#oneaday Day 94: Dystopia

Chatting with my dear friend and podcasting buddy Chris the other day, it became all too apparent that we are most certainly living in the sort of futuristic dystopia all manner of fiction has been trying to warn us about for decades at this point.

Next month, the UK is supposedly introducing measures to prevent under-18s from accessing adult content online, with the "solution" in place apparently taking the form of an ISP-level block for sites that don't conform to the rules, and the rules in question involving consumers having to "prove" their age in some form or another — possibly through having to purchase a £5 "pass" from an actual physical store. I'm sure that's a conversation everyone is looking forward to.

Of course, like so many "doom and gloom" stories, I question whether or not this is going to happen — I'm still skeptical as to whether the dreaded "Brexit" is actually going to happen at all, on that note — but it's depressingly plausible in this age we live in. We live in an age of surveillance that would make George Orwell blush; an age where people get arrested and prosecuted for stupid YouTube videos, an age where beat cops will seize everything from butter knives to legitimate tools "just in case" they are used as weapons, and where "liking" an innocuous-seeming limerick that someone else wrote on social media will bring the police to your doorstep.

We also live in an age where advertisements on bus stops encourage you to "use your phone to interact!"; where every TV programme starts with an official hashtag; where the Twitter account of a deceased comic book legend is used to promote a mediocre superhero movie; where everything must be "shared", otherwise you're doing your life wrong.

Some of these things have been fun in the past, but over time it's hard not to become cynical about them, particularly when you start to recognise the true intentions behind some of them. But there doesn't seem to be a whole lot we can do about them; that is just the direction that society appears to have chosen to move in, and all those of us who don't like it can really do is either fall in line, or choose not to engage. I tend to choose the latter under most circumstances.