Would you believe me if I tell you that we’re already living in a society with Dystopia?
For most of us, our mornings begin not by strolling in a garden but by scrolling through these :
Our entire day consists of a bunch of screens in front of our eyes constantly feeding us information, whether we want it or not.
‘Ok, but how does this have anything to do with a Dystopian Reality?, Isn’t Dystopia about suppression and tyranny?’ you ask.
Well, yes, it is.
Precisely, Oxford defines ‘Dystopia’ as an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice.We can say that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.
So, how is this Dystopia related to you scrolling through memes? To answer this,
Let us dig a little deeper into what a Dystopia consists of:-
In Dystopian societies, they often use propaganda to control society’s citizens.
At the same time, propaganda entitled as ‘organised misinformation.’
The recent Tanishq advertisement controversy is a perfect example of this. Trolls trended #boycottTanishq based on the absolute misinformation promoting ‘Love Jihad.’
Todays’ world often use technology as a method of surveillance and control.
Am I the only one who is creeped out by the sheer amount of personal information Google collects based on our search history and more?
If this wasn’t enough, the recent CBI probing of Deepika Padukone’s texts
shows us that perhaps Whatsapp is not as ‘end to end encrypted’ as it
says.
There is little to no freedom of speech or opinion, and access to information is restricted even if it may not seem that way.
While claiming that We, as a society, have reached this point may not be accurate and seem a bit too far-fetched. It must be pointed out that our Right To Information (RTI) Act is gradually heading towards its inevitable death.
Our world today has a chilling resemblance to the world Bradbury created in his critically acclaimed Fahrenheit 451.
The book depicts a dark future where ‘firemen’ have graduated from saving cats to torching books in an attempt to silence any troubling ideas. Beatty, captain of the firemen, describes this change -how media’s been reduced from cumbersome novels to “the gag, the snap ending.” “One column, two sentences, a headline! Then mid-air, all vanishes…Just like that, we consume and forget and consume again. Rinse, wash, repeat. The mind drinks less and less” Soon; people also became addicts, conditioned to feel pleasure from frivolous content.
Anything thought-provoking became downright painful. As a result, people censored themselves from any challenging ideas. They sought to be pacified, numbed and validated– soundbites, factoids, and vapid drama blaring out any troubling ideas.
It was blaring out reality.
They just want to continue watching and scrolling and watching and scrolling and watching and scrolling…
So what happened next?
In Fahrenheit 451, the Government stepped in, encouraged everyone to remain in the bubble, and torched any stragglers – sometimes literally.
Now the question is what is expecting for us and our posterity as well.
Written by Sameen Husain.