Another Boring Dystopia
It's easy to imagine dystopia because we've lived in one for our entire lives.
My neighborhood is dystopian. It has no sidewalks and people drive down the streets at deadly speeds. The sounds of birds—refreshing—are frequently muffled by the sounds of passing airplanes and drowned out entirely by the sounds of nearby traffic. Leaf-blowers and car engines and other assorted roars and hums puncture the marginal idyllic charm of large trees and frolicking squirrels.
My neighborhood is not entirely dystopian (see: squirrels, trees, occasional fog, occasional pretty sunsets), but the crows are as aware of the area’s inherent dreadfulness as I am. Like some humans, some crows seem attracted to bleakness. Do humans enjoy living on a garbage planet?
There are things that are dystopian because we do them wrong, but they are not inherently dystopian. A restaurant can be dystopian or not dystopian, but a chain restaurant is inherently dystopian, homogenized and controlled by unseen, faraway, unambiguously authoritarian edicts and rules. Interstate highways are inherently dystopian. Freeways and parking lots too, I think. This doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes find them beautiful.
Stack interchanges are beautiful feats of engineering, but they’re also looming monsters that remind me of the sick tangle of broken ideologies we’ve found ourselves trapped within. Massive empty parking lots are beautiful in that terror-sublime Lynchian sorta way. The highway at night is a glorious hyper-objective wound slashed into the landscape cutting ecosystems and neighborhoods, and it can rightfully inspire awe because it is awful.
When I talk of the dystopian highway, I’m not talking about a Route-66 type creation (though our nostalgia discolors or misremembers perhaps even that). That is a fundamentally different thing from the contemporary Interstate highway. I’m not talking about a winding road meandering from town to town, acknowledging topography and a human use of space; I am talking about the Interstate as a flattening and a straightening of the landscape, as a brutal and tyrannical force, imposing an artificial order on an ecology that has evolved over billions of years to be precisely as chaotic as it desires to be.
Public schools often look dystopian but they are not inherently dystopian. We make them look that way for reasons I’m not entirely privy to. It’s worse in some places than in other places. When I was a teenage malcontent, a fellow malcontent and I would drive around our seemingly inescapable and endlessly abysmal suburban hellscape (the Phoenix metropolitan area sprawls to a size slightly larger than the entire state of Maryland) and play a game called “prison or high school.”
A lot of things we take for granted or consider “normal” are inherently dystopian. Shopping malls are inherently dystopian. Chain link fences are inherently dystopian. Playgrounds feel weirdly dystopian to me but that might just be my faulty wiring.
Surveillance cameras are dystopian. Florescent lighting is dystopian. Children’s cereal is dystopian (that deserves some explanation, maybe another time). Hospitals usually feel dystopian but, like schools, I don’t think that’s inherent. We just do them wrong.
All of this suggests that a more vital and interesting imaginative project might be to dream up utopias instead of dystopia, but pain and suffering are more dramatically interesting. Who’s to say we cannot feel pain and suffer within a utopia? If pain and suffering—and the drama it creates—are so vital, perhaps that should be taken into account when creating a utopia. Maybe we need a little dystopia to keep us on our feet.
But this is too much.
Jan 5, 2024 Update: I feel the need to point readers to Norris Comer’s recent essay, “Walking Away from Society Snuff.”
I would also like to note that I was in a particularly dreary place, mentally, when I wrote this. And I still am! But I have tried, in the past, to create literary antidotes to this Society Snuff, which I may have been bleakly partaking in when I wrote this, though I thought my tongue was in my cheek it may have been bitten off long ago. See my Utopia XL pieces for antidotes (maybe?). They’re around, many are here.
[The full book, Utopia XL, remains unpublished because…]