Centrist Dystopias

Recently remarking the way the YA boom that was so impressive in the early 21st century, and especially the early '10s, collapsed, I was mainly interested in the role of our digital devices, and especially that of the smart phone--the way the smart phone's proliferation had everyone carrying the whole package of entertainment options with them everywhere as a matter of course, not only providing more alternatives to reading, but being relatively inimical to reading, in situations where people used to get a lot of their reading done (commuting, flying, etc.); and this, perhaps, especially affecting the young, who may have been less accustomed to reading.

Still, I also thought the content being offered had distinct limits--and it seems to me worth enlarging on that now. Among much else I had in mind the dystopian scenarios we got. In Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry I used the term "centrist dystopias" to refer to them. At the time I used the term "centrist" in the more general way people use the term than I do now, to refer to a watery middle-of-the-road position--and "centrist dystopia" to mean a society that no one, at least no one anywhere near the mainstream of American political discourse (at least before these disgraceful last several years), would call anything but a deeply unattractive social order (Suzanne Collins' Panem, for example).

Even so, I still think the term applicable, reflecting as it does the essential features of centrism in the narrow sense--avoidance of deep and probing social analysis and criticism, an aversion to calls for change generally and virtual ruling out of anything but the smallest adjustments, a stress on agreement among those interests recognized as within the mainstream, with the same results that centrism produces, not least a shallowness about the conception.* (Yes, Panem is a horrible place. But why did we end up there? Of that she does not have much to say as compared with, for example, Jack London, George Orwell, Frederik Pohl and any number of other authors of really classic dystopias in their own works.) The result was that people could see what they wanted to--not just the center but right and left claiming it for themselves.

Considering all this it seems to me that (while this is not the only factor in the dystopia bubble's going bust) all of this has become less viable--for many reasons, but one of which is the tenor of politics, and especially the current and probably increasing level of of public polarization. If people were ready to accept centrist dystopias in the '00s and early '10s the wake of the presidential election of 2016, Qanon, Charlottesville, "Russigate," "1-06"--and pandemic, and full-blown major land war on NATO's doorstep as war brews at the other end of Eurasia, and so much else--I suspect watery "dystopia for everyone" will no longer do. Authors would seem less able to avoid taking some stance toward such events, and the developments behind them, rather than talking about a place that might be bad in some general way. Failing to do so the public is also likely to be less charitable to those who play it safe--thinking them cowardly and contemptible, or behind the evasions "on the other side," and feeling less charitable toward that, with all that means for those who do declare themselves, who get punished for doing so more severely than they would have been before. This may have factored into those who dared to play the game one way or the other having so much less less success, while those who were cannier about their careers opted not to play the game at all--save, perhaps, to continue milking some old success, as Suzanne Collins has done (with the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes a bestseller, and the inevitable film adaptation coming your way in November 2023).

* These days I use it to mean that tendency originating in mid-twentieth century Cold War anti-Communist conservatism stressing pragmatism, pluralism and the sustenance of "consensus" behind the existing social order.