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A statue of George Orwell outside the BBC Radio Studios
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this excerpt.
Today’s subject is high-tech dystopia, and our guest is the preeminent writer of science fiction political thrillers. Malka Older is author of Infomocracy named one of the best books of 2016 by The Washington Post and author of sequels, Null States and State Tectonics. The full trilogy was nominated for the prestigious Hugo Award for Science Fiction. A humanitarian aid worker, Older was a fellow for technology and risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and has supported global programs in agency-wide strategy for disaster risk reduction from Africa and Asia to the United States.
Alexander Heffner: Where do we draw the line between utopia and dystopia? Where is the future going?
Malka Older: Honestly for me as a science fiction writer, the middle ground is the most interesting place to be because both utopia and dystopia, are these kind of extremes that, you know, hopefully in the case of dystopia we’re not going to reach. I think that seems a little more likely now than utopia. But you know utopia was invented as an ideal. It was invented as this, this place where nothing is wrong, which is for again, a storywriter, not a very interesting place to be. And dystopia has become a label that I think we might throw around a little too freely. I think a lot of the stories that we talk about, as dystopias are not so far from what’s happening in the real world today. You know, if you look at Margaret Atwood’s book A Handmaid’s Tale she said that these are things that have happened in the world.
Everything that happens in that book has happened in the world and as much of it is still happening. And if you look at things like The Hunger Games which kind of started some of this trend, this current trend of dystopias, although it is set in a future where the technology is a bit different, many of the things, the strategies that are used by the bad guys in those books, are things that happen today. And so, you know, I think we can, we can certainly imagine worse dystopias than those into the future, but the more fertile space for us to think about, to imagine different futures, is in the middle. We can’t, there’s not a whole lot of use in imagining a perfect system and there’s not a whole lot of use in imagining an impregnable, terrifying, absolutely lockdown horror system. But what we can do is think about working to make our own system better incrementally. We can think about radical change and then imagine the ways that it both will make things better and will have some unintended negative consequences and we can think about negative futures as a warning to people.
Heffner: How do you define those terms today? Utopia and dystopia, because Orwell had his definitions, Huxley had his definitions; you have your definitions based on your own work. How would you define it in a casual sense and then in an academic sense too? I guess the casual sense is more appropriate for any layperson watching. What to you is dystopia and utopia today, you think of subjugation, you think of genocide, you think of the disenfranchisement of people as being synonymous with dystopia. I just am wondering what’s the criteria? Dystopia seems more real than utopia today as you’re saying.
Older: I think that is part of the problem that I have with the colloquial definition that gets thrown around so much is that, you know, we can use that as a distancing mechanism. We can talk about all the, all of these things that you mentioned as dystopian, but a dystopia is something that’s not real, right, in the same way that a utopia is. If they are opposites, utopia is unattainable. And so dystopia is, you know, hopefully also unattainable. Utopia is a system that functions perfectly. And so a dystopia then for me is a negative system that you can’t actually get out of. Well most of the narratives that we write, most of the fiction that we write that we call dystopian is about actually resistance. It’s about emerging from a bad situation. And most of the ways that we use the adjective in real life, we talk about things in our lives that are dystopian and you know, while I think it’s, it’s, it’s worthwhile to call attention to just how bad those things are that you mentioned. The use of the word also suggest something that’s fictional, something that’s, you know, an exaggeration, that’s a hyperbole. And so I think that’s a little bit dangerous because I think we need to keep in mind that many of these narratives, many of these fictions like Margaret Atwood’s are bad things that actually happen like, like 1984 to a certain extent as well. Although I think that Orwell did take it you know, he took it to the extreme of being in a situation that the protagonist couldn’t get out of, that the world couldn’t get out of.
Heffner: Some of the circumstances are counterfactual; the idea of what if the confederacy had won, what if the Axis powers had won instead of the Allied powers. So, you know, The Man in High Castle, but in America today, the realities for southern states in particular is that Jim Crow won. The confederacy didn’t win, but Jim Crow won. Brown v. Board of Education was decided in the just way. And yet our schools today are more segregated by studies than ever before, you know.
Older: Yeah. And I think that that’s why I get so hung up on this question of terminology because we do talk about, you know, I think it’s important that we draw those lines about what’s dystopia and what’s just really bad stuff happening in the real world. Because most of the problems we have are these problems of from George Orwell, “doublespeak,” you know, we talk, we say that we live in a democracy. We say that our schools are legally not segregated. And yet we know that our democracy does not function in the way, not only the way that we would like it to, but even if we look at the rules, the way our democracy was designed was to take a step back from letting people have the power. It was designed to leave some of that control in the hands of the elites. We have the Electoral College, we have the Senate.
There were all these mechanisms that were specifically designed for that reason because the founders didn’t quite trust democracy yet. It was a very radical idea and you know, that’s okay if it’s something that we continue to evolve from, but when we tell ourselves we’re already living in a democracy, we’re done, we don’t have to worry about this anymore. We have people power. It’s, you know, that makes it a problem because we don’t evolve it. Like the segregation question that you just brought up. Yes, Brown v. Board of Education was decided and in certain way. But we’ve seen that things like red lining and things like the school zones being decided, you know, getting their money from the local tax base and the way that red lining and other housing policies have affected that. And you know, so many ways that we can see that the situation in Baton Rouge where they’re trying to actually seceded a city from the city so that they can have the school zone that they want. All these things are functioning so that our schools are in fact very segregated. And so if we tell ourselves, if we continue to tell ourselves there isn’t a race problem because this was decided at the Supreme Court and everything is fine now, we don’t progress on that. So we need to be very aware of the language that we’re using and the stories that we’re telling ourselves in order to improve, in order to keep taking steps into a better future.
Heffner: The idea that technology could be a democratizing force, is that still realistic under the present circumstances?
Older: I do think that technology can be a very democratizing force. I think that, you know we’re, it’s a problem again that we, that we blame the specific technology for the problems that we’re having, because we need to remember that books when they were first printed, that was a revolutionary technology that remained in the hands of the elite for a long time. Radio has been used to incite genocide. Television, I think is perhaps a bigger problem in terms of misinformation, still today than the social media that gets so much blame. And we can see well, we can see that there are problems in social media, that there are, you know about storms and there are, there’s Twitter bullying and there’s misinformation that’s being spread in these very specific ways. We can also see ways in which social media and other, more broadly, internet and digital technology are giving voice to people who didn’t have a voice. When you see the reaction to something on social media to something that a large corporation does or to a media story, it’s such a different dynamic than letters to the editor that get sent in and selected carefully and printed one week later. So we are hearing very different voices if we choose to.
