Thursday, December 29, 2016

Dystopia to Utopia

Is there a word for an art style or world setting that looks like cyberpunk but is utopic as opposed to dystopic?

I wrote a book “Newland 2084″ which is classified as sci-fi cyberpunk utopia. Previous discussions led me to conclude that the words “cyberpunk utopia” don’t make sense together. This answer offers insight into the words “cyberpunk”, “dystopia”, and “utopia”.

Wikipedia says Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction in a future setting that tends to focus on society as "high tech low life" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as information and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social.
An observer of earth events today would find rapidly changing information and technology juxtaposed with a breakdown of social order. Everything is changing at a fast pace. It is the fast exchange of information that is the root cause of the dissolution of the old order and the creation of the new.

Assuming that the world behaves as a dystopic pretty much everywhere on the planet, the transition to a future world where utopias have the opportunity to emerge in a localized manner.

THE PROBLEM is in the words themselves. Assume we are now at an intermediate stepping point in the timeline of civilization. Everything is falling apart. All of our systems appear to be broken or fast becoming so. The people of the United States and elsewhere are working to make sure that the world gets put back together in a better form. That is where we are.

The root problem is easily visualized on a two dimensional graph with a dystopia being in the lower left origin point of a mathematical function starting in today’s dystopia and moving it to the right over time and upwards in the progression away from today’s dystopia towards utopia which in a goal somewhere vertical axis.

The word “dystopia” presumes disorder and progression along the horizontal time axis until order appears, order increases, sharply upward for a time as order increases to a point and then levels off. Order approaches utopia but seldom attains it. Social disorder decreases on the pathway to utopian class order.

THE ANSWER is that we are moving lots of broken systems from their current state into a future operating state that makes better sense. Every system has to get broken before it can be put back together. When enough things become broken enough and then put back again, a new and better operating forms gets built.

We are on our way as a species towards the Golden Age of ancient prophecy. The computers and the information itself are the vehicle that gets us there in most ways. We anticipate a new world where the top-down order and control hierarchy must give way to an emergent system. The deep connections at the social media layer of organizations become the new order. Control signals from above are respected but the order emerges from the bottom.

Human time is the fundamental driver of social order transformation. Capital buys human time. Without human time and energy invested the system does not run on time. That is the way it used to be.

THE ANSWER

The search for an attention grabbing genre leads to the conclusion that “cyberpunk” is the means of transforming the current dystopian into a utopia. Therefore the best distinctions might be.
  1. Sci-fi cyberpunk - classic definition
  2. Sci-fi cyberpunk dystopia - the beginning state
  3. Sci-fi cyberpunk transition, transformation, of emergence
  4. Sci-fi cyberpunk utopia - the final stable state


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