Part of what makes dystopias dystopian is that they make people worse: they stifle their people’s tendencies towards compassion, wonder, creative problem-solving, and other “good” impulses; and develop people’s tendencies towards cruelty, deceit, submission to abuse, indolence, wireheading, or other “bad” impulses.
As such, I’m not sure how “dystopia, except in a good way” works out. What would We or 1984 be “in a good way”?
Let me try “1984 in a good way”: Everyone is pervasively monitored, but the information is also available to everyone; after a period of adjustment, everyone becomes comfortable with the elimination of privacy and returns to their hedonic set-points, but with a massive resulting increase in global productivity, and ultimately happiness, arising from the additional information available to everyone but the elimination of secrets.
It’s not so much “1984 in a good way” as it is “one negative-seeming aspect of 1984 rebuilt into a world that can arguably be seen in a positive light, and is clearly a weirdtopia”.
Well, what are some human dreams that would lead to 1984, and can we reconstruct them? Alternately, what are some activities that are prototypical of 1984 but can be changed slightly to good end?
My list of dreams would be something like conformity, letting other people make decisions for you, using language as a tool of thought, eternal conflict against outgroups.
Activities would be things like surveillance, revision of history, getting disappeared into a state prison.
Now, can we use these ingredients to make something good instead of something bad? Well, maybe not getting disappeared into a state prison. But mostly, sure.
Why should the future be united, why can’t we have factions like Eastasia and Oceania whose people view the other group as bitter enemies? What fun would the Horde be without the Alliance?
Why should the history of the world be readily accessible, rather than different groups revising history differently just to make it more awesome from their perspective, with true histories hidden and fragmentary? Herodotus thought it was a good idea to infuse his Histories with myth, maybe he was onto something, maybe it would make people nobler.
Or letting authority decide for you—this one’s pretty easy. What if Big Brother was smart enough to make a command economy work just fine? What if it turns out that most people lead lives as happy and valuable as any when the choice of where to live and what to do for a few hours a day is removed from them? Reversal test it—if we had consistently been assigned the perfect house for us, had been told to pick up and move to unknown locales only to find out they were amazing, would most people really want to switch over to house-hunting?
Part of what makes dystopias dystopian is that they make people worse: they stifle their people’s tendencies towards compassion, wonder, creative problem-solving, and other “good” impulses; and develop people’s tendencies towards cruelty, deceit, submission to abuse, indolence, wireheading, or other “bad” impulses.
As such, I’m not sure how “dystopia, except in a good way” works out. What would We or 1984 be “in a good way”?
Let me try “1984 in a good way”: Everyone is pervasively monitored, but the information is also available to everyone; after a period of adjustment, everyone becomes comfortable with the elimination of privacy and returns to their hedonic set-points, but with a massive resulting increase in global productivity, and ultimately happiness, arising from the additional information available to everyone but the elimination of secrets.
It’s not so much “1984 in a good way” as it is “one negative-seeming aspect of 1984 rebuilt into a world that can arguably be seen in a positive light, and is clearly a weirdtopia”.
Well, what are some human dreams that would lead to 1984, and can we reconstruct them? Alternately, what are some activities that are prototypical of 1984 but can be changed slightly to good end?
My list of dreams would be something like conformity, letting other people make decisions for you, using language as a tool of thought, eternal conflict against outgroups.
Activities would be things like surveillance, revision of history, getting disappeared into a state prison.
Now, can we use these ingredients to make something good instead of something bad? Well, maybe not getting disappeared into a state prison. But mostly, sure.
Why should the future be united, why can’t we have factions like Eastasia and Oceania whose people view the other group as bitter enemies? What fun would the Horde be without the Alliance?
Why should the history of the world be readily accessible, rather than different groups revising history differently just to make it more awesome from their perspective, with true histories hidden and fragmentary? Herodotus thought it was a good idea to infuse his Histories with myth, maybe he was onto something, maybe it would make people nobler.
Or letting authority decide for you—this one’s pretty easy. What if Big Brother was smart enough to make a command economy work just fine? What if it turns out that most people lead lives as happy and valuable as any when the choice of where to live and what to do for a few hours a day is removed from them? Reversal test it—if we had consistently been assigned the perfect house for us, had been told to pick up and move to unknown locales only to find out they were amazing, would most people really want to switch over to house-hunting?