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Indrė Lukošiūtė

95 Photos Show The Horrid And Sad World We’re Living In

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Every once in a while, you’ll be in a customer support chat and realize you’re talking to a bot. Then you take a step back and realize there are quite a few things like that have permeated modern society.

So we’ve collected posts and pictures that folks online thought were deeply dystopian, from faucets with screens to ads inside of fortune cookies. Get comfortable (before that becomes a subscription) as you scroll through, upvote the worst examples and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments below.

#1 $280,000,000,000

#2 One Day The Masses Might Cotton On

#3 Apocalyptical Fiction Books Are Now In Current Affairs

Every dystopia owes its existence, weirdly enough, to a word that meant the opposite. Back in 1516, English lawyer and eventual saint Sir Thomas More published a book called Utopia, describing a fictional island with a supposedly perfect society. More was a bit of a punster, and he built the word from Greek roots that could mean either "no place" or "good place" depending on how you squinted at it, which was kind of the joke. The island was an ideal so perfect it might as well not exist.

For a couple of centuries, nobody had a proper word for the flip side of that coin. There are scattered traces of writers reaching for something darker, including an obscure 1747 poem that used the spelling "dustopia," but the term most people credit didn't show up until 1868, when philosopher John Stuart Mill stood up in the British House of Commons and tore into government policy on Irish land rights.

#4 A Letter To Humans Of The Future On The Site Of Iceland's First Dead Glacier

#5 Must Profit First

#6 My City Rolled Out A Yearly Ems Subscription

He argued that what people called "utopian" was usually just too good to work, while what the government was proposing was too bad to work, and he suggested calling that second kind of thing "dystopian." He simply swapped the "u" for the Greek prefix "dys," meaning bad or diseased, and stuck it onto "topos," meaning place. A bad place, official and on the record.

#7 Pretty Weird

#8 School Bus Advertisement For Body Armor

#9 Graffiti Keeps Rent Low

It almost didn't catch on. Fellow philosopher Jeremy Bentham had already floated his own term, "cacotopia," decades earlier, and for a while dystopia mostly sat around gathering dust while writers used other labels for grim fictional futures. It wasn't until the twentieth century, once books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four had thoroughly rattled readers, that dystopia became the word everyone reached for.

#10 Glad Critical Medical Care Is Being Taken Care Of By Private Companies That Definitely Care

#11 Rows And Rows And Rows And-

#12 It’s Some Twilight Zone Stuff

So what actually makes a dystopia a dystopia, beyond the vibes? Fiction in this genre tends to circle back to the same handful of ingredients. There's almost always some authority watching everyone a little too closely, whether that's a government, a corporation, or an algorithm nobody fully understands. Individuality tends to get flattened in favor of conformity, with citizens nudged, or forced, into thinking and behaving alike.

#13 This Display Is How I Learned That Missouri Banned An Introductory Book About Oil Painting

#14 My Fortune Cookie Had A Qr Code Ad Inside

#15 They're Editing Digital Books To Contain Ads Now

Technology is usually a double edged sword, promising convenience while quietly working against the people using it. Language itself often gets twisted too, with propaganda dressing up bad news as progress. And underneath it all, there's typically a thin layer of shiny, cheerful branding stretched over something rotten, which is exactly why dystopias are so unsettling. They rarely announce themselves. They look like normal life until you notice the cracks.

#16

#17 Seems About Right

#18 A Sign To Hand In Your Notice

That last part is probably why the word gets thrown around so much online these days, usually with a laugh rather than a shudder. Nobody scrolling through pictures of a vending machine with a facial recognition ad panel thinks they're witnessing the fall of civilization. But there's something familiar in the pattern anyway.

#19 Someone At My Doctor's Office Made A Paper Bikini To Censor This Medical Illustration

#20

#21

A little surveillance here, a little forced cheerfulness there, a subscription fee where a one time purchase used to be. It's dystopia in miniature, the genre's DNA showing up in the small print of everyday annoyances rather than in a sweeping fictional regime.

#22 This Restaurant's Bathroom Faucet Has A Display For Ads

#23 Dystopian Storage Container Walls Around People’s Park In Berkeley CA To Keep Homeless Out

#24 School Put Gates To Lock Bathrooms Between And During Classes

Calling your smart fridge dystopian is obviously a joke, mostly. But jokes like that stick around because they're pointing at something real, the sense that modern conveniences occasionally come with a faint aftertaste of control. So as you scroll through the examples below, keep an eye out for that mix of slick design and quiet unease. It's the same recipe Mill was gesturing at back in 1868, just running through a much smaller, much stranger set of appliances.