Hope Blooming Between Dystopias

I'll admit it: I love dystopian movies.

"Dystopia" covers so many subgenres, from post-apocalyptic to cyberpunk, that everyone probably pictures something a little different. For me, the point isn't the story or the visuals. It's that particular uneasy feeling they leave you with. They make you feel that our existence and our reality matter less than a speck of dust in the universe. It's hard to call it sadness exactly. It's a strange, in-between kind of feeling. Which is why, honestly, I can't watch them very often.

There are two reasons I love the genre.

The first is that I've always wanted to get at the essence of things, at the truth. When Morpheus offers Neo the blue pill (the Matrix) and the red pill (the real world) in "The Matrix", I'm pretty sure I'd have taken the red pill too. Of course, in the movie the real world turns out to be far more miserable than expected, and a few characters even want to go back into the Matrix. Still, whether the answer turns out good or bad, knowing the truth matters to me.

Dystopian films usually take on pretty deep subjects, like life after death or what it means to be human. I think just exploring and reflecting on those questions has value. That's why I enjoy conversations and books about philosophy and faith, and I try to hold at least some answers of my own to those questions. Without them, I find I lose my motivation to keep going. I can't say these beliefs are everything in this world, but they're probably among the values I hold most important. So I think that's why I'm drawn to a genre that deals with these themes so often.

The second reason is that you can feel the will to survive somehow, even in the bleakest situations. I've seen scenes of someone left alone on Earth, or drifting through space with nothing but an oxygen tank. When I watch someone in that situation fight to find a way out, I feel a kind of love for humanity. On a small scale, it might just look like one person thrashing around out of fear of death. But as a fellow human, it also feels like a sense of mission: to leave the mark of our existence as a species on this enormous universe for just a little longer. So watching it, I feel both heartache and gratitude.

Okay, now back from the movies to reality. The world we live in today is hard, but I don't think it's the dystopia we see on screen. Not yet. With the arrival of the AI era, though, a lot of IT engineers predict that within five years normal life will end, and we'll get one of two worlds: Skynet from "The Terminator", or a utopia. Their reasoning is that humans still have a switch that could control how AI develops, but because of competition, nobody has any intention of hitting it.

Even so, I'm optimistic about the future, and I expect the world to be better five years from now. We've been through countless rivalries, wars and pandemics, and I still think the world has kept improving day by day.

That's why Elon Musk gives me a quiet sort of hope. Sure, there's the worrying side too, like shouting about Dogecoin and running wild on Twitter. But when I hear about SpaceX's plan to move people to Mars, it feels like watching a dystopian movie.

Someday, for one reason or another, the Earth is going to face its end. I doubt humanity has an answer for that today. Probably only a handful of global leaders, Elon Musk among them, are seriously thinking about it. So as someone who just lives day to day, focused on the here and now, I'm grateful for that.

If something actually happens to Earth and we have to move to Mars, I can't say whether he could take care of everyone else. Maybe he could, maybe not. I might not get to go along. But even so, the fact that at least a few people could survive and look for another chance, rather than everyone dying as things stand, is where I see hope between the dystopias.

Last, I want to mention a Netflix original animated series I discovered recently, "Love, Death & Robots". I think you could call it dystopian. It's made up of episodes that run 5 to 20 minutes each. They're great for watching one at a time, but they're so deep and unsettling that it's hard to keep going back to back. My pick is the episode "The Very Pulse of the Machine."

An explorer on Io, one of Jupiter's moons, crash-lands after a volcanic eruption. With not enough oxygen left, she tries to walk back to base, 41 kilometers away. To push through her failing strength she keeps injecting herself with morphine, and as a side effect she starts to hallucinate.

When she comes out of the hallucinations, she finds herself standing in front of a vast sea of magma with only two minutes of oxygen left. A voice speaks out of thin air. It says it is Io itself, and tries to persuade her that if she jumps into the magma, her body will be destroyed but her mind will remain, and she can become one with it. She asks the voice, "If you're a machine, what is your function?" The voice answers, "To know you." She gives a faint smile and finally throws herself into the magma.

At the very end, contact with Earth is restored, and you hear a voice that seems to be hers. I take it to mean that, just as Io said, she was reborn as a being merged with the moon.

Given the title, "The Very Pulse of the Machine," my reading is this. At first she saw Io as something lifeless, a machine. But as they talked and connected, she gave Io a life force it never had, and she gained a kind of eternal life of the mind that goes beyond the body.

The line "To know you" in particular gave me chills. To "know" someone carries the deeper meaning of empathizing with and understanding them. Watching a human come to know, and become one with, something that stands at the opposite pole from us (lifeless matter, a machine, a moon), I found it deeply moving and strangely comforting.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, January 4, 2024.