It's been said that one person's utopia is another person's dystopia. It's also true that the image you choose to paint as your dystopia says a lot about you and what you value and fear. In my dystopia, the human environment is degraded and humans needs are put in the service of algorithms that serve only the wealthiest and most powerful.
The funny thing about dystopias is how, if you squint a little, you might well be there already.
The Degradation of the Human Environment
I have a lot of respect for "nature" but I'm not actually that fond of it. I don't camp for fun or go out into nature as an antidote to technological overload. I agree with Oscar Wilde when he quipped that "Nature is like a big open field with goose flying overhead, uncooked" (I'm paraphrasing) - nature is a little to raw for me, and it's just downright uncomfortable and dangerous. So my dystopia isn't simply about a degraded natural environment, but us humans finding ourselves in a situation where we live in environments that are ugly and limiting, and otherwise degrading. My dystopia, as many others I have seen depicted, looks dingy and dirty, and it lacks the space for human dignity and flourishing.
I strongly believe that we humans come to be shaped, in good and bad ways, by the material conditions of our environment and the situation(s) in which we live. If we create environments that promote human flourishing, humans will flourish, and vice-versa. There is one thinker who has helped me to understand this more than anyone else, and that is Henri Lefebvre, a French sociologist and philosopher who wrote The Production of Space and Rythmanalysis. He helped me to understand how spaces can be produced and engineered to both limit and give the contours for what is possible for humans.
"Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics. It has always been political and strategic. There is an ideology of space. Because space, which seems homogeneous, which appears as a whole in its objectivity, in its pure form, such as we determine it, is a social product." -Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
Michel Foucualt also wrote quite a bit about space and spatial analytics - the both worked at the same time (although Lefebvre was much older, this work he did at the end of his life) and were coming up with similar ideas.
Non-Physical Degradation
We used to socially engineer humans through the production of physical spaces - Foucault makes this point perfectly in his example of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish. But now we are facing the social control of populations and individuals computationally, through algorithms.
In a sense, the need for social control by those in power (political or economic power) is as old as human life. The question is whether the degree and kind of control now possible through our technological and computational advances represents a threat to our humanity. And if our insides are rotted out by an overdose of technology our physical environments will no longer matter much at all.
We have spent centuries cultivating a sense of what it means to be human through the Humanities and Arts, and my fear is that this is becoming so devalued in our society that we are getting ready to throw it out with the bathwater of all things organic and analog.
Dystopia
The scariest dystopias are the ones we can feel creeping in upon us at the edges of experience.
I recently had a preview of my dystopia, and it involved an Algorithm that was being built at work to determine what projects I would work on and with whom. The good intentions behind it were to provide the best matches between people and projects given people's experiences and personalities. The results were often not good, not good at all. And there is no way to appeal to the Algorithm when a mistake has been made, and I found it quite dehumanizing to be subjugated to it's faux-will. This is just an example of an experience that I am having with increasing frequency, where a non-human agent is in a position to dictate to me what I can (and cannot) do in an unimpeachable way.
And I find it kind of horrifying, like Kant's sublime. Technology is both awe-inspiring (who would have thunk bits and bytes could lead us here, and so fast) and horrifying. I find.
Take Steemit, for example
The minute I heard about Steemit I knew that it's something I'd been looking for even though I'd never imagined it, and i knew it was brilliant. Social media is here and the question is how to put it to good use. This seems like a good use. It will allow makers and independent people to connect with others and to earn their keep. But at the same time, I must admit that I have some fears about this putting-social-media-on-a-blockchain experiment will lead us. I often think about that BlackMirror episode "Nosedive" where a social media score can determine what kind of housing you can afford and affect the kind and quality of your human interactions. (But of course, this is already the case - money itself is a currency that does just this. The problem is the quantification of being... more on this to come but for now, please repeat after me: "Data is for managing systems, not people") I am entering a world that is explicitly built on the premise that what others think of you and your contributions determine your worth and potential worth.
Philosophers since at least Socrates have held open a space for human dignity that does not depend on what others think of you. This is important because cutting edge and good ideas are often unpopular, at least to begin with. A philosopher's worth has to do with their ability to think critically about matters of truth, beauty, and goodness, and often this entails going against the social grain. I feel the space for individuality in thought and action is overwhelmed by the current social media fever.
At the same time, Steemit and content on the blockchain cannot be censored, so it also enables and protects all work and thought agnostically. (This "at the same time" is important -- there is something there to be thought....) It is quite incredible - I don't think this has ever been the case before. This is something completely new, an entirely new situation.
If I were someone who was kicked out of the most liberal of public universities because my views and actions supported and amplified that of protesting students - students protesting rising tuition fees, for example - I might find this to be a safe space.
There is something both unsettling and terribly exciting about this platform, don't you agree?