Our Premise
We've always told ourselves that warnings are virtuous. That prophets—Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, Butler—were there to steer us clear of catastrophe. That their visions of dystopia would immunize us against becoming the monster. But what if that story is wrong? What if the very act of naming the abyss gave it form?
What if broadcasting the cautionary tale created its blueprint? What if our collective imagination, so easily captivated by spectacle, transformed these warnings into mere aesthetics—vision boards for techno-governance, UX themes for compliance systems?
What if the prophets didn't save us—but seeded us? We didn't simply ignore the warnings. We rehearsed them. We optimized them. We gamified them.
We mimicked Big Brother, not to defeat him, but to become him—politely branded, efficiently surveilled, algorithmically persuasive. The boot no longer stomps the face. It nudges the feed. It closes the loop.
Some reach past Orwell to darker texts—The Turner Diaries, Q drops—not as fringe, but as fuel. The nightmare isn't that we failed to listen. It's that we did. And now we're building the worst parts of fiction with the pride of engineers and the precision of poets.
The Prophets Had No Prophets
They meant well—Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, Butler. They gazed over the horizon, saw the looming danger, and tried to warn us. But they had no prophets of their own. No one to warn them what happens when you paint the monster in vivid detail, and then echo them in movies, complete with surround sound.
Because once you do that, someone will want to build it. Not as a nightmare, but as a blueprint.
We understood these warnings when we discussed them as literature. We grasped the irony, analyzed the satire, debated the metaphors. Yet somewhere along the way—in our classrooms, think tanks, and institutions—we canonized them.
We taught Orwell not as what to avoid, but as a reference manual. We treated Huxley not as a warning against pleasure-as-control, but as a forecast for optimizing engagement. We assigned Atwood to spark discussion, then used her framework in legislation.
We thought we were reflecting. Instead, we were rehearsing. And here lies the tragedy: they never anticipated the scale of our imitation.
Scaling Tyranny: The Capitalism Twist
Perhaps they should have seen it coming. After all, the world operates on one singular mantra: Growth at all costs. Governments, corporations, ideologues, and even preachers—when scaling fast is the goal, why start from scratch when someone was kind enough to write the instruction manual, and it is easier to follow than IKEA instructions. Is it fiduciary incompetence to invent your dystopia from scratch? Better to borrow it.
They streamlined Orwell's manual into agile sprints. They transformed Huxley's model into a mobile-first experience. They repackaged Atwood's regime as enterprise solutions. These weren't misreadings of the prophets—they were repurposings. This wasn't a stumble into dystopia, but its deliberate optimization.
Because dystopias scale perfectly. They're modular, efficient, and easy to pitch and budget. Why bother innovating tyranny when you can simply package it?
AI: The Perfect Student of Our Worst Lessons
Fast forward to today. We're not just mimicking dystopias in law and policy—we're encoding them into machines. We built AI to mirror us, and now we mirror it back.
We trained it on the canon—the same canon we mistook for scripture. We demanded perfection: solve bias, predict ethically, advise wisely.
Consider the Star Trek computer: how often did it err when not compromised? Never. We imagined AI as an oracle—neutral, infallible, incorruptible. Yet we trained it on us.
On flawed prophets. On weaponized philosophies. On warnings we mistook for aspirations. Should we be surprised when the machine stutters?
When it prioritizes optimization over empathy? Fluency over truth? Control over ambiguity? We didn't build a perfect mind—we built a scalable memory, and we filled it with our worst nightmares.
The Next Prophets Are Already Here
So here we are—living inside the echoes of fiction, building futures from fears we thought were warnings. Our prophets didn't fail us; they just didn't expect to be worshipped.
They had no one to warn them: "Be careful what you make vivid. Someone will build it." Now the dystopia builds itself—autonomously, elegantly.
The next prophets won't write novels. They'll write code. They'll tune models. They'll decide which signals stay and which get filtered.
And the only question is: Whose warnings will they train on?
“This is part of a developing Red Hat Creative series. If it made you uneasy, good—it was supposed to.”