The term "dystopia" derives from the Greek dys (bad, negative) and topos (place), and was first used by John Stuart Mill in 1868, in a speech to the House of Commons. Although the concept only fully established itself between the 19th and 20th centuries, dystopian elements can be found in earlier works. The French Revolution had already demonstrated how utopian projects of total regeneration could degenerate into extreme forms of violence and oppression. But let's take it slowly and examine together—in this last article of the mini-series on seriality—its evolution and characteristics.

Index

Birth and types of Dystopia

Even before modern codification, Swift's satire in Gulliver's Travels (1726) staged imaginary societies that reflected on the excesses of British power, science, and morality, anticipating many of the themes that would become central to twentieth-century dystopias. And as already mentioned, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein not only inaugurates a new relationship between man and technology, but shows how the promise of a better world can easily turn into a nightmare.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, modern dystopia is organized along three main lines—political, technological, and environmental— as reconstructed by Muzzioli (2021). These lines are never rigidly separated, but constitute a network of concerns that reflects the way in which society and the cultural industry have narrated, over time, the dangers of progress.

Political Dystopia: Totalitarianism, Control, and the Masses

During the twentieth century, political dystopia found new narrative material in totalitarian regimes. Hannah Arendt's analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism (2009) offers an essential key to understanding its evolution: totalitarianism destroys human plurality by transforming society into an impersonal bureaucratic apparatus, where the individual is reduced to an anonymous cog in a machine larger than himself.

Works like Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 or Christina Dalcher's Vox depict precisely this dynamic: political systems that influence individuals through propaganda, widespread surveillance, linguistic manipulation, and information control. Political dystopia, in this sense, doesn't simply imagine authoritarian futures: it uses them as a critical mirror of the forms of domination that pervade modern societies.

Technological Dystopia: Advanced Capitalism, Identity, and Machines

Since the 1980s, the spread of neoliberalism and the transformation of global capitalism have profoundly changed the way we represent the future. Mark Fisher (2018) describes this phase with the formula of capitalist realism : the collective sense that there are no alternatives to the existing economic system, that the market is the natural and inevitable horizon of every dimension of life.

It is in this context that technological dystopia takes on a new centrality. It no longer merely denounces political oppression, but exposes more subtle forms of control: consumerist seduction, digital addiction, algorithms that shape desires and identities. Films like The Matrix (1999) and novels like The Circle (2013) explore a world where technology becomes an ideological prosthesis, an invisible apparatus that regulates perceptions, behaviors, and relationships.

Philip K. Dick's fiction—from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to its film adaptation, Blade Runner —takes this reflection to the extreme, questioning the boundaries of humanity in a world of copies, simulations, androids, and unstable identities. This question of "residual humanity" is also echoed in dystopian anthologies like Black Mirror , where technology fulfills profound desires but simultaneously produces new, more internalized and less visible regimes of control.

Environmental Dystopia: Ecologies of Collapse

The third type of dystopia, the environmental one, arises from the intensification of contemporary ecological crises. In these scenarios, the future is shaped not by a central power, but by the unsustainability of climate and economic systems.

Novels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), films like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and series like Never Too Late (2024) depict post-apocalyptic worlds where nature is no longer a resource, but a hostile space in which to survive. These are radical futures, where ecological collapse exposes the intertwining of social inequality, resource exploitation, and violence.

dystoia tv series never too late raiplay
The protagonists of the dystopian environmental TV series Never too late, released at the end of 2024 on RaiPlay

Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) takes this reflection to its extreme: genetic manipulation, environmental disasters, and concentrations of technological power generate societies divided between technocrats and impoverished masses. Here, environmental dystopia also becomes biopolitical dystopia: it is the control over life itself, over bodies and biology, that constitutes the new frontier of power.

Dystopia as a critical device of the cultural industry

The social history of dystopia is inseparable from the evolution of the culture industry. Since its origins, this genre has functioned as a tool to challenge dominant structures: political control, cultural massification, the standardization of consumption, the loss of individual autonomy.

Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2010), interpret the culture industry as an apparatus that transforms art into a commodity, homogenizing products and spectators. In this view, mass culture becomes a mechanism of passive integration: entertainment that anesthetizes, standardized products that reduce critical capacity, narratives that reproduce the status quo.

A different reading, proposed by Brancato (2010), however, underlines how the strength of the cultural industry lies precisely in its serial nature and in the dynamic exchange between production and consumption . Serialization allows narratives not only to spread widely, but also to be reworked, reinterpreted, and integrated into the collective imagination. In this framework, dystopia is not simply a critical product: it is a social laboratory in which the imagination is confronted, discussed, and transformed.

Dystopian science fiction, fueled by serialization, thus becomes a place where communities of viewers, authors, and producers jointly construct visions of the future. It doesn't offer solutions, but it stimulates alert thinking, capable of questioning the present and imagining alternative possibilities.

Communicating dystopias and possible futures

Communicating a dystopia means constructing a world through narrative, aesthetic, and symbolic choices that reflect social and political tensions. As Abate and Ricciardiello (2019) show, there are some recurring topoi that characterize dystopian representations and allow the viewer to immediately recognize the type of future imagined.

Degraded environments and centralized power

Dystopias are almost always set in decaying urban spaces: overcrowded cities, post-industrial landscapes, contaminated or desertified areas. The architecture itself communicates oppression: monumental buildings, cold infrastructures, rigid geometries that create a constant sense of loss of control and social collapse.

An image from the 2017 film "War for the Planet of the Apes," the second film in the trilogy. In a world where apes are becoming the dominant species on the planet, the human buildings in the background are decaying: the loss of power is revealed by the revenge of nature. DYSTOPIA
An image from the 2017 film "War for the Planet of the Apes," the second film in the trilogy. In a world where apes are becoming the dominant species, the human buildings in the background are decaying: the loss of power is revealed by the revenge of nature.

Power in these contexts often operates through a central authority—state, corporation, military-technological apparatus—that controls citizens through advanced surveillance tools. The reference to the panopticon, taken up by Foucault (2014), illustrates this dynamic well: control is more effective the more it is internalized.

Technology, communication, and social divides in dystopia

In many dystopias, technology, rather than improving life, becomes a means of manipulation, cataloging, and alienation. The human-machine relationship is impersonal, mechanical, and often devoid of empathy. Arendt (2009; 2013) has shown how bureaucratic systems dehumanize, turning people into "human material": technological dystopias take this insight to the extreme.

Communication, in these worlds, is almost always propaganda: slogans, controlled media, official narratives that define what's true and what's not. It's a semiotic system that builds consensus and conformity, narrowing the space for dissent. Hence the figure of the rebel: individuals or small groups who resist the system and embody the desire for freedom.

Another recurring element is the presence of radical social divides : exploitation, poverty, each placed in a rigid hierarchical order. Symbols become political devices: uniforms, colors, emblems, and rituals communicate belonging or exclusion, reinforcing the identity of dominant and subordinate groups (Durand, 1972).

These topoi aren't just decorative elements: they constitute the very language of dystopia. Through their use and reinterpretation, showrunners codify a vision of reality—or of its possible future outcome—while viewers decode it, negotiating its meanings, fears, and desires.

References

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