Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember walking over a hill into a rave in the Utah desert that we'd set up and thinking that it actually was the cyberpunk dystopia that I had been hoping for. That kind of stuff is around but maybe not evenly distributed or legible to large demographics. Unfortunately, so is the rest of the vicious horrorshow, equally illegible and equally uneven in distribution.
Interesting that you frame it as "hoping" for a dystopia. Like even in our wildest imaginations we can't envision a future where society works for regular folks.
I take your point; it makes sense.
"Regular folks" is doing a lot of work, though.
It may very well be the case that most of the material world which props up the idea of "regular folks" never was capital-R Real and insofar as the idea is a pleasant dream it is not a sustainable one.
Proximate to me, often "regular folks" entail white folks unproblematically living their lives around the norms of US hegemonic capital interests. When I hear Pat the Bunny sing "show me utopia, I will call it a jail" I understand the feeling. I was, afterall, raised by Christians who believed in David Byrne's picture of "Heaven" as a place where "nothing ever happens".
Those are the folks who have happily elected a few people to replace the Flock cameras here with Axon. Their vision of an ordered society is a bit chilling to me, despite the fact that they understand their project as both liberal and progressive.
As I understand it, deviations from those cultural norms are already "dystopic" to the "regular folks" I know- if we somehow lost our ability to transmute sand into computing power and dead plants into motive power and had to go back to living in the cliff side then we'd no longer really be human, despite the fact that their enchanted sand and holy oil is literally destroying the ecology of the entire planet.
This situation is, of course, already a distopia for the bands of Ute and Jicarilla Apache and Dine and Hopi and others living near me. And when I look at the kinds of technological survellience built into the material structures it feels easy enough to note that we already live in a dystopia. I have heard some specific dakota folks refer this situation to as post-apocalyptic and I am inclined to agree.
If we accept that we're already in a dystopia and, further, that much of the hegemonic culture's idea of a "utopia" has already been a holocaust for several other groups of people, then hoping for a "dystopia" in that sense might seem a bit more coherent.