#2 There’s No Hate Like Christian “Love”
#3 Explained Nice And Simple
In case you've never heard of "boring dystopia" before, the term was coined by the late British academic and cultural theorist Mark Fisher in 2015. It refers to the bland and mildly coercive signs that flourish in a late-stage capitalist society, which give out pervasive feelings of unease, discontent, and isolation.
That same year, Fisher started a Facebook group that documented these signs as a way to become more aware of the world around us. Members got the chance to share pictures of rarely seen England and the page quickly filled with eerie images of broken machinery, ragged shop signs, and cameras closely monitoring decaying streets.
The group brought together examples of "Silicon Valley ideology, PR and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have." All of this was accompanied by a description: "Neoliberal England is a boring dystopia. Here's why."
#4 Flawless Logic
#6 Is This Signs Of A Healthy Economy?
"[The group] wasn't that well thought-out at the start, to be honest," Fisher said in an interview with Vice. "I'd never done a Facebook group before." See, he shut down the community when he noticed it started to become like any other group on the platform.
"It was just recirculating 'content' and sending links, keeping people inside what I would call capitalist cyberspace instead of looking outside at their own environment. It felt like it was reinforcing the condition it was intended to displace," Fisher explained. Although many felt it was an untimely end for the popular group, 'A Boring Dystopia' sprung up in its wake soon after. The subreddit was created in 2016 and has already amassed over 750k devoted members eagerly waiting for the newest posts.
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"Boring Dystopia was partly about the fact that no one can care about stuff any more," said Fisher. "It's not that they don't care, but in a city like London, or any intensely pressured urban metropolis — add to that the pressures of capitalist cyberspace and people just feel like they perpetually have no time."
"Our resources for caring are depleted, and that has aesthetic consequences," he added.
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Previously, we reached out to Macon Holt, Ph.D., a researcher at Copenhagen Business School and author of Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, to learn more about this phenomenon. According to him, "boring dystopia" is related to another term introduced by Fisher — "capitalist realism". He used it to describe "the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable form of the political, social and cultural organization following the end of the cold war."
"Boring dystopia is more about the aesthetic experience of living in capitalist realism at a point in time when the system appears ever more unsustainable (ecologically, [politically], and in terms of increasing inequality and decreasing standards of living) but in which no other way to organize society has emerged," Holt told Bored Panda.
Although we may imagine a dystopian future similar to exciting movies like Blade Runner or The Matrix from the '80s and '90s that offered depictions of going out with a bang, it is more likely to consist of mundane scenarios. "As the years in which those images came around, none of the dreams or nightmares came true," Holt said.
"Instead, space travel is becoming the hobby of billionaires while they ignore the ecological crises they could perhaps help with, AI and robots seem either to be surveilling us while they vacuum or when we click on a link, and the VR worlds of the metaverse are just ways to charge us more rent for spaces that we can't actually occupy."
#16 Indeed
#18 America Is The Best Country In The World!
While this list involves some of the most evident examples of boring dystopia, Holt mentioned bureaucracy is also a common one. "Like the terms of a rental contract that forbid tenants to use cooking oil on the stove, so a landlord can keep the deposit if a single drop is found on the extractor fan hood."
"NFTs are perhaps a good example of boring dystopia," he continued. "If a sci-fi writer were to dream up a situation in which people paid the money they had earned doing actual work for a certificate of verification that they own a .jpeg of a bored ape, their editor would probably say the world the story depicted would be too depressing to publish."
