Before the subreddit was created in January 2016, there was a Facebook group of the same name.
The group was founded by the late philosopher Mark Fisher, the very person who originally coined the term "boring dystopia."
However, Fisher, widely known as the author of the cult classic Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, told Vice that the group "wasn't that well thought-out at the start" and that he hadn’t done anything like this before.
As a result, he closed it in November 2015. But apparently, the internet needed such a space.
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Originally, Fisher had noticed a common theme in pictures he shared on Facebook and wondered if it could be developed into a group.
"It was understood from the start to be a consciousness-raising exercise, encouraging people to perceive the actual state of Britain rather than the PR state," he said in December 2015, a month after he shut down the group and before the inception of the subreddit. "Which is surprisingly hard, because there's this mixture of Silicon Valley ideology, PR, and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have. Which is just all these crap robots..."
"Crap robots" were a common theme on his Facebook group. One typical post included a photograph of a broken vending machine, with a note attached to it saying, "The light inside has broken but I still work."
"It’s Californian ideology without Californian sunshine, isn’t it?” Fisher asked rhetorically.
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To many of the three thousand members the group had, it's content was mainly entertainment, but it also served to illustrate "hauntology," the term Fisher used to describe the sense of a lost future—in this case, one where machines enhance, rather than hinder, our lives.
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According to a new survey from book publisher The Folio Society, around 26 percent of American men and 14 percent of women feel like they are already living in a dystopia.
At the same time, only one-third of Americans believe the nation has a functioning democracy, and younger people were increasingly convinced that democracy had failed in the U.S.
Americans are particularly concerned over free speech (60 percent) and government surveillance of personal and family finances (45 percent).
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