Delayed Dystopia
Dystopian thrillers seem to be all the rage these days. Whether it is on TV, in the movies, or in books, it seems like there is no shortage of stories set in some kind of future where things are pretty horrible. More often than not in many of these scenarios, there is one defining moment that leads up to the aforementioned dystopia. Nuclear war, a pandemic, zombie uprising, I think we have heard just about every viable situation for the world being thrown into chaos.
Then something happened the other day and it got me thinking:
"What if dystopia doesn't happen all at once, but slowly over time so we don't even realize it is happening?
You're going to laugh, but it was actually something really benign that lead me down this path of though. Although, looking at the world today, it probably isn't too hard to find different things that might make you feel like things are going to hell. Like I said though, for me it was something small, probably inconsequential for many of you, but my brain is funny like that.
I think it's important to point out that dystopian doesn't always mean the world is in ruins. According to Google, dystopian fiction:
"portrays imagined, futuristic societies characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian regimes, environmental disaster, or technological control, serving as a cautionary reflection of real-world anxieties."
Which leads me to what triggered all of this. I know a lot of you don't watch the news. That is totally understandable, there isn't a lot of joy out there right now, and given how "spun" the information is, you don't know what you can trust and what you can't. Despite my knowing this, I still have a tendency to watch the news.
I do have a preferred network that I tend to watch, but that isn't really important for this post for reasons I will explain in just a second.
So I was watching the news the other day and I noticed at the bottom of the screen there was this scrolling ticker running across it. Things like that aren't uncommon, we often see them on ESPN and FOX Sports with updated scores, or on most news channels with updated news stories. However, this one was a bit different.
Instead of news stories or sports scores, it was a Kalshi feed that was listing the bets that were currently being made on the outcomes of real world events.
I'm not really familiar with the Kalshi or Polymarket sites. I don't have an account on either of them and the idea of prediction markets in general are kind of foreign to me, but it really struck me as I saw the numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
As I said, it felt like something from the future as I watched it happening, but not the good future, more like The Hunger Games or Running Man. It's interesting that we have found ourselves in a world where betting on outcomes of world events has gained enough attention that it is important enough to scroll across the bottom of both the major news networks now.
I'm not judging you if you have a Kalshi account. I hope it has been working out well for you. Whether Kalshi or some other prediction market is "right or wrong" isn't the point of this post. I have a couple sports betting accounts, so I am definitely not one to judge.
Actually, it's interesting I bring up sports betting, because in case you haven't noticed, they also list the odds when talking about upcoming contests even on ESPN.
Like I said, I'm not judging, it's just interesting how pervasive things like this have become. If you watch the news, maybe you haven't even noticed it, and I think that is what really led me to the opening of this post. What if dystopia doesn't happen all at once, but it's a slow progression that eventually leads to the kind of wasteland we have become familiar with. AI, futures projection, social media, plus any number of other little things that are slowly driving us towards the brink of nothingness...
What do you think? Let's talk about it in the comments! Am I being overly dramatic, channeling my childhood chicken little?
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I really think the slow crawl is way scarier than a big bomb. We just wake up one day and the news is a gambling app, i never noticed the kalshi ticker but now i wont be able to unsee it. Its like we are betting on our own doom. We are basically watching life like a reality show now. I wonder what the next "small" change will be. I think about this a lot. We are so used to tech control and ads that we dont even feel the "horrible" part anymore. It just feels normal. I like how u define dystopia. It isnt always ruins. Sometimes it is just losing our humanity to a scrollin ticker. Scary stuff but great write up. Deep thoughts for today. Not dramatic at all.
Thank you! That's exactly it when you say we are watching life like a reality show. It's getting crazy!
I think you are exactly right, that's its a slow progression. No atrocity is ever committed in a single act. Its always a series of small steps. Each step resets the baseline of what people perceive as normal.
Yes, that is very true. It's quite scary when you really start thinking about it!
Totally.
We've been slow burning our way towards 1984 since it was written.
It seems so!
I was thinking something similar. I am one of those people that resists it as much as I can but they get you anyway. The biometrics being everywhere is something that annoys me. The other day at a hospital they wanted me to scan my fingerprint for their records and I refused. They kind of blue screened on me like not understanding why I wouldn't want to hand over my fingerprints to a private hospital.
They also made me fill out a bunch of information completely unrelated to my procedure - I was there for an eye exam. On the "address" portion of the form and phone number I put bogus information... for address I wrote "you don't need to know this" and it was funny because when I got my printout at the end it had a fake name, a fake phone number and someone actually typed in "you don't need to know this" for the address field. I sincerely hope it was just scanned and that an actual human didn't type that in but it made me chuckle anyway.
Idiocracy is already here, we are just missing the great garbage avalanches 😀
They are dangerous. A lot of back country garbage skiers carry emergency beacons in case they get caught in a garbage avalanche.
I am pretty sure we are sliding slowly into dystopia now. I welcome being nuked (I want the second one to fall on my house - so I can see the first) because then it is over. But this slide over the edge means that we are going to slowly boil in our own misery.
Yes, it's not going to be an all of a sudden thing I don't think.
I'm amazed by how accurately these prediction markets actually can be—way more accurate than polls. It's crazy because Joe Rogan just brought up this very same topic on his last couple of podcasts. He said there was a multi-generational study in California that concluded in the last few decades we've gone from a 1-in-10,000 autism diagnoses to 1-in-12 people today. One in every twelve people now are considered to be on the autism spectrum. Although alarming, he and some of his guests wondered if autism could actually be a superpower, giving people the ability to stay hyper-focused on things that interest them. This, combined with so many human infertility issues, as well as changes to our physical form lead them to believe that merging with AI/Robots might be our next destined evolutionary step. It could be written into our DNA already and we're just making it happen through our own technological innovation. That's super weird to think about very unsettling but they made a convincing argument for it.
Well, since it is a spectrum, aren't we all autistic? ;D
I'd guess I'm somewhere on that spectrum. : ) If I'm concentrating on something the world melts away.
That's definitely an interesting theory! I can't say as though I have heard that before. Part of me wonders if they are just better able to identify it now. I am sure my wife would have some interesting thoughts on that hypothesis!
Joe wondered that as well, if the increase in diagnoses wasn't somehow connected to all the fraud going on. I'd be interested to learn her thoughts on it!
!pimp
Now we're betting on future events? Here we come Running Man! I guarantee our world today would be considered completely dystopian to the founding fathers of the nation. They never meant for the government to be as big as powerful as it is, but the world is also a lot more complicated that it was 250 years ago... Dystopia may be a slow process like you said, and I think we are heading that general direction as a society. It's sad, but it does seem to be where we are headed...
I liked the simple days back when we grew up, the world seemed so much simpler back then didn't it?
It did seem simpler back then, but we also didn't have nearly as many responsibilities as we do now, so who really knows.
That Kalshi ticker on the news feels like something straight out of a dystopian plot, except it’s real.
For sure!
Rome didn't collapse in a day. It was a process. I think what you feel in your gut is very real. Nothing stays the same. Empires rise and fall. Civilizations collapse. Weren't the Dark Ages a kind of apocalypse?
Yes, that is probably quite true!