The youngest people in the society don’t understand that anything is even wrong. The rich folks have a vested interest in people being more afraid of foreigners and domestic terrorists than any government malfeasance. And the working class is so occupied with simple survival that they see no real opportunity to revolt… until something really falls off the rails, at which point the military moves in to suppress dissent with maximum bloodshed.
Eh, it depends on the author. I’ve seen a lot of modern Post-Apocalypse/Cyberpunk stuff make comedic quasi-self-references by way of media-within-the-media (A piece of modern literature in the Fallout setting describing a “dystopian” world in the self-proclaimed utopian Vaults, for instance).
But the point of the media-within-the-media is often to illustrate how we fixate on the drama of dystopia without acknowledging the banality of social evils.
1984 literally has a manifesto describing what’s happening.
In fact, the brainwashing of the kids in 1984 to report on their parents having / reading / discussing “controversial media” is a major element of the dystopia. Those media are not explicitly named, but I don’t think they have to be.
That’s a common trope in dystopian settings.
The youngest people in the society don’t understand that anything is even wrong. The rich folks have a vested interest in people being more afraid of foreigners and domestic terrorists than any government malfeasance. And the working class is so occupied with simple survival that they see no real opportunity to revolt… until something really falls off the rails, at which point the military moves in to suppress dissent with maximum bloodshed.
In those dystopia settings however, they never seem to have all the literature describing dystopia. We do here
Eh, it depends on the author. I’ve seen a lot of modern Post-Apocalypse/Cyberpunk stuff make comedic quasi-self-references by way of media-within-the-media (A piece of modern literature in the Fallout setting describing a “dystopian” world in the self-proclaimed utopian Vaults, for instance).
But the point of the media-within-the-media is often to illustrate how we fixate on the drama of dystopia without acknowledging the banality of social evils.
1984 literally has a manifesto describing what’s happening.
In fact, the brainwashing of the kids in 1984 to report on their parents having / reading / discussing “controversial media” is a major element of the dystopia. Those media are not explicitly named, but I don’t think they have to be.
I feel like this describes pretty much every western society since we moved beyond tribalism.
I don’t think tribalism was the apex of greatness people seem to think it was.