dystopia - fb - blakey

Blakey Vermeule
There so many .... different and interesting things going on here.
1) facial recognition - you have to assume that they are doing this. Or will be doing this.
1a) Pro - awesome, that is not me buying that donut, so you know that my account was stolen.
1b) pro - oo that bad guy mugged me - yay the police have his picture
1c) con - oh no the Stasi are coming to get us!! yawn.

I have read a mountain of scifi. They have covered every possible outcome. Orwell was still, properly, reacting to the cold war and things like the Stasi and the CIA.

Snowcrash (you have read this, yes? put it on the list.)
Snowcrash is a much more modern take on ubiquitous tech. Even set in a bleak balkanized america. The book looked at a huge number of dimensions where that ubiquity is helpful.

My guess, is that 99% of the reaction is hand-wringing.
Oh no, that motorized car will put the stables out of business!!
Oh no, self-driving cares will put those drivers out of business.
Oh no, electric lights will destroy the coal gas industry.

What amuses me, is that people who on one had say "THOSE people are so uninformed and should study the issue and be more informed" .. .when talking about healthcare or voting issues or equal rights, etc.
But when it comes to something like the future, they have ignored the available material and wring hands.

Probably one of the more ... interesting aspects of so much Dystopian fiction is just how far from the mark it has always been. Versus the rest of scifi.

50s-60s were filled with cold war dystopia.
60s-70s were filled with starvation dystopia.
70s-80s were filled with nuclear winter dystopia.
We had OH NO killer robots/machines.
We had plagues and Zombies
Running out of oil oh no.
And now there is a ton of running out of resources dreck.

Fear sells. That they have constantly gotten it wrong is quite interesting.

so um ... need any help for a class outline??