The dark future

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

It is easy to imagine a dark future for humanity. Popular culture provides countless examples of how it could all go wrong. From fanciful stories of zombie apocalypse to all-too-plausible projections of climate horror, we have a cultural fascination with dystopia.

Dystopia: An imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.

Oxford English Dictionary

These stories of dark futures appear across all types of media. Here’s some examples.

Literature	1984 by George Orwell The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Film	Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott The Matrix, directed by The Wachowskis
Television	Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker Squid Game, created by Hwang Dong-hyuk
Gaming	The Last of Us, created by Naughty Dog Fallout, created by Interplay Productions
Comics	The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins

The sources of their darkness are diverse – oppressive regimes, nuclear winters, pandemics, alien invasions, asteroid impacts and artificial intelligence. There is no shortage of imagination when creators turn their attention to the fragility of human civilisation and let their dark impulses off the leash.

I don’t want to dwell on dystopia, on doom and gloom, on fear and horror. Planetcentric is a hopeful project about imagining better futures. But the pervasiveness of dystopia is a key starting point and a primary motivation for this project. I’ve written previously about the darkening of the future during my lifetime. I am not nostalgic for the gleaming techno-utopias that I imagined as a child in the 1970s – the flying cars, the jetpacks, the space habitats. Those naive modernist fantasies ignored ecological and social realities and were best discarded. But we do need positive visions of a better world, bound by ecological limits and social needs, to spark transformative action. If we can’t imagine better futures how can we realise them?

Yet, in popular culture, we have come to accept the dominance of dystopian storytelling over tales of better futures. Old ideas of progress, that the future would be better than the past, that our children would have it better than we did, are crumbling.

Why are we obsessed with dystopia?

It is easy to see why we are culturally obsessed with dystopian futures. We have lived for decades now with very real existential threats of our own making. Since the dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War, the possibility of self-annihilation became very real. During the Cold War, the mad doctrine of mutually assured destruction led to the creation of so many nuclear weapons that we could destroy civilisation many times over. It is inevitable that the existential dread created by this reality would find cultural expression, for example in films like The Day After.

The threat of nuclear war remains present but other threats, particularly climate change and pandemics, have received more attention in recent decades. Continued warnings from scientists and increasing experience with disasters linked to or worsened by climate change have contributed to many feeling eco-anxiety, defined by the American Psychological Association as a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom’.² This, too, has led to a flourishing of cultural expression in emerging genres such as eco fiction and climate fiction (cli-fi) that explore the challenges of living through ecological collapse and climate disruption.

The Climate Council writes that eco-anxiety is ‘a rational response to the reality we’re all facing’.³ Let’s face it, the data is scary. One of the best summaries of the state of the planet is the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre on planetary boundaries, which finds that humanity is now living outside the safe operating space for seven of the Earth’s critical processes. We are changing the climate and unravelling the ecosystems that all creatures (including us) rely on. It is natural to explore what this all means through cultural products.

Many of the creators of dystopian imaginaries are seeking to warn us of what lies ahead – to shock us out of complacency and point to problems in society. By depicting a dark future, they are showing us what we need to avoid through our actions in the present. The prevalence of dystopias relative to more hopeful visions of the future may also be explained by their dramatic quality. Many argue that dystopias make for more entertaining stories than boring utopias where everything goes right. After all, stories need to challenge the protagonist in some way to capture our interest.

However, as I wrote in 2013, there is a point where the warnings have done their job and can become counter-productive. Fear can prompt activism but it can equally lead to feelings of despair, cynicism and hopelessness if we can’t see a way to change the dark future. Fear can be debilitating. We need sources of hope to drive us forward. Imagining hopeful futures that are better than today is one way to generate hope and I’ll pick that up in later posts. But maybe there are sources of hope even in dystopian stories.

Hope in dystopia?

The Oxford English Dictionary definition above says that dystopia is a place where ‘everything is as bad as possible’. George Orwell’s 1984 is a classic example of this archetypal dystopia. In the novel, Winston Smith attempts to rebel against the oppressive regime but his rebellion is completely crushed by the end of the novel. Through one of the characters, Orwell gives us this bleak vision of the future:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

George Orwell, 1984

There is little hope to be found there. However, most dystopian imaginaries are not this relentlessly bleak. There is usually a spark of hope, the potential for resistance or recovery, the human relationships that persist through adversity.

These sources of hope look a little different in different types of dystopia. While dystopian imaginaries are incredibly diverse, the Great Transition Initiatives makes a useful distinction in its global scenarios for the future of humanity between two broad types – breakdown and fortress world. In a breakdown future, civilisation collapses and everyone is caught in the fall. In a fortress world, there is a dual future, where the affluent live in ‘bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery’.⁴

In the next post, I will use dystopian fiction to explore these two types of dystopia but with a particular emphasis on finding sources of hope even within these dark futures. In the meantime, I would love to hear from you – why do you think dystopian stories are so dominant in popular culture?

Notes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After ↩︎
2. American Psychological Association, 2017, Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications and Guidance, https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf ↩︎
3. Climate Council, Climate Anxiety Toolkit, https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/climate-anxiety-toolkit/ ↩︎
4. Raskin et al. 2002, Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, https://www.greattransition.org/gt-essay ↩︎