Cory Doctorow has a nice editorial in Wired (where he plugs his book ofc).
Main point, however, is that the difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails.
Here’s how you make a dystopia: Convince people that when disaster strikes, their neighbors are their enemies, not their mutual saviors and responsibilities. The belief that when the lights go out, your neighbors will come over with a shotgun—rather than the contents of their freezer so you can have a barbecue before it all spoils—isn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s a weaponized narrative. The belief in the barely restrained predatory nature of the people around you is the cause of dystopia, the belief that turns mere crises into catastrophes.
This is at the core of the Trumpland – people who cling to guns and don’t trust anybody. The antithesis to it is when we had Sandy hurricane, and no electricity and where strangers helped each other.
Stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust.
I am not a stranger to the prepper instinct he refers to, but this gives me hope.
This is also the difference between someone like Doctorow and, say, Saramago, or Atwood, whom I instinctively dislike.
tinfoilparachute 