uneasy anime battle music plays Lightning crackles around AOC as she writes an epic blue sky post and closes her laptop.
She goes to work the next day and lets a group of the most evil Amerikkkans be racist against the only Muslim and Palestinian women in congress.
Later in the Rotunda…
uneasy anime battle music plays AOC locks eyes with Loren Bobert and and squints as they face off.
“You’re so fucking lucky that you didn’t hurt my friends.”
I was thinking about this a few days ago, except about the dystopian genre. Liberals have to exaggerate what evil looks like because they can’t recognize evil as it presents itself in the real world. And it has the reverse effect of actually making people think that if someone isn’t literally a Nazi then they can’t be antisemitic, or if they aren’t calling minorities slurs then they can’t be racist. 1984 is a particularly bad example of this problem, but I don’t think I’ve read/watched a dystopian story that I cared much for.
Despite him being a think-tank-poisoned turbo-lib these days, this is why I still really appreciate William Gibson’s worlds even in his more modern work.
(I haven’t read the what if Hilary won one yet to be fair.)
He has for building these borderline incomprehensible to the individual dystopias where most people react with either confusion, incurious self-interest, or simply shrug and turn away.
In removedCountry billionaires, intelligence services, stay behind networks, and organised crime networks will all do anything to obtain a shipping container - despite the fact that basically none of them know what it contains or what it’s real importance is. They only see bits and pieces and their incentives and chauvinistic need to secure it ‘before their enemies do’ is all it takes.
In The Peripheral a man-made cataclysm has happened. One that destroyed a significant part of the world and population as we knew it. It’s referred to decades later as The Jackpot. It’s just a thing that happened in the background many years ago to the survivors who live in the new world. Something people don’t care to look at or examine for the most part. Just a thing that happened.
So much of his dystopian world building is about the way that everything becomes hyper normalised, ignored, and no one (including those in power) know what the hell is really going on or what to do about it.