But that machine is now real; and the film Inception stole my dreams and erased any desire to sue them for copyright molestations. I was sure that I was the first to see domed cities in space comprised of solar paneling, providing endless energy to mad hippies cultivating massive jungles of seriously potent mayjay, which sounds good, until the ventilation system breaks down, and recycled smoke kicks in, and mates start looking like good little munchies to each other, and all that's left when the smoke finally clears is happy leafery, rather greener now for all the extra human fertilizer plumping up their cell walls.
Yes, invariably, I'd discover that one of the hundreds of sci-fi writers out there had, in one of the dozens of books each had written, already covered the idea and there wasn't much point in continuing to develop it. (Although I'm reasonably certain that no one else has thought of those spliff trees and cannabis clouds yet.)
Lots of people were reading and writing sci-fi and dystopias from the moment the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, (Mind at the End of its Tether comes to mind) through to the moment of Star Wars in 1984 (natch), when US President Ronald Reagan forgot to turn his mike off after a speech and drolly uttered, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." (My, how times have changed.)
Remarks made so much more comical by the fact that the world was gripped then by the absolute terror of an impending nuclear war, as evidenced by the US broadcast of the nuclear war film The Day After just 6 months prior and BBC's Threads, perhaps the darkest film on the subject ever made, about to be broadcast in Britain.
But that's the thing about these dystopias: At some point, perhaps when Reagan gaffed, people seemed to realize that a world that could spend billions of dollars on a Star Wars system was explicitly preparing for a nuclear exchange of fire, and that whatever didactic power dystopias might have had -- admonishing, pleading, painting the world black as visceral symbolism -- they'd lost whatever momentum they might have had in preventing the world from going mad. We're there.
Like the more recent happy tittering of the White House press corps after Barack Obama made a joke about killing with his favorite weapon of war, the remote-controlled drone, there was no shock and horror, no jaws dropped to the plush-carpeted floor, instead the amused reporters's ears lifted champagne glasses and saluted His Majesty's murderous mirth.
The fact of the matter is we live in world that is substantially over-populated (7.7 billion people wanting to be middle class, like the neoliberals promise, disingenuously), with longer life expectancies (even in the Third World), requiring ever more resources, leading to ever more drilling, mining and consumption, which results in ever more toxic pollution, and has led humans to the very edge of cataclysmic climate change, bringing with it melting polar ice caps, tsunamis, earthquakes, monster storms, and the catastrophic decline of the bee populations, rain forests and coral reefs. And the electing of a moron when we needed a visionary leader. As Noam Chomsky noted, in four years, Trump singlehandedly brought the Atomic Doomsday Clock from 3 minutes to midnight down to 100 seconds.
Instead of reading dystopias now, there are ample samples of our living nightmare described in the pages of such contemporary sober and rational non-fiction works as The World Without Us, The Sixth Extinction, and the resurgence of Rachel Carson's prophetic classic, Silent Spring.
Looking for the cause of this historical lightning crack in the ceiling of sanity is difficult, not least of all because we are still in the moment, "the wheel's still in spin," as the Dylan lyric goes. But the crack is there. Another book I came across a while back is one by two psychiatrist brothers, Daniel and Jason Freeman, titled Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear, which argues that paranoia is widespread now, affecting as many as a quarter of the population, and
the days when paranoia could be written off as a meaningless sign of insanity are long gone...because paranoia is center stage in our culture and in our individual lives.
Big Brother is, by definition, out to get us. You don't need a rat cage tied to your face to see how the reality-taunting Turd Blossoms out there want us to say, "Two plus two equals five."
The ruminating philosopher in me is uncowed and keeps his eye on humankine and and is tempted to locate the decisive crack of lightning and peal of madhouse thunder at that historical point when the western world's evolution from tenets of the Enlightenment led to structuralism and a sense of scientific certainty and its attendant idealism for human futures only to be jig-sawed and relativized by the powerful deconstructive tools of post-modernist thinking. What kind of an a**hole, for instance, would want to rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral refitting it with a rooftop pool? Some 1%er is behind it-- here's the dope.
In science, Thomas Kuhn argued that the truths of scientific outcomes were partially related to the working paradigm of the day; what you observed was changed by the observation itself. The value of the Canon and of Grand Narratives in literature was a measurement controlled by an academic elite with their own vested interests and agendas to protect. The great motifs of the First World's enlightened political philosophy -- liberty, democracy, equal opportunity, assorted bills of rights were largely fantasies of assumed power, which, when examined more closely, dissolved from a peaceable kingdom into a frame filled with raw jungle hungers. And f*ck the culturally-relative IQ test, while we're at it -- so I thought "krone" was Islam's book, and that one hiccup was difference bewteen what I might have been and what I am. Who the f*ck would know what a "krone" was? (Years later, as an English in Istanbul I set "conestoga" as test word, just to keep the noise down. Yeah, now who's the Yabanci?)
This is not a knock on post-modernism, which has made so much social and aesthetic progress possible in the last half-century, but it does point to a naive set of assumptions that neglected to account for the sure surfeit of sociopaths who lay in wait for soft, succulent humanists everywhere. No, post-mod's promised landscapes of freedom, its liberating relativism that says there are no grand narratives, no essential humanity really, no transcendent function toward which we must strive into the future as One People, is also the same liberating process unleashed for warriors with their 'humanitarian' interventions with cluster bombs, for politicians to shed what little shame and fear they had about their lies, for Wall Street brokers to party hearty in the snorkle trough of our demise.
You can see this wild maelstrom quietly at work in Thomas Keenan's Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy. In this relatively short book, the long-time technologist Keenan doesn't so much argue as demonstrate how we have practically reached the point of the so-called Singularity, that evolutionary stage at which machines and humans begin to merge, synthesize, if you will, with the ramifications impossible to predict.
In one area of human activity after another, with example after example, Keenan lays out a future that is now, even if it will be too late to avoid its consequences once we come to full consciousness of this new paradigm shift. As President Obama might have said, with a smile, were he a technologist: We are the dystopia we've been waiting for. Hope plus Change = 5.
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