The four pillars of dystopia—the elements shared by 1984 and Brave New World—are totalitarian power, mass surveillance, manipulation through control of information, and dehumanization. In fiction, the convergence of all these pillars produces complete works that are ideal for cinematic adaptation. But when fiction catches up with reality, it may already be too late.
In today’s world, even History, from which we are supposed to draw lessons to avoid the mistakes and excesses of the past, is becoming obsolete. Because the situation we are living through is unprecedented in so many respects.
Who could have imagined that the celebrations of an American President’s birthday would include an MMA octagon on the grounds of the White House? Who could have anticipated a Red Bull-style motocross show in front of the Oval Office? As one anonymous American commentator remarked with a mix of irony and cynicism on X (formerly Twitter), the scenario resembles an epic from Ancient Rome, with the emperor staging games in his own honour at the Colosseum after concluding a war with Persia. Yet this analogy does nothing to lessen the absurdity of a production that even Hollywood has never scripted.
But the most troubling aspect is not this latest eccentricity of Donald Trump, which is merely the visible tip of the iceberg monopolizing media attention. What is truly unsettling is what has become latent and constant across large parts of societies around the world.
Powers and elites with unmistakable totalitarian overtones are multiplying, and one cannot help but observe the nihilism they increasingly display. In France, close to home, the divide between the far right and the far left has become so deep that sooner or later one will overwhelm the other in a political tidal wave that will spare none of those who believe it cannot happen.
Because the ideas with which the masses are being fed, and the whole snakes we swallow in front of our screens, have never been so nauseating. Racial theories disguised as anti-immigration discourse; toxic masculinism emerging as a reaction to the #MeToo movement and nearly a century of struggle for women’s rights; paedocriminality, whose institutionalized scale and judicial leniency are being uncovered simultaneously; the Epstein affair, which has produced no convictions—all of this contributes to the same outcome. A process of dehumanization that, slowly but surely, leads us to accept the unthinkable.
At the very moment when social media and the phones grafted to our fingers bombard us with a volume of images and information unprecedented in human history, our reactions and our capacity for action are diminishing. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perhaps the clearest demonstration that propaganda, manipulation and indoctrination ultimately anaesthetize their audience, which no longer feels what it should feel, caught between entertainment, football and marketing content that make us forget our condition as slaves to modernity.
In this context, where the unthinkable is becoming the norm, one almost finds oneself hoping that extraterrestrials might intervene in our affairs. At least that scenario remains more ambiguous than the prospect of our societies, our minds and our souls being taken over by an artificial intelligence to which only its creators—hiding away in their survivalist bunkers—would (perhaps) not be subject.
The revolution will not be televised…
Zouhair Yata
