Ibon wrote:This is a truly dystopian nightmare world that many have become so habituated to they can not recognize the nightmare.
Perhaps, but think of the perspective of JRR Tolkien 100 years ago. His Middle-earth is a paean to a pastoral countryside that was ceding to industrialization from his birth in the tail end of the 19th century and into the 20th. To him, even the 40s and 50s were dystopian. To someone like me, even the 1980s feels like a lost golden age. To millennials, many of them think today represents the best of times thanks to Netflix, XBox, free streaming porn, and Tinder hookups.
Go read all the comments under the music video link I posted. Read all of the glowing feedback. People who actually think the song and/or the video carries deep meaning. I simply do not operate on their wavelength. This is the generation gap in full bloom.
My point being that dystopia is only a "thing" when people perceive life to be dystopian. Of course you can present modernity as dystopian, but you can also portray the 1950s cold-war mad-men era as the height of racism, sexism, and red-scare hysteria. Then go back before vaccination when kids had to deal with serious fear dying before they reached adulthood, and on and on.
If people don't value what they don't have anymore then you can't impose any sense of grief over it.
When might we see a sea-change of people starting to perceive today as a dystopia across all generations? When jobs and basic necessities start getting a LOT more expensive or outright scarce. We may be a vacuous society, but we are ultimately a spoiled one, and so there's a limit to how much dread we feel, Trump not withstanding.