Luckily these types of dystopias are only stable in fiction. Lets hope future ones will destabilise faster than the e.g. soviet union did (after 70 or so years of existence), though.
Dystopias will all eventually fall. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be replaced with something better.
For what it's worth, NK officially distanced itself from communism in 2009:
And in fairness, Orwell himself was quite optimistic about 1984-world's prospects. IIRC in an appendix he opined that the innate human desire to innovate with language could not be suppressed without losing language entirely, and so humans would (slowly, painfully) eventually find the cracks and destroy the system from within.
> soviet union
what about the american imperialism covering much of the globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large amount of people already... (and growing)
For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi.
For all that Facebook is getting blamed for enabling and distributing the rhetoric that led to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground.
[0] and as a non-American, I’d add to the Tribune list with things that most Americans I’ve spoken with do not even acknowledge, and of those who do acknowledge them, most favour.
True, but one cannot exist without the other. How would the US invade Vietnam (or Afghanistan) without industries to manufacture weapons and surveillance tools? How can they pillage all their resources without predatory industry collaborating with the occupier?
> For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi.
I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet. The Stasi was pretty bad for east germany but they held no power elsewhere: now every political police on earth is equipped with stasi-like superpowers thanks to Silicon Valley.
> that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground.
True, but Facebook had a choice: from what i read it was founded as a stalking/girl-rating site by geeky sociopaths, which is already pretty dark. But when they early on censored breastfeeding women and torrent links while letting nazi/misogynist content go rampant was a very political choice in favor of very violent ideologies, and they should be held accountable (not talking about the US judicial system which is just as bad if not even worse).
The NSA? No, I don’t think they’re for-hire.
And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation. Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it.
> True, but Facebook had a choice…
All of which reflects badly on the business and its leadership, and yet is very very different to an actual repressive regime.
You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right?
Even though I agree with you that Facebook going “freedom of speech for everything except the defining characteristic of mammals” is a bad thing, that’s peanuts in comparison.
The United States of America, always an ally and at service to friendly right-wing politicians from around the world.
"What was the sense at the time of the degree to which the United States was involving itself in undermining Allende’s government?
MS: I think most people knew, and part of this was because a scandal broke in 1972 that the Chilean subsidiary of ITT had lobbied the CIA to intervene and fund different renegade military factions in Chile to try to keep Allende out of office during that brief two-month window between when he was elected in September of 1970 and when he would be sworn in, in November 1970.
So it was fairly common knowledge that, despite the public declarations by the White House that they were neutral toward Chile or that they had no official oppositional stance to him, behind the scenes, the CIA as well as the White House were actively opposed to Allende."
source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/salvador-allende-chile-coup-p...
great recent docu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
I didn't say "for hire" specifically. But they certainly pass intel to friends as part of the 5 eyes & other intelligence agreements, as well as on specific operations, such as in Rojava or in Ukraine.
Also worth mentioning although i can't find the link right now: ex-3letter-agency workers who started working for a private company contracted by saudi intelligence services who were employed for political repression (although the job was advertised as hunting down terrorists).
> And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation.
And yet the DHS does just that, both for deportations [0] and political repression [1].
> Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it.
Snowden wasn't concerned by kidnapping: he was really afraid the NSA would drone the entire neighborhood he was hiding in (which is arguably worse), like USA police who not so long ago (1985) bombed an entire neighborhood (destroying 65 houses) and killed 5 children for the sake of political repression. [2]
But kidnapping is definitely a thing though maybe not by NSA: see CIA black sites and the inhumane treatment of detainees post-9/11 (waterboarding, etc).
> You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right?
I appreciate the distinction. From my political activities, I'm acquainted with many political refugees, some of whom have been tortured while others had family members imprisoned/disappeared/executed.
But it's worth noting that our "democratic" (cough cough) governments have a strong history of doing that too, and only recently have they stopped because they've improved the subtlety of their counter-insurrection techniques. Still, there's plenty of people framed by State services [3], plenty of political prisoners [4], people mutilated by police forces or outright executed...
Some people would even argue that dictatorship/fascism is the logical byproduct of liberal democracy and its (supposedly enlightened) centralized control and enforcement structures. What if Trump had been reelected (or worse, had successfully seized power), do you think you would have kept your social comfort very long?
The same problems apply in France where i reside, where a new form of anti-muslim nazism is rising (thanks to the media oligarchy spreading FUD). The last time the nazis seized power, we had genocide after genocide, even long after WWII ended (see also, french genocide in Algeria and the 1961 Vel d'Hiv sweep).
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/13/dhs-migrants-guatemala-...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/portland-pr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/30/black-panthe...
Then why do inequalities keep rising according to most metrics? Just because the poor fare relatively better (which is debatable depending on which metrics you take) doesn't mean justice is rising.
You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries.
I definitely think it's possible that some communities/States collapsed in the past due to local climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops falling into the single available source).
But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider other forms of pollution), and some time later was a study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-polluted water.
In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if your local community respects the environment, you can be sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field killing the insects that keep your own food sources available, polluting the water sources...
I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side of things is shocking enough that it requires no less than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it, nothing good can come out of the system.
have you been to India or another country with a similar wealth disparity in the global south?
Disclaimer: i'm not well-versed in anthropology/history, but this has been studied and debated by scholars [0]
If you've ever been to the countryside, you'll notice that everything feels slower. The fast, ever-working "lifestyle" we know today apparently originated in with early capitalism/industrualism and was itself subject to stark opposition (for example from the luddites, who contrary to popular belief were not anti-tech but rather early anti-capitalists).
When that new rhythm was expanded to all areas of life with mass-industrialization in the 18th/19th century, thinkers of the time pointed the absurdity to replace legal slavery with what they called "wage slavery". [1]
[0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
A related point is why are we seeing equality as something desirable? We don't even question it anymore. This is a rather new development in the last 400 years or so and came about after Europeans arrived at America and started interacting with the natives, which had this equality concept much more advanced than what was common in Europe at the time. This also leads to the recognition of differences between people. What does it mean for us to be equal? I run slower than you, should I carry the urgent message over the mountains because we're equal?
Sorry to just add questions, but I think they are important questions people don't usually ask.
Should everyone be equal before the law? Is it possible if half the population can't afford a lawyer?
Should everyone's vote count? How does Democracy survive when a small group of people own half the country?
Equality under the law (both your examples may arguably fall here), but we also have equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, equality by mean reduction.
I personally agree that equality under the law is indeed desirable but some other types aren't.
Which ones are good and which aren't should be made explicit.
Then we can talk about how to increase the good equalities and reduce the bad ones.
1- a child of a billionaire that had private tutoring and connections
2 - a child that grew up in poverty and was malnurished, didn't recieve proper education or attention from parents because they were working two jobs or perished in some kind of tragedy
The thing is to have a destination, a goal. Which equalities are worth fighting for?
Envy. But it is not a new feature of human nature. So my question is: Why is it only now (for about the last 100 years) such a popular and successful ideology? What has changed?
Is it mass media? Or is it not a new thing at all, but things happen at a bigger scale? Meaning, before you'd maybe get envy bursts that'd devastate a village or a tribe, and that'd be it, now you get it at the country and planet level?
Compare that to the American dream where literally everybody has the ability to get rich (in theory, but the point is that now the "peasants" in general want to get rich).
This is a projection. Revolts are as old as power and inequalities. For the most well-known/well-studied of those, see this wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts
(it's important to understand that most revolts are silently crushed and never documented, and that even for those that were documented in their time we did not necessarily keep good track of those documents over the centuries)
I wasn't saying revolts didn't exist, just that they weren't about wanting to be rich.
Both sides - "good" and "evil" - have the technology of this past century and on to utilize. Arguably the interconnectivity and instantaneous communication between any and every human on Earth has its advantages, however the internet can easily be censored once captured - and ideology is ripe around the world which seems to be the precursor to the majority of blind society being led down a dark path to a pit difficult to impossible to escape; if you even realize you're in a pit or not.