It's interesting to consider how this perspective once marked a real demarcation between (much of) sci fi and fantasy. The former was defined by the kind of techno utopianism discussed here, whereas fantasy had Tolkien's melancholic 'long defeat', Howard's distrust and distaste for civilization itself, etc. Neither genre really hues to those notions any longer--at least, not consistently.
@@ManCarryingThing I think you could, predestination and prophecy, glorifying royalty, strict social roles, determinism, intrinsically evil races, overabundance of settings based on medieval Europe, ect. there are a ton of reactionary tropes in classic fantasy.
Funny how “Howard” could equally apply to both Howard Phillips Lovecraft (distrust of the advancement of technology) and Robert Howard (distrust of civilization in general).
Funny thing about Star Trek is that its utopian society was built on the remnants of a post-apocalyptic one. That universe's humanity was only galvanized change after having first contact with an alien species that came subsequent to a decades-long nuclear World War III that wiped out a massive part of the population, and many international conflicts with high body counts preceded that. It was only after humanity had nearly wiped itself out and was given a collective aspirational goal that they moved towards the light of progress. Pretty ironic that the exemplar of utopian science fiction had its setting built on one of the most dystopian foundations possible.
It's heavily based off of the theory of possadism wich thought that communism will come from aliens after a nuclear war and if that seems to specific look it up.
That's honestly my biggest problem with Star Trek. The utopia is presented as a being utopia because it has fully embraced science and let go of spirituality, but this turn only happens after unethical application of *science* nearly destroys the earth. It would have made a lot more sense to me for WWIII to have been religious and perhaps Luddite in nature and science and tech were the things that saved the day and showed humans the way forward (and then the Vulcans show up).
I've been told a lot of times that dystopian fiction began as a warning of things that we could avoid. However, it feels like it stuck around and exploded because it's believable which is pretty grim~.
Can't recall the exact source but I read a really good article / essay online that said notable dystopian books like 1984 aren't "prophetic" (i.e. "oh god the government is watching everything we do and we're always at war; Orwell was a visionary!!"), but just descriptive of what was happening in the world somewhere. Orwell didn't pull the world of 1984 out of thin air; he observed totalitarian regimes like the USSR and fictionalized them. The sad part of these kinds of dystopian works is that they don't fortell a terrible future, they describe a horrible *present.*
Yeah, that says more about the people doing the believing then it dose the reality. Humans are primed to see the negative as more true, but that fact is why it's probably less likely to be true.
It stuck around because a lot of it came true. Not even just thematically, sometimes even verbatim! I mean they're UNIRONICALLY calling it "the metaverse," for crying out loud! What's next - is Elon Musk gonna name one of his kids "Hiro Protagonist" or something?
It stuck around because teenagers identify with the angst, questioning your place in the world and the challenges and 'periods of transition' in life/society. A lot of it I don't really find believable. The Hunger Games is a dumb world. With their technology they could easily feed and house everyone, among other things. I mean, dystopian fiction was more believable during the Cold War when two superpowers were beating the shit out of each other and a lot of social norms were much worse but it wasn't nearly as popular.
I think the techno-optimism of the mid-twentieth century had one fatal flaw: it committed itself to early twenty-first century timelines. By setting firm dates on which we would achieve bases on other planets or A.I. or whatever, we set ourselves up for disappointment. 2000, 2010, 2020 came and went. Even the dreary cyberpunk dystopias of Blade Runner are past-tense. Just more modernity, stretching into some bleak future.
Agreed, seems films now at least try to set more appropriate timelines (2100/2200) or go into the trope entirely and just set in like the far future of “2025” or something.
There’s honestly a simple fix for this that nobody uses: say we switched to a new calendar system at some arbitrary point and set that as the new year 1. Then you can have a consistent dating system throughout your story, still reference real events as having occurred in 2022 “old calendar”, and then simply keep the date of when the switchover happened super vague.
That's not a flaw. Earlier works of science fiction used more remote dates. One story predicted the first moon landing to occur in 2036. Those stories were nonetheless optimistic, but the rapid progress of the 50s and 60s suggested that things would change faster than previous generations could have imagined. A permanent space station and videophones in 2001 was not unrealistic. Then things changed. By 1984, the idea that there would still be an inhabitable world by 2004 was radically optimistic, even if that world was just a continuation of the economic trends back then. Cyberpunk is not dystopian at all; people seem confused by Blade Runner being a Film Noir. (The book is not even cyberpunk.) The book Nineteen Eighty-Four is an exception in that it depicts a dystopian near future (but actually just describes the then present with cheaper technology). Dune is in a class of its own. It describes a very remote future, with the then current optimism of space exploration contrasted with the dystopia in which the problems of the day not only persist, but become worse. In space. What happened was that the USSR cancelled their manned moon mission programme, NASA's budget was cut likewise, and the Concorde was a flop. And nuclear power turned out to be rather expensive. Also war, and lots of coups. So nuclear annihilation was an ever present possibility until 1991. That's why optimism looked very different between 1960 and 1980. But even that optimism seems to be gone now.
@@davidwuhrer6704 "videophones in 2001 was not unrealistic." You mean Zoom? Skype? Not exactly 2001s tech, but we have those. I'm seriously amazed just how quickly people started to take the Internet for granted. Like, jeez, we _are_ living in the future already - our world is almost unimaginable for past folk. "By 1984, the idea that there would still be an inhabitable world by 2004 was radically optimistic" The statement sounds ludicrous on its face, but, regardless - seems like we're doing good. Our world is still inhabitable by 2022, let alone 2004. "Also war, and lots of coups." During the Cold War, sure, but Francis Fukushima called for the "end of history" after the fall of the USSR. A bit naive w.r.t. Islamic Fundamentalism, but even that seems to be a more-or-less solved problem nowadays. War in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Georgia, Libya, Syria, revolution in Ukraine - surprisingly little global death and destruction compared to the Cold War. Until now, at least. "NASA's budget was cut likewise" At first glance, it seems like all those "$12 days to feed an Astronaut. We Could feed a Starving Child for $8" guys won in the end, right? If so, then this statement wouldn't necessarily be a negative from a non-elite social perspective. "But even that optimism seems to be gone now." In a way, with the fall of the USSR, it seems that the West has fallen into a moral malaise similar to the beginning of the 20th century, where the West was seen as rotten to the core, and Stalinism was seen as an agrarian utopia. Due to the internet, political radicals from both sides seem way too focused on shaming and guilty their peers on contemporary issues, rather than looking at the course of the future. There also seems to be (rather blatant!) anti-intellectualism going around. The thing is, though - I'm not sure that that wasn't present (no pun intended) in the past. We are, after all, past the close-mindedness of the Rock-and-roll or D&D satanic panic.
@@roadent217 In 1968 it was still science fiction, but videophones became a reality in 1984. For some reason video telephony didn't become popular until Skype (2003) though. The concept of "the end of history" is much older than the end of the Cold War. The phrase itself is from 1861, and in became en vogue again around 1952. But even the ancient Roman Republic already thought they had reached what could be described as the end of history in contrast to Polybius' then current political theory. Wars and coups were not limited to the Cold War, they happened a lot before and didn't stop afterwards either. Major General Smedley Butler wrote a book about the ones he was a part of, after the Great War. There is a historical trend that violent death is becoming increasingly rare; even in WW2 the rate was significantly lower than just a thousand years earlier. The "we could feed a child" people certainly didn't win, the lowered budget for space exploration did not go to agriculture or social welfare, it went into weapons and wars. Stalin's policies were not about creating an agrarian utopia, they were about rapid industrialisation. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union was the first to launch a satellite into orbit, the first to send a man into space, the first to send a woman into space, the first to crash a rocket on the moon, the first to have a space station, and the first to land a probe on another planet. During the Cold War, the radical left had a brief surge during the late 1960, early 1970, when Star Trek was on television and the CIA had installed a Fascist military dictatorship in Greece. The First World was trying to keep up with the Second World, until the late 1970s or early 1980s when the dismantling of the welfare state slowly began. The political left have always been busy criticising each other, at least since the split between the Anarchists and the Communists at the First International in 1861, and the Left has only become increasingly fractured since then. There have also always been rivalries among the political right. We are no less close-minded than in the 1980s and 1990s, only about different hot-button issues.
This is bugging the shit out of me, but, the people that wrote in the 1950s and 60s were not "boomers". Because in those years the baby boomer generation were just little kids and young teenagers. Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were the generation that *raised* the boomers
It’s tough to criticize the Silent and Greatest Generations if you haven’t had any experience with them… or even know when the boomer start and end points are.
Capitalism is private ownership and freedom to trade though. It seems like the creator of the video & most proponents of socialism don't really understand either of the Economic or political systems.
For each time and era there's this looming danger that ppl look to as this special situation they're in, and our day and age isn't that different, most important thing is to keep the spark ignited and always look with an optimistic Eye toward our world.
The problem is that this one has the actual capacity to render us extinct in under a millennium (and, unlike the previous looming danger, requires action to stop rather than requiring action to start).
I love that someone was able to put this into words, because while I've understood the kind of hopelessness among leftists buddies of mine, I've never actually agreed with it.
Not sure why this showed up in my recommendations now but I kind of expected some criticism of YA dystopian fiction like I've seen some other channels do and instead I'm leaving with a pretty insightful new perspective about your observations. Despite how distinct the content is conveyed when I think of 1984, The Handmaids Tale, and The Hunger Games I realise now that at the time I read them I didn't recognise them as reflections of a reality some place in time/the world and it's pretty fricking grim to see how relevant those stories are. Maybe its pessimistic to want to read grim stuff but I find it more illuminating than an optimistic future without any reasonable proposals to getting there. But that's just me.
A lot of those Dystopian YA novels are about teens born into failed and corrupt societies and overcoming, escaping, or more often then not, reforming them, usually through some collective action. In some ways that's just as hopeful as the Atomic age Sci-Fi.
I'd just like to say that, Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Roddenberry were not boomers, a boomer is someone who was born AFTER ww2 and before the 1960s or so. So, for instance, early cyberpunk was written by people like William Gibson (b. 1948), Bruce Sterling (b. 1954), or Rudy Rucker (b. 1946). Joe Haldeman was born in 1943, so he's a few years too old, but he wrote what I consider to be the most "boomer" science fiction novel, The Forever War (1974)--a great book btw. Aside from the assumption that sexism and racism will diminish in the future, it is not at all optimistic. It was obviously written in response to both the Vietnam War and the novel Starship Troopers and I think you could describe it as dystopian. The optimistic streak in the writings of the aforementioned authors is probably because they had lived through the Great Depression and then saw that it ended, as well as experiencing advances like penicillin. Regardless, I think that fifties science fiction in particular had an under-discussed tendency towards the dark and negative, with a lot of dystopian or post-apocalyptic themes. Even the optimistic science fiction of the time had nuclear annihilation as an undercurrent. For instance, Clarke's Childhood's End is kind of a utopian novel, but I wouldn't exactly call it optimistic. There's a preoccupation there with nuclear weapons and the utopia has to be imposed by beings outside earth for the explicit reason that humans will destroy ourselves if left to our own devices. Just my 2c.
Exactly this. Those four were of the Greatest Generation. They were also born around the start of the Roaring Twenties, and of course, became of age during WWII. Clarke and Roddenbury were both air force veterans.
@@jmaguire2232 that's the problem. I have heard people in their thirties described as boomers. If "boomer" just means "anyone older than me" than that world loses all its meaning.
Well done. Thoughtful, thinky appetizer that was quickly devoured, and appreciated... No doubt the earlier, Golden Age science fiction writers were optimistic about the future, the forward line of progress, and the potential for technology to solve societal problems. But they also created masterpieces of dystopian work (I know you and your audience , who are clearly readers know this)... I'm thinking of "1984", "Brave New World," and later nuclear collapse narratives like "Alas Babylon" and "Canticle for Leibowitz." Today's techno-utopians seem to rely on that optimism about the future as a reason to avoid taking action, now--in the present--which is a bummer, and another sign that our ape brains don't deserve the future--not yet at least. One note: I know what you mean when you say the Star Trek universe is communistic, but that's a fun debate to to pursue. It's a "post scarcity society" where basic human needs are easily met, and the competitive, and basic capitalist motivations have been shifted to the pursuit of status, achievement, and the pursuit of human perfectability.... Oh, gods, please... Beam me up Scotty! I'm ready!
Thank you! And I appreciate the in-depth comment. Which writer said "sci-fi writers not only have to predict the car, but the car crash"? I always think about that quote. I especially love sci-fi that, even when presenting a utopia, shows the defects. I love to see worlds that are grey, not just totally perfect or totally dysfunctional.
I think actual communism has an implication of having achieved a post-scarcity society. The philosophy that "everyone is entitled to the wealth that they need" is only really sustainable if the act of one person taking more does not take anything away from everyone else, which is post-scarcity. Without going too much into theory, Marx envisioned a futute where "work", as in labouring for material rewards, becomes a less and less important part of people's lives as wealth increases until eventually the concept is defunct, and people are left to strive exclusively for self-imposed goals and aspirations. That is basically the state of affairs in Star Trek, so I think it's fair to call it a communist utopia.
There is dystopian storytelling on the one hand, and then there is misanthropic storytelling on the other. The latter is when characters are constantly bitching, complaining, and fighting with each other as if Twitter was their real life. This misanthropy has seeped even into many of our non-dystopian, everyday-life shows. Of course, oftentimes, the things on those two hands do indeed go “hand in hand”: They join and culminate in the genre Grimdark. And unfortunately, Game of Thrones has made it “cool and edgy” to inject Grimdark into all kinds of other stories and settings, mostly fantasy and sci-fi. I used to be able to avoid Grimdark by simply not engaging with Warhammer. Now I can’t even escape Grimdark when watching whatever now passes as “Star Trek”…
I heard the new "Solarpunk" genre is optimistic. Imaginary Worlds Podcast has a nice episode about it (ep144). There's also a TED Talk by Keisha Howard.
I like this but I definitely think there was a genre of writers of this time who had come of age during the reign of fascism/totalitarian in Europe and wrote during this time period that saw a bleak picture of loss of liberty and intellectual advancement - Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury. Likewise, one of the greatest Sci-Fi authors of the 90s/00s was Iain M Banks, who wrote space opera utopias where all of todays programs (climate, inequality, poverty, privacy) had been solved and the only issues to tackle were Outside Context Problems - literally things that zapped into the universe that had never existed before.
Star trek really is the perfect example of this. Nu-trek is all about how awful everything is and how you have to be constantly saving the universe from some mega threat or conspiracy. The characters are all jaded and hate each other. Compare that to classic trek where characters may have differences but they ultimately all understand that they need to do what's best for everyone not just themselves "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." The stories are about individual problems not galaxy spanning ones (Well except the dominion war) and usually in the end if the enemies of the crew of the enterprise can admit to their sincerity toward life and progress, ultimately with many sworn enemies becoming allies as they learn more about one another.
I think there’s much more to the dystopian genre than just pessimism. Most of the dystopian narratives feature a main character who inspires others around them to revolt and take down the oppressive system, to dream of a better world.
yeah maybe those that make it into motion pictures like hunger games usually have a revolutionary and hopeful message, but a lot of the dystopian fiction I've read or watched, like 1984, blade runner, etc. are focused on the futility of rebelling and show that systems/institutions can strip away the agency of individuals. Furthermore, this theme is imo why such stories are more popular now, because the average person is more subject to and is more aware of the influence of powerful institutions in their lives, so they seek out fiction that explores where that path may lead.
The Stand is the creak in your house in the middle of the night, it is the draft in your room with no air, it is the smell of death in the breathing forest, it is a night with no Moon and a sky with no stars. You lay, unaware of it's presence, but you understand that you can see if you'd open your eyes.
The problem with optimistic sci-fi stories today is that the enormity of the problems facing humanity are too big to be overcome. Climate change firmly puts us on course for the end of industrial civilization at best, the end of the human species (and many, many others) at worst. And if you have even an ounce of self-awareness, you understand that the steps needed to be taken to prevent this outcome are not going to be taken by the people in power, and attempts to wrest that power away will fail in the face of heavily militarized internal security forces. The neoliberal world order is going to (very painfully for many people) transition to fascism as resources get more and more scarce and more of the Earth becomes unlivable. There's no scenario in which things improve from here, so of course dystopian views win. That's the world we live in, and only through fantastical (derogatory) thinking can you imagine an alternative.
@@dl2839 Lmao it's hard to believe that there are still people who don't even believe in the greenhouse effect. Even oil corporations aren't denying manmade climate change anymore. The evidence is overwhelming, the temperature and CO2 levels are rising faster than they have in millions of years despite the fact that based on natural cycles we should be cooling. This just happened to occur around the time of the industrial revolution.
This is why I like I, Robot (the book, though the movie is alright, too, in a dumb action flick kind of way). In the end of the book, or rather, the collection of short stories, mankind finds itself ruled over by robots, and everyone is OK with that because the robots are actually really good at it. I was willing to accept this because Asimov used the preceding stories to both establish the book's setting and how humanity overcame it's issues with robots over a period of hundreds of years. Asimov didn't just throw us into a universe where everything was automatically great, instead he tells the reader how we get to that point. We see the issues that are initially plaguing the robots, and how they are resolved. We see how society goes from hating them to becoming completely reliant on them. We see how the robots, while quirky, have our best interests in mind and simply need our trust to be able to get their work done.
Nothing is irreversible. It may take longer than our individual lifetimes, but any change for the better prevents something worse. It's still worth striving for.
@@kashiichan well, depends what you mean by "irreversible". We're never going to be able to undo a mass extinction event (eg. the one we're currently causing)
And because you're a boomer, I bet you're talking about "climate change" and not the tsunami of degeneracy, wastefulness and cultural collapse that has stripped all future generations of a large portion of their inheritance.
G.K. Chesterton had a good quote on sci-fi utopianism which applies to almost all techno-optimist fiction such as Star Trek, inspired by the writings of his contemporary H.G. Wells: "[A] permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon."
None of these utopians (?) could imagine a massive improvement in the internal well-being of humans or the human mind, which is what has to happen, through applied neuroscience and psychedelics that follows maps of how to vastly upgrade subjective experience. It's not an important concept in Western civilization, which believes that the 'human condition' is fixed and that we'll always be the same. So utopianism failed. Even Frank Herbert, who envisioned human internal training taken to a superhuman degree, could not imagine those immense skills applied to developing wisdom and compassion and instead had people only used them for power and domination. Eastern civilization has a completely different take on human potential, but Buddhist monks haven't written a lot of science fiction books.
Just saw an article this morning about the youth of today being in a “mode of constant crisis”. At the same time, they’re being told by their boomer parents that they’re living in the best time in history, and have simply grown decadent and entitled (well, if that’s the case, boomer parents, who was the one who pampered your kids in the first place?). But YA dystopia shows the root of the problem might not even be that the *current* crises were so bad for the individual young person (even though there are a lot of them). Rather, it’s the constant *announcement of future crises* that freezes people in a state of learned helplessness. Managed to avoid a nuclear war? Great! Climate change can still destroy your home. Managed to solve that too? Oh, look, we’ve found a new asteroid that might hit us mid-century. And so on…
There's also a sub-current in political thought that seeks to shame and guilt people that do not conform to certain ideological leanings. It even permeates pop entertainment. "You don't like nu-Star Wars? You're probably a bigoted sexist racist homophobic incel chud."; "You support Gamergate? Why do you hate women? Why do you think it's OK to harass people?", etc. In a way, I wonder if part of the optimism came from the sci-fi writers being mostly sheltered from the puritanical anti-/pro- communist witch hunts of McCarthy et. al., Andrea Dworkin et. al., etc.?
@@machinatingminotaur6285 Let's not become like the anti-millennial bigots (which include many but not all boomers) by over-generalizing back in the other direction.
@@adamdavis1648 I think the article was in German, as far as I remember, so it probably wouldn’t be of much use to you even if found it again other two months. 🤔
In the same vein that Tolkien was sort talking about the industrial revolution and the end of agricultural/feudal era, I wonder if all the Dystopian science fiction is from all the anxiety over us moving to the Digital Era and ending the material "modern" era. It's probably why there's such a gap between Boomers and Millennials, they were born into two completely different worlds.
thanks for the vulnerability and putting yourself out there rather than being cynical and edgy. I agree that the first step to make change is to imagine that that change is possible
I can't tell if this is serious or not. On one hand it's presented a lot better than a lot of other video essays where it's actually kept at a watchable time length and brings what I think are interesting perspectives, on the other hand some of the editing comes off like it's trying to parody some video easy videos where they just throw something dumb and distracting and also this guy makes a bunch of short comedy sketches. So either this is very elaborate sketch and I missed the joke or this is a video essay that just parodies others well it is at it. And I feel dumb for not knowing which it is.
You get very interesting points, but as a cyber punk writer and fan, I like when things get a bit dark. I always felt like the optimistic attribute to older Sci fi was a bit of a turn off, and I see what you mean that we must visualize a good future in order for there to be a good future, but also at the same time, it feels good to read a story that feels more strikingly realistic rather than your grandpa‘s idealistic view of the year you go to college. I mean, to get further into it, I don’t think we’ve ever reached those ideals that boomers expected. Perhaps some of them, and don’t get me wrong there are still some stories I really enjoy from that era, such as Gundam. Although, Gundam is a bit more grim, and again as I said before, I’m a big fan of Grim stories. I suppose at least my perspective on all this is that realism is more important than idealism, and realizing reality and where it’s going and where it is now, actually can facilitate a better future. Why? We often times stay stagnated because we spend all of our days fantasizing about a better future, without addressing the dark things in both our lives, ourselves and in this world. I’m not saying the route to making things better is negativity, but rather, you might want to address some issues currently in society rather than fantasizing a world without them. I see what you mean about visualizing A better future might give us a better idea of what we want, but I suppose you could say it’s like only thinking about all the cool upgrades you can give your car instead of addressing the issues within it that will eventually eat it from the inside out, such as rust. This is at least to me why Japanese media has always been so awesome to me, it’s raw, it’s real, it’s human and it’s unapologetically dark at times. There’s no whitewashing, there’s no idealization, just raw reality.
This is an unexpectedly great video essay, as someone who discovered this channel through the shishposts (mainly the video essayist one that always kills me) I don't think I've seen anyone before use youtube skit/parody style humor for the jokey bits instead of just random memes or self deprecation, I really like that approach! Also holy crap please learn to pronounce dystopia, cryto-libs smh /s
It's reflective enough of our culture by itself that you feel the need to disclaim your following statement as you "getting up on your soapbox" just because what you were about to say is something earnest and non-nihilistic. Because anytime anyone says something that isn't caked in irony (or a dogmatic political slogan that people also have their predetermined reactions to) it's immediately dismissed as preachy.
Teen dystopia stories can be good its just that the writers need to remember to let the characters have some fun once and while. No one likes to watch anyone wallow in there own misery
You should read 'The Wizard and the Prophet', which is about this futuristic optimism vs pessimism. It's a non-fiction book but it tells such an epic story it might as well be.
The less hope there is, the more realistic it feels...but when did reality warp into...that? I am guessing that it is not really a decline in anything, not any massive horrible thing you can pinpoint to and say: "THAT, that´s the shitty thing" and furthermore I am guessing that it is exactly that feeling that brings about hopelessness. It´s the little inbetweens of feeling that there is no escaping this reality that we are in. Not like they could when rebuilding from wars and entering space let us hope together for some major shift in the future. We basically have everything nowadays: We have science advancing at a rapid rate - and yet everything feels like it is becoming more complicated rather than less so We have global connections spanning the whole world - Yet I can be alone in my room for weeks if I wanted to, nobody missing me. Every human interaction is just one click away but none create any intimacy to make me feel I am valued for who I am We have capitalism and democracy and peace - Yet the social divide grows regardless, refugees are getting pushed back and denied their right for asylum and we can still watch children in Yemen die from starvation the moment we care to take a look We have global challenges of a dying planet heating up threatening all our lives - Yet we are watching China building a dystopian authoritarian nightmare with technology we know is accessible to our own elites We learned from our horrible histories that we fought a war to end all wars - Yet we are shaping up to make an even bigger and more destructive one, helpless to look on as more and more countries retreat back into autoritarian and extremist leadership dividing the world once again and all out of their own volition ...and my best guess is: It is hard to not feel hopeless, when basically everything our last 4 generations lived for and dreamed for was more than reached (-hoverboards maybe) and we would have all the tools ready at our disposal to make it come true and yet everything still being like...THIS? And THIS exists not because of some evil horrible nightmare being forcing this onto us, but because everyone around us is simply the most "human" they can be. So there is nobody to fight. Even fighting the system of capitalism, or authoritarian leadership, or famine or war, they all exist simply because humans want them to exist. And presented with the possibility of ending them THEY choose to continue on like this. Back then they fought worldspanning wars to realize that those killing each other didn´t ever really want to do that, they were not so different - today we realize that it is a viable talking point that brings together the masses to argue for the death of others and disrespect even the most basic human needs again by pointing out how they are the others and they are different from us. And doing so almost unprompted, just for a little personal gain, whatever they can grasp from it for themselves. So either you start hating the same humanity that plagues you from your own birth, or you simply despair to fall into the worst sickness of them all (speaking as someone who suffered(s) from depression): become hopeless. I´m not writing this as an antithesis to your video, its merely additional thoughts. Quite frankly I like the dying boomer optimism of Star Trek just as any idealist at heart likes it, but then it is almost spiteful having to look at it from the perspective we are seeing it nowadays. Also explaining the frustration of old people with us quite nicely through that lense. But I think hope dies, not with a big flashy one time event, quite frankly, the horror of that being witnessed and gone in a moment almost motivates you to not let it repeat itself. But its the small constant drip of everything being there to help it but being helpless to not being able to reach it and doomed to watch it day in day out, waiting every day for something big and flashy and bad to happen finally so at least the wait for it will be over. ...because I absolutely agree with your point, it is important to imagine those things, like said, being hopeless is the worst plague of them all. But from my viewpoint, because it is humans doing all these shitty things, there is two ways that this can go: If this hopelessness breeds despair, imagening ways into a better future is important, giving us a way to hope. But it has to be done in a way that accounts for what we learnt about the humans...that they are not good, even if they could be. And if that basis is not covered correctly, then the despair of hopelessness will turn into something even worse, because then the high flying grandious ideas will cause a violent counterreaction, aggression ripping us out of the stasis of hopelessness. So maybe, instead of imagening a better future built on a better society it is more doable to still hope that something changes by continuing to point out the horrible instances of willful disgusting human failure that gives us hopelessness, not as a way to despair, but in the hopes that the more we urge that to be seen, the more we force ourselves to change it for the better.
"Back then they fought worldspanning wars to realize that those killing each other didn´t ever really want to do that, they were not so different " Wait - are you saying that the Nazis weren't really all that bad? In any case, I heavily disagree with your general argument: "So maybe, instead of imagening a better future built on a better society it is more doable to still hope that something changes by continuing to point out the horrible instances of willful disgusting human failure that gives us hopelessness, not as a way to despair, but in the hopes that the more we urge that to be seen, the more we force ourselves to change it for the better." The communists of the late 19th / early 20th century saw their society as inherently rotten and corrupt; they sought out Stalin's Russia as an agrarian utopia to save them from the evils of Capitalism. Likewise with Nazi Germany. What we (you) see as "willful disgusting human failure" was, at the time, an *escape* from the human failure of the times. And look where that lead us. I feel like people have generally forgotten the pure horror that revolution can bring. It's awful - I can sort of understand conservatives when looking at it from that lens. And people that, for example, were appalled by the actions of BLM in 2020 (the people that were on the side of Kyle Rittenhouse), see it as awful as well. I can see why "utopia" would be seen with rejection and skepticism by such people. That being said, I'm all up for a genuine, non-subversive Hollywood adaptation of The Dream of Debs. Maybe I'm wrong, and utopian radicalism can still be good.
I think one of the reasons kids my age love the ya dystopian genre is because how oddly relatable it is. We have no control over the world or the course it will take, with everything we hear making it seem things will only get worse. You have characters in these stories who aren't trying to find solutions because that's not something they have the power or capabilities to do. Instead they learn to cope with the difficult times they're living in, learning to improve their lives and survive the struggles they face. Covid 19 isn't as severe as the black plague, but these are difficult times people were forced to live through while struggling to cope. To most teenagers whether in difficult times or just going through puberty, that's incredibly relatable! The innocence of childhood is behind us, now we need to find our way through life. These worlds and characters show how even in worse situations than our own, they still manage to cope. They keep living their lives with drive and motivation, something kids struggle with and admire. What path in life do we take or what is the meaning of this daily grind fade away when we see people persevere and find purpose in the darkest places. We don't need those answers desperately anymore, we can live and enjoy our lives while knowing through it all we can figure it out. At least that's what I think, plus fictional crushes can't reject or hurt you so...
I think all speculative fiction boils down to either an optimistic or pessimistic core. Like saying disaster is imminent, and nothing will remain; or disaster is imminent, and life will go on in some other form. If everything must end, I don’t think it will be with a bang or a whimper. Just darkness. Which is why I do what I can to increase the amount of light in the universe. No matter how small. Instead it cursing the darkness, light a candle.
Phillip K Dick really punches this in the face He was a science fiction author writing about crumbling dystopias before it was cool! Granted he wrote in the 60s and 70s, but I think was certainly a part of that turn from glorious utopian society scifi to “earth is dead, mars is the future and it’s more dead than earth, companies rule what’s left, and the fantastical elements of my worlds only serve to hold a dark mirror up to humanity”.
Point number one, Yanis Varoufakis needs to know about you Point number two, great analysis. I would add that (especially in movies) we are beyond the dystopian phase. The boomers Sci-Fi was optimistic and extrovert, the late 70s and 80s gave great works of the dystopian fiction, nowdays there is a weird regression, a setback in a childish state best represented by the superhero genre. From Star Trek and Star Wars to Alien and Blade Runner and from there to Thor and Captain America, a 60 years ride.
I agree with this perspective, but also the quote you brought up as well that it's easier to imagine the end of the world. In my writings, I try and balance these concepts and imagine a world beyond us carried on by the species that follow. How would the brutal ecology we leave behind teach them the lessons we didn't learn until too late? When they discover the remnants of mankind, how might they learn from them?
Thanks for this video. I've written this spec-fi/sc-fi book about the insurrection and collapse of capitalism, and I've realized that its a real oddball of a book. Still, I'm glad some appreciate a more hopeful approach for the future. (Cyberpunk but its communism is the genre I want to see more of) (Also, I really need to read that Robinson book)
At least for me this is why 'zoomer humour' and outlook seems to be more optimistic, even with negative realities acknowledged. Because in a world that has issues and problems, the best stories you can tell are ones that give hope. That show good faith rewarded, and motivate. If a book is intentionally depressing, the worst thing it can do is succeed. But if a story does have a happy ending, even in a darker book, then it can almost feel cathartic. Like it has some reason to be made and appreciated.
Really good video, though I'm a bit perplexed by the assumption that capitalism is at the root of people's despondency over the future--no doubt it plays a role, but I think it's largely a problem with authoritarian power structures that've taken precedent. People no longer trust the powers that be, and are becoming increasingly hopeless that anything can be done to stop them. With such a bleak present, it becomes harder for people to imagine a bright future--even Star Trek, a series founded on the core premise that humanity has evolved past the evils we face today, has become molded to represent a humanity that's still as corrupt and despicable as ever, just not as aggressively so.
It's not an assumption. Back then it was a known historical fact. The 19th century had not been very long ago back then, a time when workers' rights were still utopic and poverty kept increasing. Things changed rapidly in the early 20th century. Social reforms began being implemented. Legislation was passed to curb monopolies. Women were given the vote, even. People never trusted the powers that be. In 1798 there was a rather drastic demonstration of radical disestablishmentarianism. And another in 1830, and another in 1848. Of course there was also one in 1917. With the seemingly decisive defeat of Fascism in 1945, the future of Star Trek seemed like a real possibility. (That despite Aramco becoming the new United Fruit Company.) Despite being a disappointment to radical revolutionaries, the mere existence of the USSR prompted reforms in the then so-called First World (now Free World) just to keep up: Public investments were made in education and infrastructure in the early 1960s. There was even a plan to send a man to the moon and safely bring him back. Much of that has been undone again since then. Downsizing, asset stripping, vertical integration, financialisation became the norm. Privatisation became de rigeur. Monopolies are touted as "efficient". Poverty is increasing again. The question used to be if a state would be needed post capitalism. Now it is if the state can survive capitalism. It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. (And the climate catastrophe looks like the world is indeed ending, in order to preserve an existing business model and the shareholder value.) As Margaret Thatcher used to say: There is no alternative. (Although according to the economist and former finance minister Yannis Varoufakis, capitalism is actually ending, replaced by what he calls "techno-feudalism": the control of information (rather than just prices and wages) by private monopolies.)
Can you honestly picture a utopia that still has a capitalist distribution of wealth? Simply put, capitalism is a "best we can do" solution to a clear problem in everyone's lives, which is material needs. Material needs impose themselves on people naturally which causes stress and forces people to labour for rewards that meet these needs. I'm not saying that in itself is wrong, or that it's unfair, or that it has ever been different, but it is still objectively an obstacle to a perfect world. If we want to solve ALL our problems, at some point we will need to move beyond capitalism, that is an unavoidable truth. Even though these materials needs have always existed, I think our current society places more focus on them than any before (thanks to growing careeism, grindset mentality, consumerism which are all promoted mostly for the sake of economic growth), which makes those needs much more important than they should be or that most people want them to be, which leads people to be unhappy and therefore pessimistic about the future since it's hard to imagine that trend changing.
I would recommend the Arc of a Scythe series. It’s a YA fiction series set in a future where even desth has been largely overcome. It is a great read and I thoroughly recommend it.
This video ties in well with my current, heightened curiosity of the Mars rover, (not Curiosity) Perseverance: Useless information to the you and public, but I must have this said - thank you.
An interesting idea that always pops into my mind for the future is wether modern sci-fi tropes will eventually (if they already haven't) put themselves firmly within the collective consciousness. Assuming that nothing happens to remove said ideas from that consciousness, I am fairly certain that in the future someone, somewhere will realize them. Something like hyperspace would eventually be invented simply because the idea of it has been around for so long.
Man Carrying Thing, I love ya, and I'll let Mr Stanley Robinson finish, but I've just gotta say Ministry for the Future is the most boomer thing I've ever read
I loved Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury growing up as well. I’m interested in the Victorian utopian socialism of eg News From Nowhere and Looking Backwards too. And I really feel that you are right, we need some vision of the future and progress, things getting better. But I wonder if we need more near-future semi-utopianism, like something different to what we had before but with some of that spirit. I assume you’ve read Capitalist Realism? Also I read A Look at Leninism by Ron Tabor who was the head of some Leninist/Trotskyite group in the US in the 80s, but he started looking at Leninism and the early development of the Soviet Union and basically became disillusioned and felt that the seeds of the failure of that project were in Leninism. What I found especially interesting was that Ron Tabor’s conclusion was basically we needed to look towards more soft Utopianism, more exploration of how things could be, rather than trying to draw all our lessons from the revolutions of the past. OTOH I wonder if these books *are* being published but not sufficiently marketed because publishers are driven by market trends and they aren’t convinced it will sell
I like this video and your ideas and I was going to write a more in-depth response but I realised that nobody wants an essay-length comment about millennials’ relationships with capitalism and views of the future. So here’s a thumbs up emoji instead 👍🏻 Also I’m currently reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet which seems like nice, hopeful speculative sci-fi for the modern age. Would recommend.
I disagree with this but it’s a great video. Personally I see fiction as a way to help young people prepare mentally for the disaster that they’ve been saddled with, so I’m in support of the negative stuff.
I also find it interesting that evangelicals in the USA are also fixated on a dystopian future. The Left Behind series influenced more churches in the early 2000s than the Bible has.
Um what? The Bible is also a dystopian future, what do you think the whole Book of Revelations is? Left Behind is just a lamer adaptation of the Bible.
I think that's why Phillip K Dick and Cyber Punk are really vouge atm. But tbh I just want solar punk to mature as a genre, it's got legs as a liberatory genre of Gen Z optimism but nothing of substance thus far.
The book series is definitely not perfect but I think the closest thing we have today to a utopian book with a solution is the "Arc of the Scythe" series. It says the only solution to capitalism is to let AI completely take over and I agree. I think the only reason there are so many stories about AI turning evil is human hubris, humans refuse to believe that machines can do a better job of running the world. Asimov himself was tired of stories where robots turned evil
Ok but have you seen the AI of today? The most advanced AIs we have are those designed by corporations to mimic people. Unless we radically change the way AI is trained and developed soon, the only robot overlords we'll be having is our corporate overlords in metal and glass bodies. If humans are so terrible, what makes you think our deformed silicon spawn will be any better than us?
I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and I felt he tried to envision a more optimistic view of how it could all end... even if there were a lot of terrible events thats come up throughout
Sci-fi could be like Old Testament prophets: not beating around the bush as to what the very real problems are, and knowing how things can end réally badly, but also offer a path of hope. Jeremiah was infamously negative, but said halfway the book: all this is true, but still there will be Justice and hope.
I myself am someone that's only skimmed the surface of modern sci-fi, but I still think you brought up a lot of good points about it. Do you think that the reason so much of it nowadays is written dystopian/hopeless, is to explore the themes of people coming together and overcoming those challenges?
I think that is part of it, and that's an interesting theme to explore. It seems like in a lot of these stories, people are divided and must join together to beat the insurmountable foe
Post apocalypses has been a crutch for 'futurist' writers for like 50 years. Its easy to just start over and not have to deal with how current events play out. A nice clean slate for your story. Even Star Trek is set in a time after a nuclear WW3. Only the absolute worst outcome of 1960's fears could be the spark to actually change course.
I don't think it's a crutch, imo science-fiction is primarily about putting the reader in a scenario that is alien and then making that scenario play out to contrast it with the reader's world. The interest lies in looking at how that fictional world's rules differ from the reader's world and how these difference affect the way the story unfolds. For that reason I don't think the explanation of how they got to these new rules or the feasibility of it matter much at all.
But it doesn't matter how bad the future is in millennial dystopias because one special teenager who doesn't follow the rules always fixes everything. I think that's even more unrealistic that boomer sci-fi. But I actually prefer the pessimistic views of Blade Runner because it's not about toppling "the system" like so many YA novels. That would be farfetched. Instead, it's about the small victories; save one person. The world is terrible, but there are still good people left.
I'm out here trying my best, though I feel obligated to write with a more honest optimism. I can imagine much better futures, but the paths there are harder. Capitalism and its attendant bigotries don’t seem inclined to die easily. But I still believe we can make it through the time of monsters and build something so much better on the other side. And that’s worth fighting for.
Hard to imagine a system that surplants capitalism. The Iron Age world had a form of prosperity and "endless" growth by beqeathing wealth to the next generation through inheritance, however it led to a situation where plots of land became so insignificant they were worthless on their own and had to be sold to Kings. The cities swelled, prices went up and there were wars inevitably. Perhaps space could function as a kind of endless frontier to exploit resources from, with increasing technological innovation and efficiency though humans could probably "fill" the galaxy at some point causing a sort of urbanisation of space.
In addition to writing about worlds beyond these problems, I think it's important to write potential solutions to these problems -- imagining how those solutions can play out could form political/economic fiction. Probably wouldn't sell well. Most folks who read for leisure aren't going to be interested, but for those of us searching for more nutritional thoughts than "capitalism bad" or "communism bad", it may prove appetizing.
“while not always proposing a way to get to this utopian ideal” That’s the root of the problem. Without a route to get there, it’s not a goal, but just wishful thinking. That said, wishful thinking is still the necessary first step, in order to come up with a vision, from which you can then derive specific sub-goals.
It's interesting to consider how this perspective once marked a real demarcation between (much of) sci fi and fantasy. The former was defined by the kind of techno utopianism discussed here, whereas fantasy had Tolkien's melancholic 'long defeat', Howard's distrust and distaste for civilization itself, etc. Neither genre really hues to those notions any longer--at least, not consistently.
So true. Fantasy used to be some kind of "conservative-minded" genre. Can't really say that about it anymore (if you ever really could)
@@ManCarryingThing
I think you could, predestination and prophecy, glorifying royalty, strict social roles, determinism, intrinsically evil races, overabundance of settings based on medieval Europe, ect. there are a ton of reactionary tropes in classic fantasy.
This is why the new fantasy and scifi are so powerful.
You need brevity my friend
Funny how “Howard” could equally apply to both Howard Phillips Lovecraft (distrust of the advancement of technology) and Robert Howard (distrust of civilization in general).
Funny thing about Star Trek is that its utopian society was built on the remnants of a post-apocalyptic one.
That universe's humanity was only galvanized change after having first contact with an alien species that came subsequent to a decades-long nuclear World War III that wiped out a massive part of the population, and many international conflicts with high body counts preceded that.
It was only after humanity had nearly wiped itself out and was given a collective aspirational goal that they moved towards the light of progress.
Pretty ironic that the exemplar of utopian science fiction had its setting built on one of the most dystopian foundations possible.
I've never heard that before and I'm a bit of a Trek nerd. In what show/movie do they discuss this?
@@Tea-uo7ev First Contact
It's heavily based off of the theory of possadism wich thought that communism will come from aliens after a nuclear war and if that seems to specific look it up.
@@Tea-uo7ev it comes up in TNG throughout. "The Eugenics War" & things like that are referenced a lot iirc
That's honestly my biggest problem with Star Trek. The utopia is presented as a being utopia because it has fully embraced science and let go of spirituality, but this turn only happens after unethical application of *science* nearly destroys the earth. It would have made a lot more sense to me for WWIII to have been religious and perhaps Luddite in nature and science and tech were the things that saved the day and showed humans the way forward (and then the Vulcans show up).
Last time I was this early I hadn't given up
I've been told a lot of times that dystopian fiction began as a warning of things that we could avoid.
However, it feels like it stuck around and exploded because it's believable which is pretty grim~.
Can't recall the exact source but I read a really good article / essay online that said notable dystopian books like 1984 aren't "prophetic" (i.e. "oh god the government is watching everything we do and we're always at war; Orwell was a visionary!!"), but just descriptive of what was happening in the world somewhere. Orwell didn't pull the world of 1984 out of thin air; he observed totalitarian regimes like the USSR and fictionalized them. The sad part of these kinds of dystopian works is that they don't fortell a terrible future, they describe a horrible *present.*
Yeah, that says more about the people doing the believing then it dose the reality. Humans are primed to see the negative as more true, but that fact is why it's probably less likely to be true.
It stuck around because a lot of it came true.
Not even just thematically, sometimes even verbatim! I mean they're UNIRONICALLY calling it "the metaverse," for crying out loud! What's next - is Elon Musk gonna name one of his kids "Hiro Protagonist" or something?
It stuck around because teenagers identify with the angst, questioning your place in the world and the challenges and 'periods of transition' in life/society.
A lot of it I don't really find believable. The Hunger Games is a dumb world. With their technology they could easily feed and house everyone, among other things.
I mean, dystopian fiction was more believable during the Cold War when two superpowers were beating the shit out of each other and a lot of social norms were much worse but it wasn't nearly as popular.
@@TerrenceNowicki What's "the metaverse"?
I think the techno-optimism of the mid-twentieth century had one fatal flaw: it committed itself to early twenty-first century timelines. By setting firm dates on which we would achieve bases on other planets or A.I. or whatever, we set ourselves up for disappointment. 2000, 2010, 2020 came and went. Even the dreary cyberpunk dystopias of Blade Runner are past-tense. Just more modernity, stretching into some bleak future.
Agreed, seems films now at least try to set more appropriate timelines (2100/2200) or go into the trope entirely and just set in like the far future of “2025” or something.
There’s honestly a simple fix for this that nobody uses: say we switched to a new calendar system at some arbitrary point and set that as the new year 1. Then you can have a consistent dating system throughout your story, still reference real events as having occurred in 2022 “old calendar”, and then simply keep the date of when the switchover happened super vague.
That's not a flaw.
Earlier works of science fiction used more remote dates. One story predicted the first moon landing to occur in 2036.
Those stories were nonetheless optimistic, but the rapid progress of the 50s and 60s suggested that things would change faster than previous generations could have imagined. A permanent space station and videophones in 2001 was not unrealistic.
Then things changed. By 1984, the idea that there would still be an inhabitable world by 2004 was radically optimistic, even if that world was just a continuation of the economic trends back then. Cyberpunk is not dystopian at all; people seem confused by Blade Runner being a Film Noir. (The book is not even cyberpunk.)
The book Nineteen Eighty-Four is an exception in that it depicts a dystopian near future (but actually just describes the then present with cheaper technology).
Dune is in a class of its own. It describes a very remote future, with the then current optimism of space exploration contrasted with the dystopia in which the problems of the day not only persist, but become worse. In space.
What happened was that the USSR cancelled their manned moon mission programme, NASA's budget was cut likewise, and the Concorde was a flop. And nuclear power turned out to be rather expensive. Also war, and lots of coups.
So nuclear annihilation was an ever present possibility until 1991. That's why optimism looked very different between 1960 and 1980.
But even that optimism seems to be gone now.
@@davidwuhrer6704
"videophones in 2001 was not unrealistic."
You mean Zoom? Skype? Not exactly 2001s tech, but we have those.
I'm seriously amazed just how quickly people started to take the Internet for granted. Like, jeez, we _are_ living in the future already - our world is almost unimaginable for past folk.
"By 1984, the idea that there would still be an inhabitable world by 2004 was radically optimistic"
The statement sounds ludicrous on its face, but, regardless - seems like we're doing good. Our world is still inhabitable by 2022, let alone 2004.
"Also war, and lots of coups."
During the Cold War, sure, but Francis Fukushima called for the "end of history" after the fall of the USSR. A bit naive w.r.t. Islamic Fundamentalism, but even that seems to be a more-or-less solved problem nowadays. War in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Georgia, Libya, Syria, revolution in Ukraine - surprisingly little global death and destruction compared to the Cold War. Until now, at least.
"NASA's budget was cut likewise"
At first glance, it seems like all those "$12 days to feed an Astronaut. We Could feed a Starving Child for $8" guys won in the end, right? If so, then this statement wouldn't necessarily be a negative from a non-elite social perspective.
"But even that optimism seems to be gone now."
In a way, with the fall of the USSR, it seems that the West has fallen into a moral malaise similar to the beginning of the 20th century, where the West was seen as rotten to the core, and Stalinism was seen as an agrarian utopia. Due to the internet, political radicals from both sides seem way too focused on shaming and guilty their peers on contemporary issues, rather than looking at the course of the future. There also seems to be (rather blatant!) anti-intellectualism going around.
The thing is, though - I'm not sure that that wasn't present (no pun intended) in the past. We are, after all, past the close-mindedness of the Rock-and-roll or D&D satanic panic.
@@roadent217 In 1968 it was still science fiction, but videophones became a reality in 1984. For some reason video telephony didn't become popular until Skype (2003) though.
The concept of "the end of history" is much older than the end of the Cold War. The phrase itself is from 1861, and in became en vogue again around 1952. But even the ancient Roman Republic already thought they had reached what could be described as the end of history in contrast to Polybius' then current political theory.
Wars and coups were not limited to the Cold War, they happened a lot before and didn't stop afterwards either. Major General Smedley Butler wrote a book about the ones he was a part of, after the Great War. There is a historical trend that violent death is becoming increasingly rare; even in WW2 the rate was significantly lower than just a thousand years earlier.
The "we could feed a child" people certainly didn't win, the lowered budget for space exploration did not go to agriculture or social welfare, it went into weapons and wars.
Stalin's policies were not about creating an agrarian utopia, they were about rapid industrialisation. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union was the first to launch a satellite into orbit, the first to send a man into space, the first to send a woman into space, the first to crash a rocket on the moon, the first to have a space station, and the first to land a probe on another planet.
During the Cold War, the radical left had a brief surge during the late 1960, early 1970, when Star Trek was on television and the CIA had installed a Fascist military dictatorship in Greece. The First World was trying to keep up with the Second World, until the late 1970s or early 1980s when the dismantling of the welfare state slowly began.
The political left have always been busy criticising each other, at least since the split between the Anarchists and the Communists at the First International in 1861, and the Left has only become increasingly fractured since then. There have also always been rivalries among the political right.
We are no less close-minded than in the 1980s and 1990s, only about different hot-button issues.
This is bugging the shit out of me, but, the people that wrote in the 1950s and 60s were not "boomers". Because in those years the baby boomer generation were just little kids and young teenagers. Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were the generation that *raised* the boomers
It’s tough to criticize the Silent and Greatest Generations if you haven’t had any experience with them… or even know when the boomer start and end points are.
I think he meant boomer as a descriptor rather than a label, aka delusional about the future and ignoring problems today.
Your videos always make me feel a little high, but i love it. Keep it up, man👌
hahaha that's awesome - thanks my friend
William Gibson has a sad short story about the death of hope in science fiction called The Gernsback Continuum
Thanks for letting me know -- have to check that out
Take a shot every time he says "dice-topian"
Could that be a regional pronunciation?
I'm happy that I haven't seen one "If capitalism bad, why own thing"
yes pls thank u. star trek communism ftw
My iphone disapproves in chinese :c
The Dispossessed has entered the chat.
Capitalism is private ownership and freedom to trade though. It seems like the creator of the video & most proponents of socialism don't really understand either of the Economic or political systems.
If capitalism bad, why own thing???
For each time and era there's this looming danger that ppl look to as this special situation they're in, and our day and age isn't that different, most important thing is to keep the spark ignited and always look with an optimistic Eye toward our world.
And yeah great video as usual, keep it up 👍
@@suppressiontest6372 thanks dude, and absolutely agree
The problem is that this one has the actual capacity to render us extinct in under a millennium (and, unlike the previous looming danger, requires action to stop rather than requiring action to start).
I love that someone was able to put this into words, because while I've understood the kind of hopelessness among leftists buddies of mine, I've never actually agreed with it.
“Science fiction makes the improbable possible, and fantasy the impossible probable.”
-Rod Serling
Not sure why this showed up in my recommendations now but I kind of expected some criticism of YA dystopian fiction like I've seen some other channels do and instead I'm leaving with a pretty insightful new perspective about your observations. Despite how distinct the content is conveyed when I think of 1984, The Handmaids Tale, and The Hunger Games I realise now that at the time I read them I didn't recognise them as reflections of a reality some place in time/the world and it's pretty fricking grim to see how relevant those stories are. Maybe its pessimistic to want to read grim stuff but I find it more illuminating than an optimistic future without any reasonable proposals to getting there. But that's just me.
Yay!! It’s Man Carrying (Jake) Thing!! My favorite thing about Saturday’s!! Also I definitely agree with you analysis! Keep it up!
Thank youu!
A lot of those Dystopian YA novels are about teens born into failed and corrupt societies and overcoming, escaping, or more often then not, reforming them, usually through some collective action. In some ways that's just as hopeful as the Atomic age Sci-Fi.
I'd just like to say that, Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Roddenberry were not boomers, a boomer is someone who was born AFTER ww2 and before the 1960s or so. So, for instance, early cyberpunk was written by people like William Gibson (b. 1948), Bruce Sterling (b. 1954), or Rudy Rucker (b. 1946). Joe Haldeman was born in 1943, so he's a few years too old, but he wrote what I consider to be the most "boomer" science fiction novel, The Forever War (1974)--a great book btw. Aside from the assumption that sexism and racism will diminish in the future, it is not at all optimistic. It was obviously written in response to both the Vietnam War and the novel Starship Troopers and I think you could describe it as dystopian.
The optimistic streak in the writings of the aforementioned authors is probably because they had lived through the Great Depression and then saw that it ended, as well as experiencing advances like penicillin. Regardless, I think that fifties science fiction in particular had an under-discussed tendency towards the dark and negative, with a lot of dystopian or post-apocalyptic themes. Even the optimistic science fiction of the time had nuclear annihilation as an undercurrent. For instance, Clarke's Childhood's End is kind of a utopian novel, but I wouldn't exactly call it optimistic. There's a preoccupation there with nuclear weapons and the utopia has to be imposed by beings outside earth for the explicit reason that humans will destroy ourselves if left to our own devices.
Just my 2c.
Exactly this. Those four were of the Greatest Generation. They were also born around the start of the Roaring Twenties, and of course, became of age during WWII. Clarke and Roddenbury were both air force veterans.
The word also has a looser colloquial meaning now.
Writers for Boomers
@@jmaguire2232 that's the problem. I have heard people in their thirties described as boomers. If "boomer" just means "anyone older than me" than that world loses all its meaning.
@@dankeykang868 I mean, categorically, no. You just described what its meaning would be.
Well done. Thoughtful, thinky appetizer that was quickly devoured, and appreciated... No doubt the earlier, Golden Age science fiction writers were optimistic about the future, the forward line of progress, and the potential for technology to solve societal problems. But they also created masterpieces of dystopian work (I know you and your audience , who are clearly readers know this)... I'm thinking of "1984", "Brave New World," and later nuclear collapse narratives like "Alas Babylon" and "Canticle for Leibowitz." Today's techno-utopians seem to rely on that optimism about the future as a reason to avoid taking action, now--in the present--which is a bummer, and another sign that our ape brains don't deserve the future--not yet at least. One note: I know what you mean when you say the Star Trek universe is communistic, but that's a fun debate to to pursue. It's a "post scarcity society" where basic human needs are easily met, and the competitive, and basic capitalist motivations have been shifted to the pursuit of status, achievement, and the pursuit of human perfectability.... Oh, gods, please... Beam me up Scotty! I'm ready!
Thank you! And I appreciate the in-depth comment. Which writer said "sci-fi writers not only have to predict the car, but the car crash"? I always think about that quote. I especially love sci-fi that, even when presenting a utopia, shows the defects. I love to see worlds that are grey, not just totally perfect or totally dysfunctional.
@@ManCarryingThing that sounds a lot like Paul virilio
I think actual communism has an implication of having achieved a post-scarcity society. The philosophy that "everyone is entitled to the wealth that they need" is only really sustainable if the act of one person taking more does not take anything away from everyone else, which is post-scarcity. Without going too much into theory, Marx envisioned a futute where "work", as in labouring for material rewards, becomes a less and less important part of people's lives as wealth increases until eventually the concept is defunct, and people are left to strive exclusively for self-imposed goals and aspirations. That is basically the state of affairs in Star Trek, so I think it's fair to call it a communist utopia.
Your videos make me feel like there is hope and also as if I am in an alternate universe 🤩🤪😜 Another great video! Keep it up Man Carrying!
Thank you! lol, i hope that alternate universe is a kind one :)
There is dystopian storytelling on the one hand, and then there is misanthropic storytelling on the other. The latter is when characters are constantly bitching, complaining, and fighting with each other as if Twitter was their real life. This misanthropy has seeped even into many of our non-dystopian, everyday-life shows. Of course, oftentimes, the things on those two hands do indeed go “hand in hand”: They join and culminate in the genre Grimdark. And unfortunately, Game of Thrones has made it “cool and edgy” to inject Grimdark into all kinds of other stories and settings, mostly fantasy and sci-fi. I used to be able to avoid Grimdark by simply not engaging with Warhammer. Now I can’t even escape Grimdark when watching whatever now passes as “Star Trek”…
We're stuck in a dystopian cyberpunk future but without all the cool cybernetics and neon shit. We got scammed.
I absolutely love these chaotic good videos. You always have great points and the absurd editing is hilarious
Thanks! i appreciate it
People that say Chaotic should consider suicide... not follow through, just consider
I heard the new "Solarpunk" genre is optimistic. Imaginary Worlds Podcast has a nice episode about it (ep144). There's also a TED Talk by Keisha Howard.
Keep Your Hands off Eizouken, an anime released in 2020, has a really cool solarpunk aesthetic that combines industrial technology with nature.
I love this type of content. Analysis of like the themes of fantasy and sci-fi and how they reflect the mindsets of the time
True man, optimism should not ever be left out just because the future doesn’t appear in your reflection of time.
I like this but I definitely think there was a genre of writers of this time who had come of age during the reign of fascism/totalitarian in Europe and wrote during this time period that saw a bleak picture of loss of liberty and intellectual advancement - Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury.
Likewise, one of the greatest Sci-Fi authors of the 90s/00s was Iain M Banks, who wrote space opera utopias where all of todays programs (climate, inequality, poverty, privacy) had been solved and the only issues to tackle were Outside Context Problems - literally things that zapped into the universe that had never existed before.
I was gonna say, everyone references 1984 all the time.
Professor Jake doing his thing! 👏🏼
Star trek really is the perfect example of this. Nu-trek is all about how awful everything is and how you have to be constantly saving the universe from some mega threat or conspiracy. The characters are all jaded and hate each other. Compare that to classic trek where characters may have differences but they ultimately all understand that they need to do what's best for everyone not just themselves "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." The stories are about individual problems not galaxy spanning ones (Well except the dominion war) and usually in the end if the enemies of the crew of the enterprise can admit to their sincerity toward life and progress, ultimately with many sworn enemies becoming allies as they learn more about one another.
I think there’s much more to the dystopian genre than just pessimism. Most of the dystopian narratives feature a main character who inspires others around them to revolt and take down the oppressive system, to dream of a better world.
yeah maybe those that make it into motion pictures like hunger games usually have a revolutionary and hopeful message, but a lot of the dystopian fiction I've read or watched, like 1984, blade runner, etc. are focused on the futility of rebelling and show that systems/institutions can strip away the agency of individuals. Furthermore, this theme is imo why such stories are more popular now, because the average person is more subject to and is more aware of the influence of powerful institutions in their lives, so they seek out fiction that explores where that path may lead.
The Stand is the creak in your house in the middle of the night, it is the draft in your room with no air, it is the smell of death in the breathing forest, it is a night with no Moon and a sky with no stars. You lay, unaware of it's presence, but you understand that you can see if you'd open your eyes.
we've been sleeping on a goddamn poet in the comments
The problem with optimistic sci-fi stories today is that the enormity of the problems facing humanity are too big to be overcome. Climate change firmly puts us on course for the end of industrial civilization at best, the end of the human species (and many, many others) at worst. And if you have even an ounce of self-awareness, you understand that the steps needed to be taken to prevent this outcome are not going to be taken by the people in power, and attempts to wrest that power away will fail in the face of heavily militarized internal security forces. The neoliberal world order is going to (very painfully for many people) transition to fascism as resources get more and more scarce and more of the Earth becomes unlivable. There's no scenario in which things improve from here, so of course dystopian views win. That's the world we live in, and only through fantastical (derogatory) thinking can you imagine an alternative.
🤮
…yay…
It's fantastical thinking to imagine CO2 driven climate change is real. Get real. That Global Warming is a lie.
@@dl2839 Lmao it's hard to believe that there are still people who don't even believe in the greenhouse effect. Even oil corporations aren't denying manmade climate change anymore. The evidence is overwhelming, the temperature and CO2 levels are rising faster than they have in millions of years despite the fact that based on natural cycles we should be cooling. This just happened to occur around the time of the industrial revolution.
This is why I like I, Robot (the book, though the movie is alright, too, in a dumb action flick kind of way). In the end of the book, or rather, the collection of short stories, mankind finds itself ruled over by robots, and everyone is OK with that because the robots are actually really good at it. I was willing to accept this because Asimov used the preceding stories to both establish the book's setting and how humanity overcame it's issues with robots over a period of hundreds of years. Asimov didn't just throw us into a universe where everything was automatically great, instead he tells the reader how we get to that point. We see the issues that are initially plaguing the robots, and how they are resolved. We see how society goes from hating them to becoming completely reliant on them. We see how the robots, while quirky, have our best interests in mind and simply need our trust to be able to get their work done.
Thank you for this video! I recently read Ursula K. LeGuins Hainish Cycle and now I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars Trilogy for the first time
I am a boomer, and I am sad that by the time my generation dies off the damage done will be irreversible.
Nothing is irreversible. It may take longer than our individual lifetimes, but any change for the better prevents something worse. It's still worth striving for.
@@kashiichan well, depends what you mean by "irreversible". We're never going to be able to undo a mass extinction event (eg. the one we're currently causing)
And because you're a boomer, I bet you're talking about "climate change" and not the tsunami of degeneracy, wastefulness and cultural collapse that has stripped all future generations of a large portion of their inheritance.
@@stumbling are they exclusive to each?
G.K. Chesterton had a good quote on sci-fi utopianism which applies to almost all techno-optimist fiction such as Star Trek, inspired by the writings of his contemporary H.G. Wells:
"[A] permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon."
None of these utopians (?) could imagine a massive improvement in the internal well-being of humans or the human mind, which is what has to happen, through applied neuroscience and psychedelics that follows maps of how to vastly upgrade subjective experience. It's not an important concept in Western civilization, which believes that the 'human condition' is fixed and that we'll always be the same. So utopianism failed.
Even Frank Herbert, who envisioned human internal training taken to a superhuman degree, could not imagine those immense skills applied to developing wisdom and compassion and instead had people only used them for power and domination.
Eastern civilization has a completely different take on human potential, but Buddhist monks haven't written a lot of science fiction books.
Chesterson was based as hell, he created the only alternative system to capitalism that would actually succeeed in real life
@@nemo-x "people won't need to want more than their share"
I want you to repeat this back to yourself slowly
Satisfaction for all implies the end of humanity as we know it.
Pronatalism is child abuse.
@@Cubelarooso curious, you think life is bad and yet you are still alive :^)
Just saw an article this morning about the youth of today being in a “mode of constant crisis”. At the same time, they’re being told by their boomer parents that they’re living in the best time in history, and have simply grown decadent and entitled (well, if that’s the case, boomer parents, who was the one who pampered your kids in the first place?). But YA dystopia shows the root of the problem might not even be that the *current* crises were so bad for the individual young person (even though there are a lot of them). Rather, it’s the constant *announcement of future crises* that freezes people in a state of learned helplessness.
Managed to avoid a nuclear war? Great! Climate change can still destroy your home. Managed to solve that too? Oh, look, we’ve found a new asteroid that might hit us mid-century. And so on…
There's also a sub-current in political thought that seeks to shame and guilt people that do not conform to certain ideological leanings. It even permeates pop entertainment.
"You don't like nu-Star Wars? You're probably a bigoted sexist racist homophobic incel chud."; "You support Gamergate? Why do you hate women? Why do you think it's OK to harass people?", etc. In a way, I wonder if part of the optimism came from the sci-fi writers being mostly sheltered from the puritanical anti-/pro- communist witch hunts of McCarthy et. al., Andrea Dworkin et. al., etc.?
there's an entire generation between boomers and millenials, and no generation has been more decadent or entitled than the boomers
Interesting; do you happen to remember what the article was called or where to find it?
@@machinatingminotaur6285 Let's not become like the anti-millennial bigots (which include many but not all boomers) by over-generalizing back in the other direction.
@@adamdavis1648 I think the article was in German, as far as I remember, so it probably wouldn’t be of much use to you even if found it again other two months. 🤔
Weren't Boomers only just being born in 50s and 60s?
2:05
This part is so great. The presenter says "Frederick Jameson", the picture says "Roderick Jamestown", and his quote says "some guy."
In the same vein that Tolkien was sort talking about the industrial revolution and the end of agricultural/feudal era, I wonder if all the Dystopian science fiction is from all the anxiety over us moving to the Digital Era and ending the material "modern" era. It's probably why there's such a gap between Boomers and Millennials, they were born into two completely different worlds.
Interesting food for thought.
Holy shit I’ve never been this early on a channel, you’re going places and I’m here for it. Another amazing video, keep up the great work!
This is the most important video on the internet! ♥
No book has ever made me feel as optimistic about the future of the human race than Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
thanks for the vulnerability and putting yourself out there rather than being cynical and edgy. I agree that the first step to make change is to imagine that that change is possible
this is the first video I've seen from this dude in which he is actually carrying things
I can't tell if this is serious or not.
On one hand it's presented a lot better than a lot of other video essays where it's actually kept at a watchable time length and brings what I think are interesting perspectives, on the other hand some of the editing comes off like it's trying to parody some video easy videos where they just throw something dumb and distracting and also this guy makes a bunch of short comedy sketches.
So either this is very elaborate sketch and I missed the joke or this is a video essay that just parodies others well it is at it. And I feel dumb for not knowing which it is.
Fucking tremendous. Finally something different on the booktubez, love your content
Thanks dude! The feeling is mutual, I must say
You get very interesting points, but as a cyber punk writer and fan, I like when things get a bit dark. I always felt like the optimistic attribute to older Sci fi was a bit of a turn off, and I see what you mean that we must visualize a good future in order for there to be a good future, but also at the same time, it feels good to read a story that feels more strikingly realistic rather than your grandpa‘s idealistic view of the year you go to college.
I mean, to get further into it, I don’t think we’ve ever reached those ideals that boomers expected. Perhaps some of them, and don’t get me wrong there are still some stories I really enjoy from that era, such as Gundam. Although, Gundam is a bit more grim, and again as I said before, I’m a big fan of Grim stories.
I suppose at least my perspective on all this is that realism is more important than idealism, and realizing reality and where it’s going and where it is now, actually can facilitate a better future. Why? We often times stay stagnated because we spend all of our days fantasizing about a better future, without addressing the dark things in both our lives, ourselves and in this world. I’m not saying the route to making things better is negativity, but rather, you might want to address some issues currently in society rather than fantasizing a world without them. I see what you mean about visualizing A better future might give us a better idea of what we want, but I suppose you could say it’s like only thinking about all the cool upgrades you can give your car instead of addressing the issues within it that will eventually eat it from the inside out, such as rust. This is at least to me why Japanese media has always been so awesome to me, it’s raw, it’s real, it’s human and it’s unapologetically dark at times. There’s no whitewashing, there’s no idealization, just raw reality.
This is an unexpectedly great video essay, as someone who discovered this channel through the shishposts (mainly the video essayist one that always kills me)
I don't think I've seen anyone before use youtube skit/parody style humor for the jokey bits instead of just random memes or self deprecation, I really like that approach!
Also holy crap please learn to pronounce dystopia, cryto-libs smh /s
It's reflective enough of our culture by itself that you feel the need to disclaim your following statement as you "getting up on your soapbox" just because what you were about to say is something earnest and non-nihilistic. Because anytime anyone says something that isn't caked in irony (or a dogmatic political slogan that people also have their predetermined reactions to) it's immediately dismissed as preachy.
Teen dystopia stories can be good its just that the writers need to remember to let the characters have some fun once and while.
No one likes to watch anyone wallow in there own misery
If someone was writing in the 50s, they were, by definition, not boomers.
Unless they were under 5 years old
You should read 'The Wizard and the Prophet', which is about this futuristic optimism vs pessimism. It's a non-fiction book but it tells such an epic story it might as well be.
The less hope there is, the more realistic it feels...but when did reality warp into...that?
I am guessing that it is not really a decline in anything, not any massive horrible thing you can pinpoint to and say: "THAT, that´s the shitty thing" and furthermore I am guessing that it is exactly that feeling that brings about hopelessness. It´s the little inbetweens of feeling that there is no escaping this reality that we are in. Not like they could when rebuilding from wars and entering space let us hope together for some major shift in the future.
We basically have everything nowadays:
We have science advancing at a rapid rate - and yet everything feels like it is becoming more complicated rather than less so
We have global connections spanning the whole world - Yet I can be alone in my room for weeks if I wanted to, nobody missing me. Every human interaction is just one click away but none create any intimacy to make me feel I am valued for who I am
We have capitalism and democracy and peace - Yet the social divide grows regardless, refugees are getting pushed back and denied their right for asylum and we can still watch children in Yemen die from starvation the moment we care to take a look
We have global challenges of a dying planet heating up threatening all our lives - Yet we are watching China building a dystopian authoritarian nightmare with technology we know is accessible to our own elites
We learned from our horrible histories that we fought a war to end all wars - Yet we are shaping up to make an even bigger and more destructive one, helpless to look on as more and more countries retreat back into autoritarian and extremist leadership dividing the world once again and all out of their own volition
...and my best guess is: It is hard to not feel hopeless, when basically everything our last 4 generations lived for and dreamed for was more than reached (-hoverboards maybe) and we would have all the tools ready at our disposal to make it come true and yet everything still being like...THIS? And THIS exists not because of some evil horrible nightmare being forcing this onto us, but because everyone around us is simply the most "human" they can be. So there is nobody to fight. Even fighting the system of capitalism, or authoritarian leadership, or famine or war, they all exist simply because humans want them to exist. And presented with the possibility of ending them THEY choose to continue on like this. Back then they fought worldspanning wars to realize that those killing each other didn´t ever really want to do that, they were not so different - today we realize that it is a viable talking point that brings together the masses to argue for the death of others and disrespect even the most basic human needs again by pointing out how they are the others and they are different from us. And doing so almost unprompted, just for a little personal gain, whatever they can grasp from it for themselves. So either you start hating the same humanity that plagues you from your own birth, or you simply despair to fall into the worst sickness of them all (speaking as someone who suffered(s) from depression): become hopeless.
I´m not writing this as an antithesis to your video, its merely additional thoughts. Quite frankly I like the dying boomer optimism of Star Trek just as any idealist at heart likes it, but then it is almost spiteful having to look at it from the perspective we are seeing it nowadays. Also explaining the frustration of old people with us quite nicely through that lense. But I think hope dies, not with a big flashy one time event, quite frankly, the horror of that being witnessed and gone in a moment almost motivates you to not let it repeat itself. But its the small constant drip of everything being there to help it but being helpless to not being able to reach it and doomed to watch it day in day out, waiting every day for something big and flashy and bad to happen finally so at least the wait for it will be over.
...because I absolutely agree with your point, it is important to imagine those things, like said, being hopeless is the worst plague of them all. But from my viewpoint, because it is humans doing all these shitty things, there is two ways that this can go: If this hopelessness breeds despair, imagening ways into a better future is important, giving us a way to hope. But it has to be done in a way that accounts for what we learnt about the humans...that they are not good, even if they could be. And if that basis is not covered correctly, then the despair of hopelessness will turn into something even worse, because then the high flying grandious ideas will cause a violent counterreaction, aggression ripping us out of the stasis of hopelessness. So maybe, instead of imagening a better future built on a better society it is more doable to still hope that something changes by continuing to point out the horrible instances of willful disgusting human failure that gives us hopelessness, not as a way to despair, but in the hopes that the more we urge that to be seen, the more we force ourselves to change it for the better.
"Back then they fought worldspanning wars to realize that those killing each other didn´t ever really want to do that, they were not so different "
Wait - are you saying that the Nazis weren't really all that bad?
In any case, I heavily disagree with your general argument:
"So maybe, instead of imagening a better future built on a better society it is more doable to still hope that something changes by continuing to point out the horrible instances of willful disgusting human failure that gives us hopelessness, not as a way to despair, but in the hopes that the more we urge that to be seen, the more we force ourselves to change it for the better."
The communists of the late 19th / early 20th century saw their society as inherently rotten and corrupt; they sought out Stalin's Russia as an agrarian utopia to save them from the evils of Capitalism. Likewise with Nazi Germany. What we (you) see as "willful disgusting human failure" was, at the time, an *escape* from the human failure of the times. And look where that lead us.
I feel like people have generally forgotten the pure horror that revolution can bring. It's awful - I can sort of understand conservatives when looking at it from that lens. And people that, for example, were appalled by the actions of BLM in 2020 (the people that were on the side of Kyle Rittenhouse), see it as awful as well. I can see why "utopia" would be seen with rejection and skepticism by such people.
That being said, I'm all up for a genuine, non-subversive Hollywood adaptation of The Dream of Debs. Maybe I'm wrong, and utopian radicalism can still be good.
"The less hope there is, the more realistic it is"
That's fuckin stupid man!!
I think one of the reasons kids my age love the ya dystopian genre is because how oddly relatable it is. We have no control over the world or the course it will take, with everything we hear making it seem things will only get worse. You have characters in these stories who aren't trying to find solutions because that's not something they have the power or capabilities to do. Instead they learn to cope with the difficult times they're living in, learning to improve their lives and survive the struggles they face.
Covid 19 isn't as severe as the black plague, but these are difficult times people were forced to live through while struggling to cope. To most teenagers whether in difficult times or just going through puberty, that's incredibly relatable! The innocence of childhood is behind us, now we need to find our way through life. These worlds and characters show how even in worse situations than our own, they still manage to cope. They keep living their lives with drive and motivation, something kids struggle with and admire. What path in life do we take or what is the meaning of this daily grind fade away when we see people persevere and find purpose in the darkest places. We don't need those answers desperately anymore, we can live and enjoy our lives while knowing through it all we can figure it out.
At least that's what I think, plus fictional crushes can't reject or hurt you so...
I think all speculative fiction boils down to either an optimistic or pessimistic core. Like saying disaster is imminent, and nothing will remain; or disaster is imminent, and life will go on in some other form.
If everything must end, I don’t think it will be with a bang or a whimper. Just darkness. Which is why I do what I can to increase the amount of light in the universe. No matter how small. Instead it cursing the darkness, light a candle.
Why does there have to be a disaster imminent? That strikes me as overly pessimistic.
@@davidwuhrer6704 Or overly realistic
@@cameronsitton501 Definitely not.
@@davidwuhrer6704 Have you been paying attention? Turn on the news, man. Disaster is happening in real time
@@cameronsitton501 And that is the only possible premise for fiction that is realistic?
Phillip K Dick really punches this in the face
He was a science fiction author writing about crumbling dystopias before it was cool! Granted he wrote in the 60s and 70s, but I think was certainly a part of that turn from glorious utopian society scifi to “earth is dead, mars is the future and it’s more dead than earth, companies rule what’s left, and the fantastical elements of my worlds only serve to hold a dark mirror up to humanity”.
Point number one, Yanis Varoufakis needs to know about you
Point number two, great analysis. I would add that (especially in movies) we are beyond the dystopian phase. The boomers Sci-Fi was optimistic and extrovert, the late 70s and 80s gave great works of the dystopian fiction, nowdays there is a weird regression, a setback in a childish state best represented by the superhero genre.
From Star Trek and Star Wars to Alien and Blade Runner and from there to Thor and Captain America, a 60 years ride.
I agree with this perspective, but also the quote you brought up as well that it's easier to imagine the end of the world. In my writings, I try and balance these concepts and imagine a world beyond us carried on by the species that follow.
How would the brutal ecology we leave behind teach them the lessons we didn't learn until too late?
When they discover the remnants of mankind, how might they learn from them?
Nice surprise to see Kim Stanley Robinson mentioned near the end.
Thanks for this video. I've written this spec-fi/sc-fi book about the insurrection and collapse of capitalism, and I've realized that its a real oddball of a book. Still, I'm glad some appreciate a more hopeful approach for the future. (Cyberpunk but its communism is the genre I want to see more of) (Also, I really need to read that Robinson book)
Came to this channel for the memes stayed for the essays
At least for me this is why 'zoomer humour' and outlook seems to be more optimistic, even with negative realities acknowledged. Because in a world that has issues and problems, the best stories you can tell are ones that give hope. That show good faith rewarded, and motivate.
If a book is intentionally depressing, the worst thing it can do is succeed. But if a story does have a happy ending, even in a darker book, then it can almost feel cathartic. Like it has some reason to be made and appreciated.
Really good video, though I'm a bit perplexed by the assumption that capitalism is at the root of people's despondency over the future--no doubt it plays a role, but I think it's largely a problem with authoritarian power structures that've taken precedent. People no longer trust the powers that be, and are becoming increasingly hopeless that anything can be done to stop them. With such a bleak present, it becomes harder for people to imagine a bright future--even Star Trek, a series founded on the core premise that humanity has evolved past the evils we face today, has become molded to represent a humanity that's still as corrupt and despicable as ever, just not as aggressively so.
It's not an assumption. Back then it was a known historical fact. The 19th century had not been very long ago back then, a time when workers' rights were still utopic and poverty kept increasing. Things changed rapidly in the early 20th century. Social reforms began being implemented. Legislation was passed to curb monopolies. Women were given the vote, even.
People never trusted the powers that be. In 1798 there was a rather drastic demonstration of radical disestablishmentarianism. And another in 1830, and another in 1848. Of course there was also one in 1917.
With the seemingly decisive defeat of Fascism in 1945, the future of Star Trek seemed like a real possibility. (That despite Aramco becoming the new United Fruit Company.)
Despite being a disappointment to radical revolutionaries, the mere existence of the USSR prompted reforms in the then so-called First World (now Free World) just to keep up: Public investments were made in education and infrastructure in the early 1960s. There was even a plan to send a man to the moon and safely bring him back.
Much of that has been undone again since then. Downsizing, asset stripping, vertical integration, financialisation became the norm. Privatisation became de rigeur. Monopolies are touted as "efficient". Poverty is increasing again.
The question used to be if a state would be needed post capitalism. Now it is if the state can survive capitalism.
It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. (And the climate catastrophe looks like the world is indeed ending, in order to preserve an existing business model and the shareholder value.) As Margaret Thatcher used to say: There is no alternative.
(Although according to the economist and former finance minister Yannis Varoufakis, capitalism is actually ending, replaced by what he calls "techno-feudalism": the control of information (rather than just prices and wages) by private monopolies.)
You say as I'm forced to watch ads on this video. So... erm, I'd argue your point here has no merit Vurrunna.
You may want to come back to this comment after entering the work force
"Cartelism is a good thing!"
Can you honestly picture a utopia that still has a capitalist distribution of wealth? Simply put, capitalism is a "best we can do" solution to a clear problem in everyone's lives, which is material needs. Material needs impose themselves on people naturally which causes stress and forces people to labour for rewards that meet these needs. I'm not saying that in itself is wrong, or that it's unfair, or that it has ever been different, but it is still objectively an obstacle to a perfect world. If we want to solve ALL our problems, at some point we will need to move beyond capitalism, that is an unavoidable truth.
Even though these materials needs have always existed, I think our current society places more focus on them than any before (thanks to growing careeism, grindset mentality, consumerism which are all promoted mostly for the sake of economic growth), which makes those needs much more important than they should be or that most people want them to be, which leads people to be unhappy and therefore pessimistic about the future since it's hard to imagine that trend changing.
I would recommend the Arc of a Scythe series. It’s a YA fiction series set in a future where even desth has been largely overcome. It is a great read and I thoroughly recommend it.
MY FAVORITE SERIES
It's incredible how they address HOW society's problems like racism have been dealt with over a few thousand years
This video ties in well with my current, heightened curiosity of the Mars rover, (not Curiosity) Perseverance: Useless information to the you and public, but I must have this said - thank you.
Why does it have to involve the "end of capitalism"? The alternatives seem like the dystopias writers like George Orwell were talking about.
here we are again
Starmoth by Isilanka is a good example of contemporary utopian fiction
Great content! Bring on the era of cool solar punk stories!!!
An interesting idea that always pops into my mind for the future is wether modern sci-fi tropes will eventually (if they already haven't) put themselves firmly within the collective consciousness. Assuming that nothing happens to remove said ideas from that consciousness, I am fairly certain that in the future someone, somewhere will realize them.
Something like hyperspace would eventually be invented simply because the idea of it has been around for so long.
Man Carrying Thing, I love ya, and I'll let Mr Stanley Robinson finish, but I've just gotta say Ministry for the Future is the most boomer thing I've ever read
I loved Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury growing up as well. I’m interested in the Victorian utopian socialism of eg News From Nowhere and Looking Backwards too. And I really feel that you are right, we need some vision of the future and progress, things getting better. But I wonder if we need more near-future semi-utopianism, like something different to what we had before but with some of that spirit. I assume you’ve read Capitalist Realism?
Also I read A Look at Leninism by Ron Tabor who was the head of some Leninist/Trotskyite group in the US in the 80s, but he started looking at Leninism and the early development of the Soviet Union and basically became disillusioned and felt that the seeds of the failure of that project were in Leninism. What I found especially interesting was that Ron Tabor’s conclusion was basically we needed to look towards more soft Utopianism, more exploration of how things could be, rather than trying to draw all our lessons from the revolutions of the past.
OTOH I wonder if these books *are* being published but not sufficiently marketed because publishers are driven by market trends and they aren’t convinced it will sell
Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz have a great talk on this
I like this video and your ideas and I was going to write a more in-depth response but I realised that nobody wants an essay-length comment about millennials’ relationships with capitalism and views of the future. So here’s a thumbs up emoji instead 👍🏻
Also I’m currently reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet which seems like nice, hopeful speculative sci-fi for the modern age. Would recommend.
Hhaha thanks man, but whenever you want to go on a tirade, my channel is open to you. (thanks for the rec, I want to check that one out)
Are you calling me nobody mark? 🤔
Guess I am 🤷🏻♂️ It sounds like I’ll have to make this comment at some stage now.
@@mwbreen yes, please! I am curious.
I disagree with this but it’s a great video. Personally I see fiction as a way to help young people prepare mentally for the disaster that they’ve been saddled with, so I’m in support of the negative stuff.
I also find it interesting that evangelicals in the USA are also fixated on a dystopian future.
The Left Behind series influenced more churches in the early 2000s than the Bible has.
Um what? The Bible is also a dystopian future, what do you think the whole Book of Revelations is? Left Behind is just a lamer adaptation of the Bible.
"Old people are the greatest. They're full of wisdom and experience." -Man Carrying Thing
I think that's why Phillip K Dick and Cyber Punk are really vouge atm. But tbh I just want solar punk to mature as a genre, it's got legs as a liberatory genre of Gen Z optimism but nothing of substance thus far.
The book series is definitely not perfect but I think the closest thing we have today to a utopian book with a solution is the "Arc of the Scythe" series. It says the only solution to capitalism is to let AI completely take over and I agree. I think the only reason there are so many stories about AI turning evil is human hubris, humans refuse to believe that machines can do a better job of running the world. Asimov himself was tired of stories where robots turned evil
I don't know Revelation sounds like a pretty good future to me
Ok but have you seen the AI of today? The most advanced AIs we have are those designed by corporations to mimic people. Unless we radically change the way AI is trained and developed soon, the only robot overlords we'll be having is our corporate overlords in metal and glass bodies. If humans are so terrible, what makes you think our deformed silicon spawn will be any better than us?
I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and I felt he tried to envision a more optimistic view of how it could all end... even if there were a lot of terrible events thats come up throughout
Look out Normies. Man Carrying Thing is BASED.
Sci-fi could be like Old Testament prophets: not beating around the bush as to what the very real problems are, and knowing how things can end réally badly, but also offer a path of hope. Jeremiah was infamously negative, but said halfway the book: all this is true, but still there will be Justice and hope.
I myself am someone that's only skimmed the surface of modern sci-fi, but I still think you brought up a lot of good points about it. Do you think that the reason so much of it nowadays is written dystopian/hopeless, is to explore the themes of people coming together and overcoming those challenges?
I think that is part of it, and that's an interesting theme to explore. It seems like in a lot of these stories, people are divided and must join together to beat the insurmountable foe
Post apocalypses has been a crutch for 'futurist' writers for like 50 years. Its easy to just start over and not have to deal with how current events play out. A nice clean slate for your story.
Even Star Trek is set in a time after a nuclear WW3. Only the absolute worst outcome of 1960's fears could be the spark to actually change course.
I don't think it's a crutch, imo science-fiction is primarily about putting the reader in a scenario that is alien and then making that scenario play out to contrast it with the reader's world. The interest lies in looking at how that fictional world's rules differ from the reader's world and how these difference affect the way the story unfolds. For that reason I don't think the explanation of how they got to these new rules or the feasibility of it matter much at all.
Bruh what's wrong with capitalism that specifically a capitalism problem?
I have never seen a video from you that wasn't a joke until now. I kept waiting for the punchline, and midway through realized this wasn't satire.
lolololololo
But it doesn't matter how bad the future is in millennial dystopias because one special teenager who doesn't follow the rules always fixes everything. I think that's even more unrealistic that boomer sci-fi. But I actually prefer the pessimistic views of Blade Runner because it's not about toppling "the system" like so many YA novels. That would be farfetched. Instead, it's about the small victories; save one person. The world is terrible, but there are still good people left.
I'm out here trying my best, though I feel obligated to write with a more honest optimism. I can imagine much better futures, but the paths there are harder. Capitalism and its attendant bigotries don’t seem inclined to die easily. But I still believe we can make it through the time of monsters and build something so much better on the other side. And that’s worth fighting for.
Have I been pronouncing dystopian wrong? (Diss topian instead of dice topian)
I pronounce it diss topian too 🤷♂️
i am probably doing it wrong, please disregard all future pronunciations
@@ManCarryingThing no worries 😅
@@ManCarryingThing dice-regard lol
Hard to imagine a system that surplants capitalism.
The Iron Age world had a form of prosperity and "endless" growth by beqeathing wealth to the next generation through inheritance, however it led to a situation where plots of land became so insignificant they were worthless on their own and had to be sold to Kings. The cities swelled, prices went up and there were wars inevitably. Perhaps space could function as a kind of endless frontier to exploit resources from, with increasing technological innovation and efficiency though humans could probably "fill" the galaxy at some point causing a sort of urbanisation of space.
Imperialism and colonialism are 100% going to return in some way in the future if we do take up space travel.
I know the end of captalism. It comes right after the end of entropy.
The movie Tomorrowland is a great critique of dystopian science fiction.
anyone know the background music?
If Tom Cruise and Norm McDonald adopted a son, this would be him.
Writers in the 50s and 60s aren't boomers. More would have been the greatest generation and the silent generation
Take a look at some of the works of modern Chinese Si-Fi writers, this optimistic genre is alive and well over there.
In addition to writing about worlds beyond these problems, I think it's important to write potential solutions to these problems -- imagining how those solutions can play out could form political/economic fiction. Probably wouldn't sell well. Most folks who read for leisure aren't going to be interested, but for those of us searching for more nutritional thoughts than "capitalism bad" or "communism bad", it may prove appetizing.
oooh ur so refined and intellectual clearly you're above the shallow political discussions of the lowly peasantry.
Love that old science fiction, but weren’t Gene Roddenberry, Asimov, and Clarke not Boomers but the Silent Generation? 😬
Progress doesn't 'happen'. It must be *made* to happen.
Really good video. Thanks. I've been thinking along those lines myself.
Thanks :) glad you enjoyed
“while not always proposing a way to get to this utopian ideal”
That’s the root of the problem. Without a route to get there, it’s not a goal, but just wishful thinking.
That said, wishful thinking is still the necessary first step, in order to come up with a vision, from which you can then derive specific sub-goals.
Virgin optimist 'Eternal Progress' vs chad fatalist 'Progress is inevitable'