Why only four dystopias? There’s way more dystopias out there.
I don’t think a totalitarian regime can perpetuate itself unless it has access to all four domains: the police state sometimes throws bureaucracy at you, the bureaucracy sometimes throws hyperreality at you, the hyperreality sometimes tries to sell you stuff, and the shopping mall has loss prevention officers with a license to kill.
So, IMO the repeated use of the word ‘rule’ is a bit misleading because it’s really just a single power structure. Solid meme otherwise.
Also the role of organized religion in all this has been neglected, so maybe we should add a fifth one and call it “Atwoodian”.
Out of all of them Brave New World really nails it, the only one of the four that feels like a proper commentary on the way I live in the here and now.
Kafka comes in at second, if only because it is cathartic to read his stuff
Kafka gets really chilling when you realize all that bureaucratic oppression was done with nothing but a paper and pencil
No phones
No computers
No databases
No internet
No neural networks
No AI
Now they have all those things.
The coward who made this has included just one of the authors’ first names purely to avoid using the word “Dickian”.
Look, just eat your tin of fish and keep lathing a world where our children don’t have to eat tins of corpse-starch and our grandchildren get to exist at all.
