“Revolution,” the widely-watched JJ Abrams show that premiered on NBC this week, is the latest entry in sci-fi’s raggedest subgenre. Call it the dystopia of failed technology or the powered-down apocalypse; it’s speculative fiction that peers into possible futures when all the lights go out and our computers shut off. After all, for as long as we’ve leaned on tech, we’ve imagined what would happen if we suddenly lost it. In our imaginations, everything usually just goes to shit.It happened in the 80s, after nuclear bombs left Australia a barren wasteland populated only by marauders, helpless peasants, and the Road Warrior. Cars still work, if you can find the oil to run them, but nothing else does; we’re barbarians again.In the 90s too! After the great nuclear war of 2013, the world was again divided into whimpering townsfolk and weapon-waving militias. And only the Postman might unite the otherwise helpless peasant-towns by pretending to be an authority figure.Water World is pretty much the exact same movie, with global warming instead, and no land.In The Road, the clocks all stopped at 1:17 in the morning, implying some great disaster swiftly overtook the world. Those still living in face a miserable vortex of violence and survivalism.And granted, in an actual nuclear holocaust scenario, things get far grimmer than anything depicted above. Way grimmer than The Road. The most devastating piece of apocalyptic speculative fiction ever put to tape is easily “Threads”, a 1983 “docudrama” produced by the BBC—and aired on live TV in Britain. It recounts, step by step, the unfolding of a nuclear holocaust in the industrial city of Sheffield. And it is relentless. The initial carnage, sure, but then the food rationing, the failed emergency government, the martial law, the bodies in the street, the fallout, the forced labor, the cancer, the nuclear winter, and on and on. It details the death of millions and the decay of society to Medieval population levels and technologies.
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It’s interesting—too much technology, the better to monitor you with, yields Orwellian totalitarian states and monolithic oppressive governments: 1984, Brave New World, Metropolis, Brazil, Minority Report, Gattaca, etc, etc. But pull the rug out from our technology-dependent lives too quickly, and old-fashioned hell breaks loose. Usually, this comes on the heels of mass contagion or nuclear fallout or some other global catastrophe—"Revolution" may be the first of its kind to imagine a world where the laws of physics are simply and inexplicably obliterated.That’s what happens in Revolution’s first episode, “Blackout.” We focus on two brothers, both high-ranking military men, when the world as we know it powers down. The show’s creators are anything but subtle—first we zoom in on iPhones, GPS-equipped electronic car consoles, flat screen TVs, etc, as well as more pedestrian light-emitters like headlights, window lights, etc—then the lights go off. Just look, look how dependent we are on all this shiny techno-stuff! Cars come to a halt, cities go dark. And that’s that. We pick up fifteen years later, and they haven’t come back on.Electricity no longer exists, so, obviously, people try to form little organic farming townships. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to do so because the vacuum left by all the technology has been filled with merciless warlords who thieve and pillage and murder as they please. Which shouldn’t surprise too many viewers, because that’s always what happens when our world is drained of technology in the near-future. It’s been happening for decades.
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It’s in the final act of Cloud Atlas, where the de-teched world is overrun with pillagers, and again and again and again. But why? A massive, disruptive event pries our niceties and gadgets from us and inevitably reduces us to savages, as though technology itself is the fabric holding our societies together. That seems to be the supposition, old as Enlightenment, that if you strip away our toys and modern affectations, we’re still primal beasts at heart. It’s Lord of the Flies. Or, apropos of “Revolution,” it’s the Trigger Effect:
The interesting thing about Trigger Effect here is that it showcases a plausible pre-militia-craze scenario; it demonstrates the slippery slope. It considers how we might see modern societies devolve into the warlord-run worlds of yesteryear—the whiff of lawlessness, the neutered sense of entitlement to our tech, our meds, our familiar modes of communication …
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It’s in a league of its own, partially because it’s carefully informed by a scientific understanding of the apocalyptic event in question, and partially because it’s intended to be viewed as the mother of all PSAs—seriously, we need one of these for global warming. As such, you’ll notice another interesting thing about "Threads"—no rampaging militias. The government retains control, albeit violently, because it had an organizational structure in place, and could consolidate arms. Also, everyone’s too weak and sick to go cowboying around.“Threads” is the exception; a carefully measured dystopia based on actual historical precedent. The rest, you know, seem a little too pat. Disaster strikes and the bad guys rise up to go exploitin’. We’re at each others’ throats, for years and years and years after Event X, because we have no clue how to govern ourselves without technology. Which, fine—we need to squeeze the drama; no one wants to watch post-apocalyptic fiction where the survivors form a functioning regional government and set upon the task of producing and distributing the goods necessary for survival.But that line of thinking gives too much credit to technology, to the devices and platforms that, sure, have improved and made our lives more convenient. These dystopias assume that our lives are now inoperable without the latest technology, that we are entirely unable to organize ourselves without it. That technology is some sort of a shield that protects us from gun-wielding villains, that is the only thing keeping police and fire departments running. It’s the same kind of thinking that would have you believe popular uprisings are no longer possible without social media.The unplugged dystopia is still no doubt a useful cultural barometer; they show us how valuable we believe technology to be, how essential we believe our gadgets to be to modern life. Even if we’re wrong.