Distopia?

The term "Utopia" did not start out as a common noun, and it certainly wasn't meant as an adjective. It began as a proper noun (a place name, in fact), in the 1516 novel of the same name by Sir Thomas Moore. The book's rather fanciful account of a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean that serves as home to a "perfect" society repelled almost as many people as it attracted, and gave rise to the negative, opposite concept: the nightmareish "distopia."

Orwell's "1984" is probably the best known of these worlds, but hundreds of others have appeared in movies, books, and other media since the term was first coined by John Stuart Mill in 1868. Some of these are heroic fantasies where the protagonist hero really does change the world; some (like 1984 itself) end with the failure of the hero and the continued opression of the people, along whatever dimension that might take.

One of the most complex and thought-provoking works in the entire sub-genre has to be Cory Doctorow's 2003 novel "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," a post-scarcity world in which every person has all of the material needs met, everyone can live forever by backing up their memories and then "restoring from backup" by loading those memories into a new cloned body, and everyone is "online" all the time on computers implanted in their bodies.

I should tell you that I'm making this post from my Blackberry while I wait for a meeting to start, which is probably what brought the topic to mind...

What I can't figure out is if "Down and Out" is supposed to be a distopia or if it's just a really disturbing look at the world the way it might be if both technology and the sense of entitlement that people seem to be overdoing both continue to their logical extremes. I suppose I could email Cory and ask, but it seens rude somehow, as well as intellectually lazy...

The one thing I can tell you about the future is that it won't be anything like what we expect it to be. As evidence, I direct your attention to the little device I've written this post on, and the wireless technology to which it connects, both of which are beyond anything our grandparents (or in some cases our parents) could have imagined in their childhoods...