Lazy Dystopia

If your political theory requires humanity to "evolve", then you do not have a theory.... you have a dream.

-A.E. Samaan

I caught up on a couple Black Mirror episodes. 

My big pet peeve is how dystopian worlds are super lazily created these days. There’s little thought to how or why the world got this way and how it became sustainable. It’s usually some big conspiracy group that created it. There’s a reason dystopian fictions are so common while utopias are so rare. It reminded me of parallels to running a business. 

It’s easier to imagine ways things will go wrong. It’s easy to be a naysayer, to come up with a million ways something will fail. What’s rare is figuring out ways in which something will succeed. This translates to everywhere in life. Before giving a speech, before playing a recital, before playing a game-- there truly are a million ways to imagine failing all of these. There are ways to succeed, but they’re far fewer and harder to imagine. The number of little things that cause total failure seems so high.

People use the same analogy when running a business. There are so many little things that can sink a business… in reality, that’s false. I’ve seen numerous businesses succeed despite their incompetencies in tons of areas. They could be completely wrong on huge bets. It’s not ideal, but in business, it’s ok. It’s part of running a business. Amazon can spend billions on the Amazon Fire Phone as long as AWS or ecommerce keeps working, Google can invest tens of thousands of developer hours in Google+ and Google Wave as long as Adwords keeps working, Facebook can go all in on HTML 5 as long as they have a basic app. The truth is, you can fuck things up badly as long as you get the core things right. And you will fuck things up badly. There’s no way around it. Every great company and every great investor has made huge mistakes. Berkshire Hathaway is the namesake of a textile company Buffet failed to run profitably. Odeo was a failed podcasting service that became Twitter. Burbn failed which became Instagram. Your mistakes don’t define you, the way you learn from and grow from your mistakes defines you. Never stop swinging.

It’s easy to make fun of blind optimism. We make fun of the people who think things are going to work out when they clearly aren’t. There’s truth on both sides. We shouldn’t be blindly optimistic, and we also shouldn’t shit on every grand vision. But that still isn’t right… that’s not the recipe for success. You need blind optimism to succeed, AND you need ruthless realism to iterate to succeed. You need both of these things at the same time. They are counter to each other, but they are necessary for success. 

I’ve heard investors make fun of founders for saying they’ve drank too much of their own koolaid or had a bit too much fairy dust. This may be true, but drinking the koolaid is a recipe for success as long as they have a force to balance them out. Someone in charge needs to be self aware of the discrepancy of the fairy dust vs the harsh reality of the path to get there.

So why are dystopias so common? For one, conflict is the core of any story. Without conflict, there’s no story. Dystopias provide conflict by their nature. The world is built in a way that is fundamentally unfair, so it’s easy to pit the protagonist against this dystopian world and the powers that sustain the dystopia. This makes dystopias simple and straightforward to write about. They keep the story simple. Utopias are perfect so there isn’t a way for the protagonist to fight against the existing power structures. 

But conflict can exist inside utopia. Watching The Good Place made me think of how complicated an actual Heaven would be. How would you design Heaven? If you can do anything, anytime you want, wouldn’t you get bored? There needs to be some sort of conflict… funny enough, the boredom itself is a conflict. In non-heaven utopias, there will still be interpersonal conflicts, conflicts with outside forces, e.g. governments or extraterrestrials. Conflicts over how to deal with moral issues and what the rules should be and why. There are always edge cases to explore. This leads me to believe there are countless stories to be told about and inside utopias. What’s hard is building a world that is a utopia. Star Trek is a world told more from the utopic side. Humans mostly figured out how to stop war among themselves. The conflicts exist between humans and other species who give into their baser instincts. 

Humans in Star Trek stories are often tested to see if they can uphold their rules and morals in the face of extreme difficulty. Do they act with integrity even when integrity handicaps them in a fight they know is important to win? It reminds me of the movie Unthinkable. The movie is extremely uncomfortable because it forces the audience to side with one side, having to deal with the moral consequences. Neither side is fully correct, and they both feel wrong. But you have to choose one. It’s a world in which we know one side is ultimately right and the other is wrong, but the decision of what the right side does is extremely difficult.

There’s currently a dearth of utopian fiction. There aren’t any The Jetsons families. This may be due to people’s current negative perception of technology. We’re spending more time than ever on our phones and on our computers. We’re constantly connected and aware of how others are living their lives. When we see stars on private jets and vacationing in exotic locales, it makes most of us feel shitty in comparison. Life is relative. 

Even though we all know that wealth doesn’t bring more happiness, it’s hard to separate the two. We should showcase worlds in which we’re all rich and get whatever we want on the material side. Show how parts of life are easier, but it doesn’t increase happiness. Show how internal conflicts and interpersonal relationships matter most. Maybe it’ll help us concentrate on the important things.