Quite aside from a pandemic, a brewing environmental catastrophe and a highly disruptive technological revolution, is the trend for protein shakes the real sign that we have moved into a dystopian nightmare?

We look at what constitutes a dystopia, how you can categorise different types of dystopia and why we conceive of them in the first place. We also attempt to measure how close we are to dystopia at the moment and explore whether we would be able to spot its arrival. Finally, we consider if there is such a thing as a good dystopia.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• Are we living in a dystopia?
• Darren Allen’s ‘four kinds of dystopia’
• TV Tropes - dystopia
• British Social Attitudes
• The Economist - Global democracy has another bad year

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics, discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision-making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And this week we're discussing, are we living in a dystopian nightmare? And unusually, because of the third lockdown now, we are recording this remotely. Okay, Nick, tell us about, is it your personal dystopian nightmare or are we all living in a dystopian nightmare? Let's see.

Go for it. Have you heard of a product called Huel? I have. I've used it, actually. It's part of the problem, Nick. Then that's it. Then it's over. I was reading the internet the other day, I got about halfway through the internet and I discovered this advert which said, seven eggs or a single Huel shake. You could whisk up around seven raw eggs. You could fry them, poach them, boil them or scramble them. You could waste time, it says, and make a mess. Or you could just enjoy a Huel shake with 40 grams of protein ready in less than a minute. It's your call. It's your call, Nick. And I suddenly, I just had this horrific image of someone, you know, deterred by the pressure of having to get to work and probably having to hit the gym before they get to work. You know, because they don't in their daily lives get any natural exercise sat at their desk in a call center. You know, deciding not to have a nice omelette, but simply to put some powder in some, I guess it's like a watery drink thing that you put powder in, right? And drinking that.

It's enough to make you Huel, quite frankly.

Yes. And then, you know, legging it, getting the bus to the gym through the rain. And the idea that, you know, one of the few pleasures in life is, you know, cooking and eating nice food, that we should now do away with this. Now, admittedly, Huel isn't, we're not being forced to eat it by a sinister government, but it did seem it was such a dystopian vision that it came to me. And I thought, you know, I've been seeing adverts like this for a long time. I've, have I, you know, have I been blind to the fact that we've sleepwalked into a kind of, you know, a dystopian nightmare.

Is it actually Soylent Green? And it's the ground up remains of humans.

Yeah, indeed. I mean, I think the, I think Soylent Green is a good, it's a great example.

You plug it into the back of your head, just here.

It's a good example of a certain kind of, you know, I think a lot of, you know, dystopias, fictional dystopias, obviously shine lights on aspects of what we do, but this one's just seemed it's really sprang out of me. And I had this feeling of, you know, have I somehow seen through the matrix? But yeah, yeah. So I just wanted to ask, you know, what, how could you tell if you were accidentally living in a dystopia? And, and are we?

Okay. Just as an aside, I bought this Huel once, about six months or so. Other protein drinks are available, by the way. Indeed, indeed.

Yeah, I think it's clear that not only are we not sponsored by Huel, but we're unlikely to be in the near future.

Yeah, I think we've blown that one. And all I will say is, is it's bloody awful. It's terrible stuff. And I think I didn't, the reason I took it was not because of the, hey, I can't be bothered to scramble six eggs or whatever. It was, I think it was more to do with how precise it was. And something that we've talked about before is, let's say you're going on a diet or something. If you can remove kind of decision-making or something, it's a bit like, what's his face of Apple wearing jumpers, same jumpers all the time, right? Yeah. And this one actually. Yeah, it's, I knew, you know, you're getting exact amount of calories and I quite like that idea. That's the upside. The downside is it just tastes vile. And it's not just that it tastes vile. It's the texture of it. It's just like a slimy wet poo, you know, and it's, I mean, it's obviously successful,

or at least it's got a good marketing department because I see it, I see it advertised everywhere.

Yeah. It's always part of the, the, the culture of sort of asceticism really that I think we're, we're, we're in at the moment, you know, which is like basically the worse it tastes, the better it must be.

And I think it's a mixture of that. And also some of the language you were using when you're reading out the advert is that kind of have it your way kind of thing.

So anyway, there was something in the tone. The tone is very sort of, it's, it's like that sort of friendly corporate tone, which, which has been really prevalent in advertising for several decades. But somehow sort of, you know, where it's like, hey, this is, this is going to make your life easier. And in fact, you know, it's, it just makes your life more empty and devoid of meaning. Yes, quite.

I did feel a bit emptier, actually. So let's return to the, because actually you slightly rephrased the question at the end there, Nick, which I think was along the lines of, are we living in a dystopian nightmare? And if so, how would we know something along those lines? Chris, would you like to weigh in at this point?

Yeah, well, I think dystopias are, you know, we've got to work out what a dystopia is first, right? And I think we obviously feel the need from a kind of fictional point of view to create these terrible future worlds, right? And to describe them in some way, or alternative worlds in some way. So, you know, you've always had that with things like, you know, Sodom and Gomorrah. And, you know, the Odyssey is basically a trip through a series of different dystopias.

Also, the antediluvian world, you know, of the, you know, pre the Great Flood, which was basically a horrific nightmare of humankind gone wild.

Yeah, state of nature. So, you know, we always have this need to sort of paint a world of something bad, as we do to paint a world of something good. But I would say the balance recently in our sort of fictional outlook, you know, dystopian fiction now is a really significant genre, you know, and lots of the most influential books published and, you know, films that are produced now are sort of dystopian in nature. So I think there's a real drive there to have dystopias. And I sort of think, well, you know, why is that? Why do we want to do that? And I think, you know, it's kind of almost like worst case scenario planning for society at large. You know, it's like painting these pictures of places we don't want to go to. And so you get all of the, you know, they put it in the public consciousness, what a bad world is, and set signposts for how not to get there. So, you know, you always hear the phrase, oh, that's a bit big brother, you know, and that is used to effectively scotch, you know, lots of political policy proposals, you know, and that clearly comes directly from dystopian fiction. So I think the first thing is, you know, they kind of serve a purpose. And, you know, what they actually are is a, I suppose, from one perspective, a potential, usually a potential future world which society doesn't want to move towards.

Well, what I was gonna say, isn't this to do with growth in rate of technology change?

I think that might be part of it.

Exactly. Well, let's pause for a moment, because that's exactly what I want to ask, because we're a fair way through, actually. But we need to answer that question, which is, well, I just wonder, is this just the ramblings of three grumpy old men, right? Or are we in a dystopia?

Yeah, well, one of the reasons I wanted to look at failure modes as a mechanism, like a taxonomy of dystopias, was because I thought it was probably a bit more measurable in some way. And so what I sort of thought about before this was coming up with basically like a dystopia index based on-

Yeah, I was going to say, it's almost like a health check. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's a pity because I had you down as Snake Polisky, Nick. I think you'd be perfect for that.

I think I would love that.

So, unusually, in one of these podcasts, we have answered the question that we posed, right? Are we living in a dystopian nightmare? And how would we know? Well, the answer is no, we're not. And we've, you know, set out how we would know on those different metrics that you both talked about, right? So, hooray, we're not in a dystopian nightmare yet. Yet, but as you say, yeah, but we might be soon, or it certainly feels like sometimes that we're slipping towards that. Okay, we've actually been talking for quite a while already. There's a question I want to ask. Taking a dystopian universe from fiction, or hopefully from fiction, which one would be your preferred one in which to live?

Yeah, well, so I think mine is heavily influenced by my sort of childhood, really, and that is Megacity One from the Judge Dredd comic books as a dystopia, which has it all, really, you know, you've got massively high crime rates, you've got autocratic governments, you've got a fallout of nuclear wars, you've got environmental disasters with the cursed earth, you've got obesity epidemic with the fatties who- On their wheels. Yeah, their stomach and their competition eating. And so, yeah, I think, and it's just because it was a weekly serial published thing, the richness of that dystopia was, yeah, quite impressive and, yeah, addressed all of society's ills, really. So, yeah, role-

Also, you've got wonderful entertainment options as well in that if you're just a regular Megacity One dweller, right?

Yeah, well, one of my favourite things was in, you know, they banned democracy because it was, you know, it wasn't very productive, it didn't really help run society very well. But the one thing they could vote on every day was the weather. So, you know, that was it. And they always voted for a sunny day. So, good choice. I like it. Nick?

Well, it's a slightly, it's not obscure if you're into kind of comics and things, I think, but, and I know this only from the film, but I don't know if you guys watched or have heard of Mortal Engines. Yeah, no. Yeah, it's, I would guess it's sort of a mix between alternative history, sort of steampunk, but it's post-apocalyptic sort of world set in Britain where cities have become these huge sort of massive, like tank type machines. You have these huge cities built on these enormous tank treads that go round hoovering up other cities and gobbling up resources. And the big, the most evil city around that's sort of the boss, which keeps going around gobbling up these tiny, tiny cities is London. And the depiction of this mobile London with St Paul's Cathedral at the top trundling along, I just thought I want to live there. That is awesome. So yeah, I think, I think I'd like to be the Lord Mayor of, you know, the Mortal Engines version of London.

I think for me, well, look, even though I've asked that, where would we want to live? I still want to have a shout out for it. I wouldn't want to necessarily live there, but the universe of Rollerball, I just love the aesthetics of that place.

Well, do you remember when American Gladiators came on telly? I do. Our own British version. I remember thinking, ah, this is, this is just like the Running Man or Rollerball. This is fantastic. Unfortunately, and I thought it will inevitably progress to them actually killing each other, but that never happened.

But I love the aesthetics of that universe. But I actually.

But if we talk about purely on which of these universes of dystopias I would like to live, it's probably actually Brave New World. If you can be an elf or whatever it is, and, you know, just running around, having fun, dropping Soma. And I think that's a pretty nice life. Well, that was the challenge, wasn't it? That's the point of the book, right? Yeah. All a bit empty. Yeah.

But what I like is that dystopias are relative, right? You know, I mean, in Naomi Alderman's The Power, right, you know, where women inherit this sort of electrical power and the tides shift effectively, you know, for the Saudi Arabian women, it becomes, you know, what is sort of a dystopian novel actually, you know, ends up being very liberating for them. So, yeah, it's all relative.

Yeah. But I think it answers the question, could you have a dystopia where actually everybody is happy? Because even, you know, and if you can. Even the epsilons, the delta minuses, they're happy as well, right? Yeah. Within the boundary of what they can experience. But so, I mean, if you can have a dystopia where everyone's happy, it's a good philosophical thought experiment.

Sign us up and get necking down that huel, Nick. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, look, we're going to stop there. That was fun. I enjoyed that. If you have any comments about the show, we'd really like to hear from you, especially if you've got any suggestions for topics. And you can email us now. We've got a new email, which is podcast at alephinsights.com. That's aleph spelt with a PH. Also, you've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. If you've enjoyed it, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast from. As it helps others to find us. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.