"Severance: Does Mr. Milchick Know He is Black?" By Alex Beightol
#CoerciveControl
#BlackFedi #Bodies #Smiling #CorporateCulture #Power #Culture #BlackFace #Classism #Cults #WhiteFolks #ScienceFiction #Resist #Passing #Colorism #Hierarchy #Kyriarchy #House #Field #BlackNuance #CorporateHorror #Dystopias #Embodiment #Marked #Feculence #Severance #WhoDoYouThinkYouAre? #racism #technology #AfricanDiaspora #Assimilation #Lumen #Agency
<<I've been entrusted with making the Tokens stretch.
I know we must be thankful for our Daily Bread location, but all I can find are dried-up rolls + wizened doughnuts.
Under His Eye,
VoiceRecorded by a Martha from one of Gilead's finer families>>
#ComplaintsAtFictionalBiz
#HashtagGames
#Christendom
#ChristDom
#ChristFandom
#MargaretAtwood
#HandmaidsTale
#food
#shopping
#streaming
#tv
#USPol
#SevenMountains
#Project2025
#ProsperityGospel
#bookstodon
#dystopias
It's like we're through the looking glass on mass surveillance, and this is the other side. The apparatus of war is inverted enough to equally punch down on anything civilian that dares to make a noise. Mice of men!
In all the fictional representations I've seen of #dystopias, absolutely none of them included public health experts trying to raise the alarm about a looming #pandemic by filming themselves delivering academic citations while wearing lingerie at a swimming pool.
So very true:
"The #NegativeUtopias/ #Dystopias that I think are becoming, or already have become in some countries, a reality are:..."
As a 50 year old with a 13 year old daughter living in Octavia Butler’s neighborhood of Altadena, CA, it was eerie when I re-read The Parable of the Sower last summer. Today following the devastating Eaton Fire, the opening of chapter four just doubles down on the dystopia in which we’re living.Saturday, February 1, 2025
WE HAD A FIRE TODAY.
People go on "1984! 1984!" and rightly so but Brave New World is coming up behind us on the social angle and fewer people are familiar with that one, (I'll confess I've read the wikipedia and the 1979 Canadian film of it but not actually read the thing)
#Dystopias #1984 #BraveNewWorld
#CfP for the "2025 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Annual Conference: Imaginary Futures: #Utopias, #Dystopias & #Protopias of Cultural Studies", which will take place at the California Institute of the Arts (Valencia) on May 29 - 31, 2025.
🗓️Deadline for abstracts: February 23, 2025
📌Further information:
https://www.avldigital.de/de/vernetzen/details/callforpapers/2025-cultural-studies-association-csa-annual-conference-imaginary-futures-utopias-dystopias-p/ #fidavlnews @litstudies @germanistik @italianstudies #LiteratureCulture
@sorenfox @pluralistic "Radicalized" is a dark, dark story, and I say that as a regular consumer of #dystopias. Such a convincing rhythm to the narrative, and such a diagnostic of contemporary ills. I'm glad I took the time for it; thanks for sharing!
The Dispossessed
"Fifty years later, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novel about Utopian Anarchists Is as Relevant as Ever"
🥥 The modern Cassandras: Brilliant women of color who started warning about the dangers of generative AI years before anyone else seemed to notice. Unfortunately, hardly anyone was listening, and nothing speaks louder than money in a winner-takes-all economy run by dead-inside tech bros and marketing monsters.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/women-warnings-ai-danger-risk-before-chatgpt-1234804367/
🥥
#GenerativeAI #TechBros #Dystopias #Cassandras #RollingStone #TuckersBalls
#1984 #Dystopias #FanFiction: "Orwell's readers experience all of 1984 through Winston's eyes and are encouraged to trust his assessment of his situation. But Newman brings in a second point of view, that of Julia, who is indeed far more worldly than Winston. But that's not because she's younger than him – it's because she's more provincial. Julia, we learn, grew up outside of the Home Counties, where the revolution was incomplete and where dissidents – like her parents – were sent into exile. Julia has experienced the periphery of the Party's power, the places where it is frayed and incomplete. For Julia, the Party may be ruthless and powerful, but it's hardly omnicompetent. Indeed, it's rather fumbling.
Which makes sense. After all, if we take Winston at his word and assume that every disloyal citizen of Oceania is arrested, tortured and murdered, where would that leave Oceania? Even Kim Jong Un can't murder everyone who hates him, or he'd get awfully lonely, and then awfully hungry.
Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction."
Sci-fi has been getting darker and more pessimistic through the decades.
A fascinating website that shows this, with data:
Who killed the world? https://pudding.cool/2024/07/scifi
#SciFi #dystopia #dystopian #dystopias #PostApocalyptic #fiction #ScienceFiction #future #pessimistic #pessimism
Finished Wayward Pines (series based on the books, M. Night Shyamalan and Duffer Brothers from 2014-2016 - has Matt Dillon in the first season) last night.
They were on Fox so now they're on Hulu and it's.. something. Dark. Weird. Kinda cool though. Hadn't even heard of it before a week or two ago.
#WaywardPines #TV #thriller #thrillers #horror #SciFi #dystopia #dystopias #dystopian #MNightShyamalan #DufferBrothers
@evelynefoerster @VeroniqueB99 @si_irini @MaJ1 @mattotcha @mina @2ndStar @energiepirat @SilviaMarton @forthy42 @GreenFire
(2/2)
#Fahrenheit 451, however, it is but one of the #SciFi #dystopias that seem to be becoming reality in many countries. Here are some:
#BigTech #SiliconValley #Dystopias: "By attaching the new product to a popular speculation, especially one with built-in dramatic tension, the founders can elevate a buggy, unproven, or partially conceived technology into the cultural firmament, even if only briefly. It’s a cheat code, a way of getting us to relate to a future that’s already been culturally prototyped, and it can be quite successful. To wit: The day after admonishing tech companies for using Her as a benchmark for their products, Roose dedicated his column to explaining how AI’s ‘Her’ Era Has Arrived — thus further entrenching the link between OpenAI’s aspirational technology and its attendant useful dystopia in the public consciousness. Hell, my own story about the grim origins of the metaverse probably made Facebook’s deeply lame Horizons VR product seem orders of magnitude cooler than it turned out to be.
Even if consumers aren’t aware of all of the dystopian reference points these founders and companies are pushing, they probably should be aware of the narcissistic, us-against-the-collapsing-world mentality that is active behind them. And we shouldn’t merely mock the tech set for using dystopias as marketing materials — we should try to stop them from creating them, too."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/for-tech-ceos-the-dystopia-is-the
"Dystopian fiction often makes revolution look easy - thrilling too...in so many fictional contexts, a Big Bad Order can be brought to its knees by a motley young crew, and then the work is done....SORDIDEZ... is not such a story."
- @MLClark
Absolutely mind-blowing & brilliant 🤯 review of my book is up at @StrangeHorizons
I'm so grateful! Hahóm 🙏🏼🇵🇷🪶
#indigenousliterature #sciencefictionbook #review
#dystopias #SciFi
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/sordidez-by-e-g-conde/
@CarlG@esq.social @philip_cardella@historians.social
(3/n)
...#Orwellian #dystopias simultaneously: #1984 and, more pertinent in this context, #AnimalFarm. Seen from this novel's perspective, aspiring to be the One Animal [that] Is more equal Than Others makes perfect sense. It even strongly appeals to the lowest human instincts.
I have long thought that #DefundThePolice doesn’t have any merit, except for anarchists waiting for the breakdown of civil society to loot shops, etc.
I have...
