Word: dystopia
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More troubling, from a philosophic standpoint, is the theme of DYSTOPIA that runs like a bad trip through the cyberpunk world view. Gibson's fictional world is filled with glassy-eyed girls strung out on their Walkman-like SIMSTIM DECKS and young men who get their kicks from MICROSOFTS plugged into sockets behind their ears. His brooding, dehumanized vision conveys a strong sense that technology is changing civilization and the course of history in frightening ways. But many of his readers don't seem to care. "History is a funny thing for cyberpunks," says Christopher Meyer, a music-synthesizer designer...
...that scientific advances had also produced better engines of death and destruction turned speculation about the future excessively sour. Bellamy's radiant city became the high-tech slave societies of Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We and Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis. Aldous Huxley perfected the notion of dystopia in 1932 with Brave New World, and George Orwell weighed in with his haunting classic...
...only 50 years ago? How touching our grandfathers' faith in the future seems, in our day of acid rain, exploding shuttles, decaying inner cities and general creeping dystopia. The mood is epitomized in objects like the male costume of the future dreamed up for Vogue -- a bearded figure in an immaculate white jumpsuit wearing a circular antenna as a halo on his head, John the Baptist among the insulators. Everything is streamlined, even objects that are screwed down and cannot move, so that America's breathless rush toward Utopia is clearly signified by things like a 1933 Raymond Loewy metal...
...muffled, submerged so far in the paint that it hardly works as allegory. Winters does not want to make his images specific: "I want them to trigger multiple readings, so that they somehow function above and below language, not exactly on the line." But some of his titles, like Dystopia (the reverse of Utopia: a failed society), 1985, leave no doubt that rumination on the human order is meant...
...publication that accompanies this show indicates, by the time the '60s rolled round, cars were no longer seen as shuttles to paradise. They had become villains responsible for turning America into a dystopia. Autos were described as gas guzzlers, road eaters, monsters that plunder the countryside. They had brought about a nation scarred with billboards, motels and drive-in restaurants, banks and even churches. When Joni Mitchell sang, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," millions of listeners joined in the chorus...