74 Dystopian Photos From Around The World That Hit Like A Punch In The Gut

The photos in this thread are something else. Towering cities so densely packed they make you feel like an ant. Homeless tents stretching for blocks. Rivers running strange colors from industrial runoff.

Looking through them, a word keeps coming to mind, and it’s the same word that keeps coming up in conversations about the state of the world right now. Dystopia. Sounds about right.

But what does dystopia actually mean, and where did the word even come from? It starts, fittingly, with the opposite idea.

In 1516, Sir Thomas More coined the word “utopia” for his book about an ideal fictional society, pulling it from the Greek for “no place,” essentially admitting that perfection doesn’t exist anywhere on earth.

The word dystopia came much later, first appearing in its modern usage when philosopher John Stuart Mill used it in a speech to the British House of Commons in 1868 to criticize a government policy he found so bad it deserved its own word. He put the Greek prefix “dys,” meaning bad or abnormal, in front of “topia,” meaning place. A bad place. That was the idea.

It took a while for the concept to really take hold in fiction, but when it did, it stuck. Dystopian storytelling tends to emerge in waves, usually after some kind of global trauma. The years surrounding the World Wars gave us some of the most enduring examples.

George Orwell’s 1984 imagined a world of total government surveillance and rewritten history. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World went another direction, picturing a society so obsessed with pleasure and order that people were engineered from birth to fit into it.

Both were published in the shadow of real authoritarian regimes, and both felt uncomfortably close to things that were actually happening.

Dystopian fiction tends to share a few recognizable features wherever you find it. There’s usually a society that has gone badly wrong in some specific way, and a government that has either too much power or none at all.

Ordinary people find their freedoms stripped away, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. And the environment tends to reflect the decay happening at every other level.

The technology in these worlds tends to serve control rather than freedom. Information gets manipulated or destroyed. And there’s almost always someone who starts to notice the cracks and can’t stop noticing them once they do.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games are all great examples of the dystopian genre.

But have we truly reached dystopia, or as heart-breaking as things are, are we not quite there yet? The answer depends on who you ask, because for a lot of people the word gets thrown around pretty casually.

Shauna Shames, Associate Professor at Rutgers University, and Amy Atchison, Associate Professor of Political Science at Valparaiso University, wrote a compelling piece during the COVID pandemic arguing that we haven’t crossed that line.

And they made that case at a moment when everything felt truly dystopian and like something we couldn’t come back from. Even then, they pointed out, people still showed up for one another. Communities organized. Kindness appeared where you least expected it.

Taking the US as an example, they say that even with all its difficulties and all the very valid criticism of how fragile its democracy can feel, it still holds. “It still has functioning democratic institutions. Many in the U.S. fight against dehumanization and persecution of minorities. Courts are adjudicating cases. Legislatures are passing bills,” they remind.

And that’s actually where Shames and Atchison see something worth holding onto. Dystopian fiction shows us the future we don’t want, and in doing that it gives us a reason to make sure we never get there. As they wrote, “fictional dystopias warn of preventable futures; those warnings can help avert the actual demise of democracy.”

So as depressing as dystopia is, maybe that’s exactly the point. The genre exists to unsettle us, and so do photos like these.

But feeling unsettled and feeling hopeless are two different things. If anything, the fact that we’re still capable of recognizing how wrong things look is a reason to do something about it, not a reason to give up.