Dystopia Tracker – explore sci-fi predictions as they become realities
dystopiatracker.com
dystopiatracker.com
We've also made so many steps toward utopia, and sometime utopian patterns are deeply linked to the dystopian patterns. (e.g. elimination of crime and ubiquitous surveillance). It would be even more fascinating to see these together (and substantially less depressing!).
Edit: The intro in the comments addresses this:
"Why so pessimistic?
Agreed, the name Dystopia Tracker is rather gloomy. Yet I’m actually not pessimistic about the future and technology’s role in it. It’s just that I think it’s crucial we stay wary about possible negative developments to get the best possible version of a tech-enabled future. Of course, you’re more than welcome to enter promising predictions and their realisations to the Dystopia Tracker. Not least because for most predictions, different people will have different opinions on whether its realisation would do more good or more harm."
May I ask what kind of effort you've spent on the site? You've manually translated many of the english contributions :)
Suggestion: - Add a little category icon to each card. Took a while to realize that the colors correspond to categories, and when I open the category dropdown the cards are offscreen so I can't tell/remember which is which.
- the "Bootstrap blue" doesn't seem to fit the rest of the (beautiful) theme.
- The title search has some titles available for which no cards exist. I'd love to know if anything from "A Fire Upon The Deep" has become reality already...
Re effort: I've built this while embedded with the great folks at Journalism++ in Berlin and Paris in roughly 4 weeks full time. Plus some time for polishing and adding initial content.
Thanks for the suggestions. Will consider all of them. We wanted to get this off the ground and see if anyone is interested, but definitely planning to put more work into it (also on the timeline view which currently isn't available).
Titles showing up in the search even if they don't have any recorded predictions yet is intentional. Hope this prompts people to add predictions from sources they know.
...nah
That said, systematically tracking predictions made by speculative fiction is one of the better ideas I've had and never bothered to start implementing, so nice to see someone working on it.