Since the 15th century, humans have been captivated by the idealism of achieving world peace and to live in a place of pure bliss where, “[…] all citizens are equal – rights, property, privilege – […] all sources of envy and conflict are eliminated; desires are satisfied because no unreasonable desires develop.” The tradition of utopian fiction dates as far back as Thomas More’s 1551 Utopia , inspiring many variations on the theme. “In the twentieth century dystopia becomes the predominant expression of the utopian ideal, mirroring the colossal failures of totalitarian collectivism,” causing a shift in the utopian paradigm. Dystopia began as a response to utopian literature but the aftermath of the First World War, the economic recession, and the emergence of the first totalitarian regimes gave European writers the inclination to reflect the new bleak perspective that society now had on the future. The world witnessed the horrors of genocide and war, which provided material for writers. Thus, the genre of dystopia became anti-utopia. Their works began to imagine joyless and oppressed future societies full of hegemony, conditioning, brainwashing, surveillance and lack of freedom, a ‘negative utopia’ or rather, a dystopia.
Dystopian Literature consists of a society with, “Eugenic caste systems and ‘designer children’, the dissolution of the self under constant surveillance, a paranoid geo-politics in which state and corporate power become indistinguishable.” From literary fiction to social and political criticism to cinematic adaptations, it appears that Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s imagined societies not only permeated political discourse and popular culture of the twentieth century, but transcended into the 21st century along with new novels inspired by the two greatest canonical works in the dystopian genre. The hi-tech social engineering experiment of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1927), the paranoid surveillance state of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) shaped the twentieth century political imagination and as a result, a modern, familiar 21st century utopian dystopia The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013). “It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984.” It is a novel, which foregrounds the theme of human oppression and surveillance as a medium to achieve, maintain and grow power within a society.
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The ‘father of dystopian literature’ is H. G. Wells and his dystopian collection, which led to Huxley’s Brave New World (1923), Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale (1986) – all of which are the most renowned works of the genre. “Science fiction isn’t limited to predicting tech developments: It’s more broadly concerned with imagining possible futures, or alternative presents.” Author Orson Scott Card says on science fiction “thought experiments”: “We have to think of them so that if the worst does come, we’ll already know how to live in that universe.” The twentieth dystopian writers critiqued the methods of manipulation and surveillance offering a relevant insight into modern yet familiar forms of control such as capitalism. This theme remains relevant even in the 21st century, inspiring television shows such as Black Mirror.
There are various forms of oppression that totalitarian regimes use to manipulate their citizens into obedience, but in a world where technology is advancing more rapidly every day, this project is focused on how technology is used to control people by the government or state. “Without resisting the idea that technology is inherently progressive, we will only reinscribe this logic of power at the cost of more human lives.” Since 1930s and 1940s, technology has changed radically and at a pace where we cannot control meaning that its limitations are unknown to humans. Literature is usually a reflection of the society at the time it was written, and each work displays that in its contents representing the views of technology by society throughout time.
This essay seeks to analyse how various forms of systematic technological manipulation can force individuals and masses into obedience. It will primarily focus on comparing two diametrically opposite approaches; one of them basing on oppressive methods such as surveillance that induce fear, the other encouraging will and consent through conditioning. Both essentially lead to oppression, but the process and implications are different.
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