The “Dystopia” is almost as old as fictional writing itself is. Speculative fiction is an inherently enticing idea for both audiences and authors; its a way to explore politics, alternate histories, societal ideas and ideologies without the confines of reality to constrain and strangle the author or ruin the believability for the audience. These settings almost always portray the world dominated by the worst aspects of humanity: greed, insanity, malice and our inherent desire to control run rampant in whatever power structure remains. The wants of the few put so far above the needs of the many that to look at the structurally maintained gap between them strikes one as almost comical. Mustache twirling psychopaths run the world. Your rent is too high. Your salary is too low. Your boss sucks. Your job sucks. The boss of your boss sucks. There’s so many awful things happening all the time that these can feel like punitive measures meant to keep you, specifically, down. Its so easy to just get lost in “The Churn”, to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite dystopian settings, The Expanse.
Only–and you probably guessed where I’m going with this–that doesn’t describe a fictional dystopia. That’s, in broad strokes, the thoughts lingering in the minds of a not-insignificant portion of the current western population, not to mention the billions that don’t have it as materially good as we do.
So, if our world is a dystopia akin to so many fictional worlds, why does it feel so… boring?
The dystopian writer, at least the good ones, present these ideas that we all at least subconsciously know and move them to the forefront. Warhammer 40k sees humanity’s worst cravings for conquest and control win out at some point in its history, and now all of humanity is on a war and religion fueled death drive, where lives are expended like bullets in the name of a dead god. The series I put in the title, Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk and its top selling video game tie-in Cyberpunk 2077 present a world where body modifications and technological advancements have left a dying Earth in control of a few nation-states, many of which are secretly or not-so-secretly ran by megacorporations. But all of these dystopian settings have the same throughlines: Your job sucks, your place of living likely sucks, the world sucks, and the bigwigs at the top couldn’t give a damn.
Its easy to compare fictional worlds to our reality in broad strokes, but the real disparity between our reality and fiction is the fiction’s ability to use these throughlines and add an outwardly presenting evil for whoever our protagonist is to combat, such as the obviously devious megacorporations in Cyberpunk who enforce their profit margins at the end of a rifle. The rebel, the outlaw, the man on the periphery is often romanticized in these settings due to the evil’s obvious nature, as anyone who fights against this type of comical systematic injustice naturally lends itself to sympathy from both the author and the audience-Han Solo was a drug runner, sure, but he was a drug runner who’s lot wasn’t in with the outwardly evil Empire, and that fact, combined with the endless charisma of Harrison Ford, makes him endearing.
By this logic, rebels and anti-establishment groups should be everywhere in our reality. There should be 50,000 guerilla rebels in the Appalachian mountains right now if those who sympathize with the periphery characters in dystopian settings like Cyberpunk actually acted on the morals of their heroes in fiction, even if those morals are as shallow and broad as “anti establishment”.
Thus, we come to the thesis at the core of this rambling, which I have dubbed “Chainsaw-Hands Theory”. If you live in Cyberpunk‘s fictional Night City, you face many of the same problems that are slowly encircling American’s urban middle class, namely high rent, awful housing, and little prospects for an optimistic future, but in addition to all of these, your neighbor is a guy named Chainsaw Hands Mike who killed five people yesterday with his chainsaw hands, and THAT is what sends settings such as Cyberpunk spilling over into the territory of the fantastical and the absurd rather than a moderately exaggerated mirror of our everyday reality.
In Cyberpunk and similar settings, control is blunt and unsubtle. Megacorporations like Arasaka and Militech use Chainsaw Hands Mike and his buddies to enforce profits at the end of a rifle. But the modes of control in our reality are much more subtle and nefarious–its in the urban zoning laws, the rise in grocery prices and the lowering of your wages, the BMW a CEO drives during a year where he layed off 200 people. There’s no face to this evil, no skull-faced robots and heavily armored goons to direct your anger towards. Which leads to this feeling of numbness; without an obvious ideological evil actively terrorizing your streets and neighborhood, everything just feels… dull, even if you do have an awareness of the moral dilemma encasing Western society.
This outward facing evil is the crux of any point a dystopian setting tries to make. Whatever ideology, whatever deep seated fear or hatred the author harbors is pushed forward in the aesthetic and ideological chain until it is shouting the audience in the face going “Look at me! I’m the bad guy!”. Giving malice a face is the first step in crafting any good dystopia and giving your periphery characters something to rage against.
Its both a completely understandable and incredibly funny fact that, in the West and specifically the U.S. that without either a) material conditions getting substantially worse in a short period of time or b) the U.S. government partnering with Amazon to construct a large black tower in Washington D.C. dubbed “Evil Inc. Headquarters” (this could happen any day now really), little progress can be made on this front. Great shakeups in any political system throughout history are often ideological at its roots, yet materialistic in its execution; The Cuban, Russian, Chinese, French, Haitian, and American revolutions were all driven to a tipping point by the ones in charge strangling everyone below them until no one but them could breathe, sparking a needed change in the order. In Cyberpunk settings those powers-that-be are often ugly, neon lit versions of our own institutions; corrupt governments, corporations the size of countries, and a populace under them just barely scraping by on a diet of alleyway ramen shop noodles and cigarettes. But the Punk in Cyberpunk comes from those who look up and see the world for what it is–Punk, after all, was a derogatory term but used to be a badge of honor worn by the men and women on the periphery; the outcasts, the criminals, the rebels in modern society that didn’t quite fit in anywhere else and didn’t have the ability or the desire to try and get in their “rightful” place. This was, of course, before the word was co-opted by people with no internal monologue and reduced to just another meaningless describing adjective- “Hope-punk, Solar-punk, Folk-punk”, meaningless “genres” with no ideological underpinnings besides “What if things were kinda nice?” and no understanding of the roots of what they’re using to describe their uninteresting ideas. Distilling a word and the genres that used it to nothing but an unidentifiable grey gruel that wouldn’t look out of place subsisting the inhabitants of Blade Runner‘s world.
And that really sums it up, doesn’t it? In our numbness to the everyday horrors we partake in, we took a word that used to be synonymous with breaking out of a system and made it part of an easily controllable, malleable order until it means nothing. Even so much that a video game sporting the most influential of the “Punks”, a genre built on rebellion and defiance of your corporate overlords, can become a best selling video game distributed by a multi-billion dollar company. This isn’t a condemnation of Cyberpunk 2077–I actually quite like the game– but it is a vindication of my Chainsaw-Hands Theory; with no Chainsaw Hands Mike running around the suburbs at night, words like “rebel” and “punk” start to lose meaning until they become part of the same system that makes you numb and oblivious to everything around you, including the existence of the system itself. Without Chainsaw Hands Mike, you have no reason to look up and see the ivory towers and the tortured souls beneath them.
Without Chainsaw Hands Mike, everything just feels a bit… boring.
