So much Psycho-Pass....

S1:E13

"Today, the world has realized a stable prosperity and achieved the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people... Planning one's life...Obtaining what one desires...When people make choices, no matter what they are, they ask for Sibyl's judgment rather than agonize over it."

"No mistakes are allowed with Sibyl. That's the ideal... If the system is perfect it shouldn't even require humans to operate it."

Is this their version of a utopia? Or at least what they are aiming to achieve. Is an entirely computer-operated society even a utopia at all? Should the humans be involved in the functionality of their society or does that not matter if they don't have to worry about anything (in theory)...

Are the criminals in Psycho-Pass "hardwired to self-destruct?"

Soooo, even the title of this song feels relevant to Psycho-Pass in general as it's all about catching criminals and I'd say that they criminals themselves are pretty unkind... 

This song is specifically for episode three though (goes with my other post, I have a lot of catching up to do (so, sorry for anyone who is actually looking at these)) lyrics in the song like "I've become hostage to my mind" and "dominate, killing of the innocence" go with Yellow-Green snapping and such, though I know the victims aren't entirelyyyyy innocent...

Good Ol' Yellow-Green

I wanted to take a look at episode three of “Psycho-Pass” because of the obvious issues that are presented in the drone factory (obviously there are issues presented in all of the episodes of Psycho-Pass buuuuut ya know…). Good ol’ Yellow-Green is going around killing people with the drones, but nobody suspects him because he is the underdog; he is bullied by other factory workers so that they can take their stress out on him. Which is, in a sense, throwing this one person to the dogs in order to alleviate any strain felt by the other workers. What I find pretty dumb of them to not realize is that all of the bullying and pressure put on Yellow-Green is going to/ is causing him to have repressed emotions of hatred towards his coworkers. And all of those negative emotions held in are going to raise his Psycho-Pass until he feels the need to alleviate his own pressure back onto them. What’s also interesting about this episode is how Akane starts to trust in the enforcer’s judgments more. She has had her doubts of the Sybil System from the beginning and couldn’t quite bring herself to believe in how the enforcers were operating on their own knowledge. I think that it says a lot about Akane’s character and judgment abilities when she is willing to trust the latent criminals to bring Yellow-Green to justice. She knows that they will be able to find a way to determine if he is the actual murderer or not, and that the law must, sometimes, be skirted around (aka Kogani’s interesting methods of information retrieval) in order to find the truth and enforce the rules.

An Unholy Amalgamation of Teen Dystopia Topics

In an effort to synthesize (some of) the points raised in the articles... and disregarding our definition of utopia for the more colloquial utopia/dystopia dichotomy... here is a very vague string of questions:

What do you think the agitprop of a YA utopia would be, if any? Would teens still take to the genre? What was your favorite YA dystopia (if any), and why?

I know I loved the idea of dystopias as a teen, I get their attraction: everything is LIFE OR DEATH and DO OR DIE and ME AGAINST THE WORLD—the apocalyptic themes of these dystopias are not so unfamiliar to teens.

And in case no one has any thoughts on that, here's an unrelated photo posted by my aunt this morning that outraged me; maybe it will spark some sort of utopian discussion. Or maybe it will make you feel, idk.

Not Simple

When reading the Salon article, this sentence particularly stuck out to me,

"Let’s pause for a moment, in fact, to notice that this kind of story almost always imagines a future world that’s far simpler than the one we currently live in, one in which all the stuff and clutter of our lives – the screens, the gizmos, the cars, the noise – has evaporated."

I definitely feel like this isn't true, especially with the two books the article is talking about (Divergent and The Hunger Games) that still have a lot of technology and noise. I definitely wouldn't consider them simpler, especially not in The Hunger Games since the citizens are forced to participate in a lottery murder game between children. The Capital is exactly the opposite of simple, with lavish parties and loud fashions. The 12th District may be "simple" in comparison, but that is only because they are very poor.
As for Divergent, they aren't necessarily simpler, they are just more tightly organized, and each faction has it's own rules it must follow. Abnegation is bland compared to Dauntless, but that is simple because of the morals that faction chooses to live by and that is only one part of that society. The society as a whole is far from being simpler than our own, and seems to be much more complex in my opinion.

Aesthetic Utopia

I posted this video because it is my favorite utopia purely for its aesthetics. This is from the game Bioshock Infinite. The utopia is called ‘Columbia’ and is made by the Lutece twins through floating particle nonsense. The utopia is basically not really a utopia as it is discovered early on in the game that the prophet, whose name is Comstock, brought a bunch of rich paying racist white folks up into the sky after the Civil War ended to continue living their lives as if the Emancipation Proclamation never happened. Yes, they meet their demise and no that isn’t a spoiler. The scene just shows a particularly beautiful and thematic representation of a ‘utopia’ when it is first discovered, and gives me slight Herland vibes.

I thought it was particularly interesting that during descent, the 'proverbs' of the utopia are presented to the new citizen of Columbia, and almost inducts them into their state of mind.

The video actually begins at the 1 minute mark.

(from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFGnBoS95SU)

Nosedive rating

I give this society/utopia/dystopia 1 star. 

I enjoyed this episode of Black Mirror and while watching, I was trying to figure out why the title is "Nosedive". My first thought after watching it through was that it was titled as such due to the amount that this way of life might make someone want to nosedive off a cliff or something along those lines. 
This "life", if you could even call it that, seems like hell in my opinion. Its like Yelp meets Sims meets PsychoPass meets social networking hell. You get to rate people, and based on those ratings you either do well or do poorly in life. This seems like it would qualify as a form of cruel and unusual punishment. It seems to make it impossible to have a single bad day, ever. Or if you are having a bad day, I guess you should just not interact with anyone at all. But for some people that might lead to yet another bad day and without social interaction they may never stop having bad days. Anyway, I need to stop before I go off on a tangent, and I had another point I wanted to mention.
One thing I am extremely curious about is how this would work in other situations, such as college. Would your rating be treated the same as a GPA is treated now? Would people be turned away from certain schools due to low rating? Would people be sought after due to higher ratings? 
I was also wondering how this would work for relationships, jobs, different ages, parents to kids and vise versa, etc.
These were only some of my main thoughts surrounding this episode. 

Nosedive

This episode stresses me out. Thinking about living in a world we’re literally everything is public and everything is about ratings makes me anxious. Even in present day we are able to shape the version of ourselves that we present on social media and even sometimes that’s stress inducing. How could anyone be happy in a society where they’re constantly striving to get to a 4.5 rating? That’s got to have horrible effects on ones self esteem. I think Ryan’s rating of 3.75 seems to allow him the ability to live an actual life not so focused on how other feel about him. In the long run he ended up much happier than his sister. 

People SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

Now that title isn't very yogic of me!

To remedy my absence from Blogger of late, I sat down for "Nosedive" with my iPhone Notes in hand, determined to take note of the important themes of the utopia and submit them for discussion.

But here is a sample of my notes:

----------

"ppl suck
Lacie is like 'no I have to get there it's my best friends wedding' instead of just being a nice person
'I am so sorry about that' flight lady too

Cat in the hat did cheesy pastel world better

Imagine that being high strung all the time

People running back into their cars when she needs help (me doing flyers stuff)"

----------

And so on.

This weekend I went door to door in my neighborhood passing out informational flyers for New Market's upcoming farmer's market, and though I had a couple nice interactions with people, the ones that stuck out were a frowning guy waving me away from his door as I approached, smiling, and another man with wary, staring family gathered about him aggressively saying "y'know, there's a sign down there that says no so-lic-it-ting," and the like.... This episode just compounded with that and made me think "God, people SUCK!"

That's the essence of my reflection, everybody. I don't really believe that people suck, or maybe I just like to say that. Maybe that's the point of this episode? To make viewers recoil at our world? To be reactive rather than proactive? "Nosedive" doesn't give much encouragement to actively work to remedy its uncomfortable echoes in our world...

Now for a fun gif of the incomparable Mike Myers' Cat in the Hat expressing how this episode made me feel towards people:

Pastel Nightmare

I thought this episode of Black Mirror was interesting, and kinda comments on our own social media influenced society today, but I also thought it was really unfair that having a high rating means better perks. Or, rather, that having a low rating means you can't do a lot of things. Money seems absolutely worthless in this society, since having close to five stars means you can pretty much get whatever you want.
I wonder, though, at what point in someone's life is this system truly implemented? I don't think they could force this type of thing on children, and it certainly didn't seem to matter to Naomi who anyone was before she became who she is now. The whole thing sort of reminded me of having good or bad credit score, except way more extreme.
This system works well if its meant for everyone to be overly fake nice to everybody they meet and live fake lives in order to get better perks, but if it was created in order to put the best people, or the kindest and most charitable people on top, then it would have definitely failed from the beginning. Of course, there's no real way of telling who is fake and who's not in this world, and the fact that you have to look through everyone's posts and stuff right in front of them, with them knowing, just seems really awkward and stressful.

No Privacy

While watching "Nosedive," I couldn't help but have this song spinning in my brain. The lines "I always feel like somebody's watching me / And I have no privacy" and "I don't know anymore / are the neighbors watching me?" just fit perfectly with this world where no one can escape the perpetual cycle of increasing or decreasing online and offline status. Everyone, from your coworkers to a stranger passing you by on the highway, has the power to watch you and decide how lush or poor your life may be. Laci slowly devolves into manic obsessiveness over her stars not only for 'social fame' but housing and reputation and general security. Considering that a person can merely look at you and see your rating, the threat of being watched is enough to incite paranoia and a constant state of 'acting,' which is what Rockwell's song portrays and/or frets over.

Of course, other stalker/paranoia heavy songs that also popped into my head were "Private Eyes" and "Every Step You Take," but I stuck with "Somebody's Watching Me" because its almost helpless, manic-yet-calm assertion of prying, judging eyes seems to parallel and reflect the 'Utopia' in "Nosedive."


Here's the lyric video if the official music video isn't to our tastes: