{"id":7906,"date":"2018-08-05T19:15:47","date_gmt":"2018-08-06T01:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/1yrago-william-gibson-what-we-talk-about-when\/"},"modified":"2018-12-09T14:47:14","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T21:47:14","slug":"1yrago-william-gibson-what-we-talk-about-when","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/1yrago-william-gibson-what-we-talk-about-when\/","title":{"rendered":"#1yrago William Gibson: what we talk about, when we talk about dystopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
<\/figure>\n

\nWith pre-orders open for the graphic novel collecting<\/a> William Gibson\u2019s amazing comic book Archangel<\/a>, and a linked novel on the way<\/a> that ties the 2016 election to the world of The Peripheral<\/a>, William Gibson has conducted a fascinating interview with Vulture on the surge in popularity in dystopian literature.<\/p>\n

\nGibson reads literary trends as a kind of window into our collective
\nfears and desires about the future \u2013 he notes that while the 20th
\ncentury was rife with speculation about the 21st; here in the early
\ndecades of 21C we almost never talk about 2200 and beyond (I wonder if
\nthat\u2019s not just a function of the fact that we\u2019re in the first half of
\nthe 21st century, while most sf was written in the back half of 20C).<\/p>\n

\nWhere things get sharp is where Gibson points out that huge swathes of
\nthe human population are living in dystopias as grim as any cyberpunk
\nfuture (\u201cdystopia is not evenly distributed\u201d). In the 1960s, during the
\ncivil rights movement\u2019s heyday, LBJ said \u201cIf you can convince the lowest
\n white man he\u2019s better than the best colored man, he won\u2019t notice you\u2019re
\n picking his pocket,\u201d while Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign was a long exercise in
\n telling poor white people that they may end up in the same dire straits
\n that racialized Americans had navigated since the colonialism\u2019s first
\ngenocidal years on the continent \u2013 proving the corollary to LBJ,
\nnamely, convincing white people they may be the next underclass will
\nstampede them into voting for anyone who promises to stop it.<\/p>\n

\nThe steady accumulation of wealth at the top of the income distribution
\nsince the Reagan years are a kind of macroscopic version of the Trump
\nphenomenon: if you want to convince first-worlders that the end-times
\nare coming, simply convince them that they will live in the dystopian
\nconditions that already prevail elsewhere, confirm their lurking anxiety
\n that the privilege they\u2019ve enjoyed was an accident of history and not a
\n vote of confidence in their innate superiority. Convince them that they
\n are one bad beat away from having kids with swollen bellies lying
\noutside rude huts, too weak to brush the flies away from their eyes.<\/p>\n

\nI think this is the special genius of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale: by
\nputting a white, educated, formerly middle-class woman in the position
\nof a sex-slave to a religious fascist \u2013 by putting a North American in
\nthe place of a woman under the Taliban or Isis \u2013 the entwined destiny
\nand fragility of all people on earth (including those in the unevenly
\ndistributed dystopias of the Rest of the World) is manifested and our
\nworst fears are confirmed. <\/p>\n

\nThere are other reasons that dystopian stories flourish. Science
\nfiction, as Gibson has pointed out, is a pulp literature, a storytelling
\n mode in which the plot is the highest priority. These stories demand a
\nseries of ever-raising stakes to keep the tension ratcheting up towards a
\n climax. Disaster stories in which the small problems of workaday life
\nare turned into ever-larger problems of \u201cnatural\u201d disaster, human
\nmisconduct, worsening disaster, human atrocities, build to an unbeatable
\n crescendo of man-against-nature-against-man that you can\u2019t bear to look
\n away from.<\/p>\n

\nAs Gibson says, our resonating stories are a window into our collective fears and hopes. We\u2019re still talking about Skynet and The Matrix<\/a> because the fear of transhuman, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their energy-source and gut-flora is a great metaphor<\/a> for the relationship most of us have to limited liability transnational corporations.<\/p>\n

\nThese, in turn, are the result of extreme market ideology, the idea that
\n markets aren\u2019t just places were you go every other week \u2013 they\u2019re
\nmoral arbiters that tell us who the worthy and unworthy are among us.
\nThe Thatcherite doctrine that \u201cthere is no such thing as society\u201d is a
\nclaim that we have no solidarity, no shared destiny, that \u201cgreed is
\ngood\u201d and that we are all brands and businesses, and that \u201cthere
\n is one and only one social responsibility of business\u2013to use it
\nresources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\nThis is a common motif of dystopia: neighbor against neighbor, families
\nturning on each other. In our hearts, we know that we have a common
\ndestiny. Not only are do we require other people to help us accomplish
\nanything truly ambitious \u2013 we also are entwined at the level of our
\nvery microbes, in our very climate. You can\u2019t find high enough ground to
\n escape climate change, not when the people dying in the lowlands are
\nbreeding antibiotic resistant TB and coughing it into the air we all
\nbreathe. You could try for ever-more baroque secession strategies \u2013
\nunderground shelters, air scrubbers, hydroponics \u2013 but at a certain
\npoint, it\u2019s far cheaper to just take care of the people around you and
\nvice-versa.<\/p>\n

\nThe popularity of today\u2019s dystopias might represent the fear of shear
\nbetween the contradictions of believing in the primacy of the individual
\n (and the idea that our shared destiny is a delusion) and the certainty
\nof the very small and unimaginably large ways in which we are linked. If
\n we go on believing that we owe each other nothing, we\u2019ll arrive at a
\nworld in which we behave that way \u2013 a perfect dystopia.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/boingboing.net\/2017\/08\/04\/skynet-ascendant.html<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents: With pre-orders open for the graphic novel collecting William Gibson\u2019s amazing comic book Archangel, and a linked novel on the way that ties the 2016 election to the world of The Peripheral, William Gibson has conducted a fascinating interview with Vulture on the surge in popularity in dystopian literature. Gibson reads literary trends as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[2004,2056],"class_list":["post-7906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-teaching-tumblr","tag-tumblr-exodus"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-23w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52303,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906\/revisions\/52303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}