How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

This is very topical. If i had a dollar every time someone used Black Mirror as an argument against technology...

Interesting.

"In the totalitarian-dystopian genre, the prototypical narrative content elements — e.g., setting, character, plot, and story morals — are relatively clear and consistent; thus, they are “filled in” according to widely shared genre conventions."

Writers can thus write in such worlds without extensive world-building. It's like grinding out police procedurals or zombie novels. Not every writer can build worlds like Charles Stross. It's also easier for readers. Reading Ian Banks is hard work.

More generally, we have a decided lack of novels describing a better future. We have no shared conceptual model of what a better future should look like. We did once, up to 1970 or so. To a considerable extent, futurism is still stuck in the 1960s. What passes for futurism today is a minor tweak on the present.

("Futures: 1) Utopia 2) Dystopia 3) the future in which your cell phone takes slightly better pictures.")

"In political science" - they assert this is science.

This is how they decide what to test:

"In formulating hypotheses, we draw from several theoretical traditions. The majority of our hypotheses flow from the nature of the content shared across dystopian narratives. We take each theoretical tradition in turn."

This appears to describe the difference between fact and fantasy:

"Scholars in the narrative persuasion tradition distinguish narrative from rhetorical persuasion, where the latter is characterized by advocacy of a position through arguments, reasoning, and evidence (e.g., newspaper editorials and political speeches). By contrast, narrative persuasion involves attitude change driven by cognitive and emotional engagement with a story."

This is experiment three:

"Finally, we test two key folk hypotheses, loosely connected to cultivation theory."

Science is hard:

"Yet an experimental manipulation involving an entire story narrative can be difficult to unpack and interpret."

Overall, I found this paper hard to read (to be fair, I'm not used to seeing this style of thing but I have put some effort in - I read it!) and rather vapid.

This is something I've argued about a lot recently, and I think it's very important to be aware of. All too often in political debates, the subject of some dystopian scenario from fiction will come up. Fiction serves an important role in helping you to see other points of view, but it's even more important to keep in mind that it is just fiction.

When people point to Atlas Shrugged or 1984 and cite some real world event that seems to back it up, it reaffirms the belief that we're heading towards that fictional dystopia. When in fact this is merely selection bias.

Dystopian fiction is entertaining, but we cannot draw any real world conclusions from the fictional narrative. The world is much, much more complex than the fictional straw man world the author creates.

> that violence and illegal activities may be both legitimate and necessary to pursue justice. Dystopian fiction appears to subtly expand the political imagination of viewers and readers to encompass a range of scenarios outside the normal realm of democratic politics, and what people then consider reasonable and thinkable appears to expand accordingly.

America was founded on a revolution, and often changing the system from within for anything other than the most trivial issues is seen to the cynics seems impossible.

The fact is that in the present mode of existence the only revolutions that do happen can only happen in fiction. Like for instance see the movie They Live! The protagonist finds himself completely alienated by his newly perceived reality and decides to chew gum and kick ass to get to the bottom of it, only to find that he's in a much deeper hole than something he can do anything about, the aliens run a galactic economic empire of which earth is just a small part -- which could be a pretty apt metaphor for individual existence or maybe the human condition -- even the most powerful can do little about the system. Who controls us? Maybe it's money or technology or a conspiracy, or God, or bacteria and viruses?

So the message is one of revolution because those who are unhappy with reality as it is, can only rebel against it on the screen or in books... and do so idealistically without any sort of heavy handed intellectual exercise which might cause revolution in a hundred years -- like for instance Communism.

The truth is that these days revolution can only be televised. And that is itself cathartic for both the author and for the audience.