Dystopia #

Dystopian sci-fi movies and TV shows portray an outcome of the world that is stark and oppressive, often violent. The oppression is in the form of stringent and overbearing rules and laws, and Power to rule over people lies in the hands of a select few people. The super-concentration of this power creates an atmosphere of extreme inequality and there is an undercurrent of despair in the collapsed civic society.

The movies that depict the dystopia are a mirror of the age when they are made. They reflect the societal fears, and the technological, political and cultural shifts of that time. These movies have a very simple premise - What if this continues, and takes that thread to a point in the future where all the worse things that can happen, have happened. Terminator, for example, was released when there were rapid advances in computers and robotics, accentuating the fear of robots taking over humanity. The Matrix showcases the digital revolution, and a growing sense of alienation in an increasingly virtual world.

Silos #

In the dystopian world of Silo, the gripping sci-fi web series, we are shown a society confined to an underground chamber, whose entire view of the world outside is limited to a single screen that only displays a desolated and uninhabitable world. And so, they put their heads down and work for the betterment of their Silo, because that’s the only “world” they have left. Truth, whatever it is, is a secret that is known only to a very few people at the top, and information and knowledge flows top-down at a very slow pace. Knowledge is further controlled by confining society to performing specific roles, causing fragmentation. No one can know the big picture.

So what exactly is a silo? This is how the Webster dictionary defines it.

Dad, are we nearly there yet? #

The fantastically villainous plot hatched by The Riddler in the superhero caper Batman Forever (1995), was campy and outlandish. The Riddler invents a device called The Box that beams television signals directly into people’s brains, allowing him to manipulate what they see, control how they think, and extract their thoughts and intelligence for himself.

Are these plots from the movies far fetched in reality? Do they really foretell a bleak future for humanity? Are we actually already on the path of one of these timelines that eventually takes us into a dystopian future? To answer some of these questions, we have to see if there is any weight to the anxieties that these future timelines stem from. Also, to adapt another quote, one man’s dystopia is another man’s reality. What looks like dystopia to one part of the population may be the actual reality for someone else in another part of the world.

Where you are in the world geographically, determines your reality. This is because the region, its history, the culture and current state of civic progress shapes up the core of the worldview of the population of that region. So what is a very mundane daily activity for one region of the world can be unheard of in another part of the world. It becomes difficult, then, to introspect at a civic level as a whole, and to see reality from an observer’s perspective, even with the modern advantage of internet communication. In fact, an overload of information and entertainment, which has led to the rise of the Dopamine Culture, actually adds another layer of reinforcement of this “reality”.

Different sets of population in different regions of the world living in their own reality, even via their virtual avatars online, is basically the blueprint of a silo. Although these may not have been formed or built by design, these vague outlines of silos do nevertheless exist. The silos depicted in the Apple TV series on the other hand, are hard, physical objects, with real people actually trapped inside with no way of knowing the reality outside except one single screen and no way out and finding out. It is, however, possible to draw some parallels with actual life.

In the next “chapter” in this Silos series, we dive into the land of fiction, and see for ourselves, reality from a character’s POV. Or is it dystopia already?

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