BRITAIN - WORLD LEADER IN NEAR FUTURE DYSTOPIA AESTHETICS Something...
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩@kunley_drukpa
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Apr 08, 2025
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BRITAIN - WORLD LEADER IN NEAR FUTURE DYSTOPIA AESTHETICS
Something about Britain (now The Yookay) and British Culture that lends it so readily to the dystopian near future aesthetic. Children of Men, 1984, Clockwork Orange, Brazil, V for Vendetta, Third World Britain… etc. Which is, Authoritarianism on a silly gimmicky theme or ideology as well as a certain kind of grimy aesthetic and tweeness and then occasional touches or glimpses of high culture interspersed through all the absurdities. You couldn’t do direct Cult of Personality Stalinism in Britain. You couldn’t buy ‘Britain but it’s North Korea and has totalitarian military parades’ but you could buy ‘Britain where everyone is forced to clap for the National Health Service on the orders of bureaucrats in top hats and then fill out a series forms to certify that they have done so’. It’s authoritarianism but not in a traditional Caudillo ‘Evil Dictator’ type way - it’s more psychological. In many of those examples, it is the British state that’s the source of horror. It isn’t a kind of more primal, immediate and palpable folk horror
There is an under-explored psychological phenomenon that comes from being in say Luton town centre, just almost ethereal in a horrible way. The walls that surround a country have caved in and what’s replaced it isn’t anything other than meaningless squalor and it is entirely the result of runaway top down ideology imposed by the state. And then the walls are festooned with NHS and ‘Have you paid you TV License?’ and ‘Don’t be a burden on your loved ones support Assisted Dying’ and ‘New BBC Series: The Black Tudors (They’re Black)’ posters. The horror is at the banality of it all… It’s a sort of ‘Terry Gilliam Authoritarianism’, the perennial puritanical curtain twitching streak in British Culture taken to an absurd extreme and now preoccupied with some squalid farcical comedy ideology that isn’t a comedy anymore because it’s real life
Something about Britain (now The Yookay) and British Culture that lends it so readily to the dystopian near future aesthetic. Children of Men, 1984, Clockwork Orange, Brazil, V for Vendetta, Third World Britain… etc. Which is, Authoritarianism on a silly gimmicky theme or ideology as well as a certain kind of grimy aesthetic and tweeness and then occasional touches or glimpses of high culture interspersed through all the absurdities. You couldn’t do direct Cult of Personality Stalinism in Britain. You couldn’t buy ‘Britain but it’s North Korea and has totalitarian military parades’ but you could buy ‘Britain where everyone is forced to clap for the National Health Service on the orders of bureaucrats in top hats and then fill out a series forms to certify that they have done so’. It’s authoritarianism but not in a traditional Caudillo ‘Evil Dictator’ type way - it’s more psychological. In many of those examples, it is the British state that’s the source of horror. It isn’t a kind of more primal, immediate and palpable folk horror
There is an under-explored psychological phenomenon that comes from being in say Luton town centre, just almost ethereal in a horrible way. The walls that surround a country have caved in and what’s replaced it isn’t anything other than meaningless squalor and it is entirely the result of runaway top down ideology imposed by the state. And then the walls are festooned with NHS and ‘Have you paid you TV License?’ and ‘Don’t be a burden on your loved ones support Assisted Dying’ and ‘New BBC Series: The Black Tudors (They’re Black)’ posters. The horror is at the banality of it all… It’s a sort of ‘Terry Gilliam Authoritarianism’, the perennial puritanical curtain twitching streak in British Culture taken to an absurd extreme and now preoccupied with some squalid farcical comedy ideology that isn’t a comedy anymore because it’s real life
Aleph@woke8yearold
They are trying to legalize suicide in Britain and the ads they’re running on the metro look like something out of a satirical video game
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Absurdities of the current Yookay North Sea Economic Zone Where You Can’t Even Make Any Money are really ‘Terry Gilliam Authoritarianism’. You couldn’t do Authoritarianism in America in the same way it’s not grey and curtain-twitching and bureaucratic enough, much more cyberpunk
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Such trauma-inducing Rubicon-crossing levels of ‘Terry Gilliam Authoritarianism’ that people can only process it by ‘memory-holing’ it
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Not the virus itself but the response is so indelibly scarred in my mind that I will be unable to forget it for the rest of my life, will haunt me forever. The other dimension to it too is how readily so many people went along with it, how easily petty authoritarianism developed
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‘Third World Britain’ as the contemporary answer to Orwell, Burgess, Gilliam, Moore and Cuarón
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Children of Men captured this ‘look’ best
Heathcliff@Lord_Thornton
In 2006, the film Children of Men presented a vision of Britain in 2027, a bleak and sterile country struggling to survive in a World that has seemingly collapsed. We are 3 years from the period depicted in this film - I'd argue the Britain in this film is the closest to reality
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Love Britain with my heart and soul but, you know, this is one of reasons I am abroad so much. Though, there’s always for many centuries been actually this kind of perennial feeling of dissatisfaction and uneasiness… British History is a long list of people wanting to ‘get out’
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“Get me off this miserable Island, please, God - just get me out of here!” etc.
