21th Century’s New Dystopian Imaginary. From George Orwell to Black Mirror. From Big Brother to Big Data
20th Century’s dystopian predictions have become object of a recent revisitation. Donald Trump’s election in the United States of America, the several xenophobic and ultra-nationalist threats emerging in different geographical and political contexts, populism phenomena, as well as excessive surveillance, counter-information, and the so-called “fake news” have drawn attention to some dystopian portrays conceived in the 20th Century which are now being considered an appropriate depiction of democracy and political communication’s new pathologies.
The Huffington Post has published a text by Christian Fuchs examining Donald Trump’s leadership style from the perspective of Theodor Adorno’s worldview on authoritarian personality. The Guardian has turned to the Frankfurt School to analyze the now famous “alt-right” connected with Steve Bannon’s name. Neil Postman’s essays have been recurrently referred around and about surveillance studies. The New York Review of Books has included essays speculating on which book best-anticipated new forms of political intervention within media context, after phenomena such as fake news and the infamous post-truth: would it be George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? These two classics registered substantial increases in sales and popularity. The George Orwell essays on language were mentioned, in traditional press, following the phenomena of media manipulation. Cinephile memory was evoked alluding to films such as King Vidor’s The Crowd. Finally, televised fiction itself has inaugurated a string of quality series pointing to a dystopian depiction of contemporary political communication, having Mr. Robot and Black Mirror as two of the most manifest examples.