Welcome To Hell: 50 Posts That Prove We’ve Hit Peak Dystopia (New Pics)

Before the subreddit was created in January 2016, there was a Facebook group of the same name.

The group was founded by the late philosopher Mark Fisher, the very person who originally coined the term "boring dystopia."

However, Fisher, widely known as the author of the cult classic Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, told Vice that the group "wasn't that well thought-out at the start" and that he hadn’t done anything like this before.

As a result, he closed it in November 2015. But apparently, the internet needed such a space.

Originally, Fisher had noticed a common theme in pictures he shared on Facebook and wondered if it could be developed into a group.

"It was understood from the start to be a consciousness-raising exercise, encouraging people to perceive the actual state of Britain rather than the PR state," he said in December 2015, a month after he shut down the group and before the inception of the subreddit. "Which is surprisingly hard, because there's this mixture of Silicon Valley ideology, PR, and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have. Which is just all these crap robots..."

"Crap robots" were a common theme on his Facebook group. One typical post included a photograph of a broken vending machine, with a note attached to it saying, "The light inside has broken but I still work."

"It’s Californian ideology without Californian sunshine, isn’t it?” Fisher asked rhetorically.

To many of the three thousand members the group had, it's content was mainly entertainment, but it also served to illustrate "hauntology," the term Fisher used to describe the sense of a lost future—in this case, one where machines enhance, rather than hinder, our lives.

According to a new survey from book publisher The Folio Society, around 26 percent of American men and 14 percent of women feel like they are already living in a dystopia.

At the same time, only one-third of Americans believe the nation has a functioning democracy, and younger people were increasingly convinced that democracy had failed in the U.S.

Americans are particularly concerned over free speech (60 percent) and government surveillance of personal and family finances (45 percent).

However, why did Fisher close 'Boring Dystopia' 1.0 if his thoughts are proving to be so relevant to people?

"For me, the point at which the group started to go downhill was when it became like every other Facebook group. It was just recirculating 'content' and sending links, keeping people inside what I would call capitalist cyberspace instead of looking outside at their own environment," the philosopher explained. "It felt like it was reinforcing the condition it was intended to displace."

The alternative to closing it was endless policing by him and Rumi Josephs, an artist who served as the group's second admin. "It didn't work at that scale, and you could feel that it wasn't the right place for it… It was just an experiment, and Facebook probably wasn't the right platform. I didn't want it to be diluted."

Fisher cast Facebook as a distorted reality following an alternate sense of time, where old news is endlessly recirculated and human nature is subject to automation. At that time, the filter bubble had already felt developed enough to rewrite reality by what companies paid for us to see. Which hasn't really changed since, either.

Because of this, in 2023 (over 6 years after Fisher's passing), the subreddit's team eventually released a statement saying it wanted to honor his stance and committed to removing social media content unless posters get approval from the moderators. It will be interesting to see how well they will manage to enforce the rule.