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Techno Dystopia
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A Sub-Trope to the Dystopia, a technological dystopia — that is, a dystopia caused by the introduction of new technology, not just one featuring it — is a Bad Future setting that isn't particularly crapsack. It looks nice and clean, and normal, and progressive — maybe even overly nice and fluffy. Robot servants wait on your every need, death is at an all-time low and everyone looks happy. Don't thank the robots and you'll be imprisoned for social rudeness. Death is not a way out. Nobody knows the truth, or Happiness Is Mandatory. Everything is monitored, and technology has replaced enough of interaction to give it unofficial control over the world (either literally or figuratively) so much that one update change or unfixed minor bug could shut a country down. And technology, a human invention, is one clever way to explore more of humanity's flaws and how we have brought this on ourselves. It's also a useful way to explore if this dystopia could, perhaps, be the world we are living in. It looks like Utopia, but computer says no. A twist on the setting is to discover that the humans being oppressed are actually some form of robot or synthetic life form, beginning a discussion on what makes a human. What usually makes it is that the people living there think this is the best the world can get when it's clearly designed for the audience to be appalled at the situation. It usually takes an Audience Surrogate outsider to enter the dystopia or get a knock on the head in order to start up La Résistance. Typically features the MegaCorp, AIs that are crapshoots, the 'i' aesthetic, and Killer Robots, often 20 Minutes into the Future. Compare Cyberpunk, a darker and grittier Sub-Trope which takes this concept and combines it with Film Noir-inspired aesthetics/themes. |
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The first season of Viper takes place in a dystopian tech noir setting. The day after tomorrow, society benefits from advanced communication technology and medical achievements such as fully artificial heart transplants. However, this comes at the cost of being constantly terrorized by the organized techno-mafia that closely runs the city behind the scenes. The police are often as corrupt as the criminals they're supposedly trying to stop, forcing the lead character to take the vigilante path in the hope of restoring the city to a brighter state. Throw in the fact that the local government may rob you of your own thoughts and memories if they decide they have a better use for you, and you start to see how bleak it really is. | |
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The Outer Limits (1995): In "Stasis", society is divided between the Elites and the considerably larger worker population, who are themselves split into the Alphas and the Betas. Fifty years earlier, the Stasis Initiative was introduced. It involves half of the worker population being placed in stasis for 72 hours at a time in order to conserve resources. Each Alpha has a Beta stasis partner who has the same job and lives in the same accommodation while their counterpart is in stasis. As such, each worker lives only half a life. The Elite, who are exempt from stasis, have developed into an aristocracy who suppress and persecute the workers. About 2% of the Elite are former workers, but they are no more than a Token Minority. Eric Waters, a Beta who is in love with an Alpha named Larissa Whitestone, is horrified when he discovers that the Elite intend to convert the Alphas into fuel in order to power the City. | |
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Anon (2018) takes place in a world without crime. Minds Eye records everything you do and uploads it to the cloud. Privacy is dead, everyone is monitored constantly, and everyone knows everything about people they just met. The dull expressions on citizens' faces are due to them being smartphone zombies dialed up. | |
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This Perfect Day depicts a communist technocratic dystopia controlled by a computer. In fact, it is revealed at the end that the computer is controlled by a programmer elite. | |
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Both the third and fourth seasons of Westworld take place outside the park after the majority of the cast left it. In Season 3, the outside world is controlled by an A.I. system called Rehoboam which gathers all of humanity's personal data and analyzes it to give the people directions on their future lives. Unfortunately, this takes a person's free will to choose what they want because they become too overly dependent on Rehoboam's prediction. Even if one aspires to progress, Rehoboam's prediction would tell them otherwise which would eventually lead the person to end their life. There are also people called outliers, who are considered unpredictable by the system, and they are rounded up and put into an AR therapy where they are reprogrammed into better members of society. Those outliers who failed the therapy are put into a cryogenic state. In Season 4, Charlotte Hale (who is a copy of Dolores) creates a utopia which took around 23 years to achieve, where the Hosts can freely do what they want while controlling humans with narratives, making them similar to the Hosts in the Delos parks. Unfortunately, Hale is unable to stop the outliers who are resistant to her plague and had been building resistance against her. It doesn't help that once a Host comes into contact with an outlier, they go into an existential crisis causing them to commit suicide. It turns out the Hosts killed themselves because they find Hale's utopia to be false and are unable to progress further which is why they begin to question the nature of their reality. |
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Of Mice and Mooshaber is set in a country that is only vaguely alluded to by names or background events. The state is controlled by dictator Albin Rappelschlund who governs the country nominally with support from the rightful ruler Duchess Augusta. The civilization and technology of the country appear advanced: there is metro, satellite transmission, television broadcasting, and flights to the Moon are common; however, this bizarrely contrasts with things like child labor, horse-drawn wagons, rural-like inns in the capital city or State Office for Suppressing and Annihilating Witchcraft. People fear everything and cannot trust one another. | |
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Brazil is set in a repressive totalitarian society in an Ambiguous Time Period "somewhere in the 20th century". The society and its technological infrastructure are decaying, and this is a big part of the plot. For example, simple mistakes like a bug getting squashed on a form result in the state executing innocent civilians instead of the rebel freedom fighters they are after. Huge ducts invade every restaurant and home. Electronic surveillance is everywhere, but despite the high tech level, nothing works right, everything is decaying, decrepit or just gross, and the information is tightly controlled by those in power in a Vast Bureaucracy so absurdly disorganized, incompetent and committed to pretending any issues that pop up are some other department's problem that not even they have a clue of what the hell is going on. | |
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Star Trek: This pops up on occasion. The most notable example of the original series is probably "A Taste of Armageddon", in which a planet tries to make war more civilized by calculating an appropriate number of casualties and having them "voluntarily" step into death chambers. The point seems to be that technology can solve social problems, but not without a fundamentally human touch. | |
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Black Mirror is an anthology series that explores the nasty consequences associated with the use and abuse of technology and most of the episodes are set in future worlds of this sort. The most notable example is "Fifteen Million Merits", in which people live underground, having to ride exercise bicycles to generate energy, while television literally rules the society. "Nosedive" has what is basically a Facebook dystopia. Be sure to like everyone whose business you appreciate — because if you don't, their reputation is at stake, and poor reputation means they can be barred from travel options, lose their job or house, or basically become an outcast! |
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Superman: In pre-Crisis days, Brainiac's homeworld of Colu started out like this. They'd had a Robot War, and the robots won. The "Computer Tyrants of Colu" built Brainiac as their agent and sent him out into space, but he eventually returned home to find that the organic population had successfully revolted and regained control of their planet, subverting this trope. As for Brainiac, this just meant his bosses were dead and he was now free to be a self-directed spacefaring super villain all on his own. | |
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Dollhouse: Two episodes are set in the year 2019 after the show's technology had been used to transfer the rich into younger bodies permanently. The situation snowballed until the city was reduced to a state of total anarchy, some people going insane and others getting kidnapped for their bodies. Then it became possible to deploy the technology on a mass scale, and countries started mind-wiping each other's population centers for fear that it would happen to them first. The moral of the story is that advanced technology will be abused by the powerful. | |
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Lord of the World shows Western civilization as having turned into a technologically advanced socialist society that persecutes the Christian faithful and attempts to stamp out Christianity once and for all. | |
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Brave New World takes place in a hyper-advanced society known as the World State, a Totalitarian Utilitarian False Utopia bent on maximizing happiness as much as possible. However, by doing so, it forced humanity into genetically engineered castes subjected to conditioning and constantly drugged and entertained so that they will remain content doing the duties in their respective castes. The humanity of this era also worships Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line and thus the indirect founder of the World State's technocratic culture. | |
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Earth-838 in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has a futuristic version of Manhattan, complete with botany growing everywhere and flying cars. However, Word of God states that George Orwell was a major inspiration for this universe, with an authoritarian Illuminati watching over the world and "Memory Lane" stores allowing for authorities to scan memories a la Minority Report. | |
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In Agent G, "Black Technology" is used to monitor the populace and empower cyborg enforcers to enforce the will of powerful corporations while keeping the public unaware. Eventually, the Black Technology all gets out and the setting transitions to being a full-blown Cyberpunk dystopia. | |
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Doctor Who: A few episodes have done this. The show first runs the "sadness is illegal" schtick in "The Happiness Patrol", perhaps most memorable for featuring a homicidal robot made of candy. The above theme is revisited in "Smile", in which robots designed to help humans decide that the best way to cure sadness is to kill the person — they recognize that human sadness is never gone as long as the person lives. The way they recognize sadness, though, is through outward behavior, so humans are trapped in having to behave like Stepford Smilers all the time to avoid being murdered. Eventually, the Doctor disconnects the robots but doesn't find it humane to destroy them, and so tells the new humans to negotiate with them. However, the robots are self-learning, and so it's almost guaranteed that they'll develop the same pattern of "literally destroy sadness" again. |
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In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Coney the Island's home planet seems to have been in the process of becoming one of these when he left, eons ago. | |
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Crackdown's setting is unique in that it has three different flavors of dystopia, each just as crapsack as the next. Do you prefer the "Lawless gangland hell, with lots of crumbling infrastructure" flavor? Check out La Mugre (eng. The Dirt). Is the "Bleak communist dictatorship with everything run by the mob"-flavored dystopia more your style? The Den has you covered. Or maybe you're more the "Hi-tech cyberpunk dystopia with everything (and everyone) owned, enforced and manipulated by an absurdly powerful MegaCorp" type? Look no further than The Corridor. Even more high-tech cyberpunk dystopia ruled by immortal killing machines? The Agency itself. Crackdown 3 manages to top all of the previous with a supervillain whose first assault on the world destroys the electrical network across the entire world with Unobtainium-powered electro-magnetic pulse missiles that last for years, throwing the rest of the world into a dark age while putting herself on a pedestal as the only hope for humanity, all while her cutting-edge systems are secretly run by Mad Scientists who use the influx of refugees as test subjects. It gets so bad that one of the above groups are the heroes of this game. | |
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The world of Transmetropolitan seems to be a subverted dystopia, with the initially filthy and crapsack future setting being revealed as essentially the same as today, just with the volume turned up by technology and increased the population. Though some of the modern world's problems have been defeated (pollution has ceased to be an issue, for example), it's clear that the influence of technology has crowded the world and drowned out human kindness. | |
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The 2056 juncture of Feng Shui is equal parts Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Buro government monitors its citizens constantly, same-race relationships are frowned upon at best as "racist" and punished at worst, guns and kung fu are outlawed, it's a crime to be unhappy, all TV (except for advertising) is pay-per-view, you can't get ahead unless you work for the Buro, and the only thing worse than falling into the Public Order (2056's brutal police) machine is letting the Bureau of Happiness and Productivity get hold of you — Mind Rape is the absolute kindest term for what these guys do to people. That's not even mentioning the CDCA (the group responsible for arcanowave technology and the Abominations) and the creepifying horrors that they get up to. | |
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Psycho-Pass takes place in a technologically advanced country where bio-monitors check and calculate (using the criminal-prediction Sybil System) for potential criminals, sending hit squads of regulated criminals with laser guns to kill off serial killers. Sounds safe yet awesome — except these potential criminals are usually just random citizens who have had a bad day and began questioning the system that rules over every single facet of their life with constant surveillance and more drones than people. The main antagonists are criminal masterminds whose psychological profiles are undetectable by the system, allowing them to legally get away with murder and corruption because it would expose the flaws in security. As they game away and reveal how depraved and schizophrenic 'sane' humans can be without any freedom or responsibility in their lives,note as seen when a hacking exploit allows a murderer to get away with stabbing a woman to death in broad daylight; due to a broken police sensor, the other citizens are incapable of realizing that this is an actual crime, and even post it on social media the Sybil System freaks out and enforces totalitarian edicts to keep order and look competent, effectively killing some of the people it is supposed to protect. The icing on the cake is the insanity programmed into the very core of the Sybil System as an intentional insult to justice itself: it's actually made of human brains wired together, and a core requirement to be selected for brain harvesting is the ability to commit crimes without being detectable by others (criminally asymptomatic), with textbook psychopaths taking up the core of the system's leaders. | |
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