Looking through the various dystopian fics, films, whatever, they all started as someone's utopia. Somebody out there thought this was a great idea. And like most great ideas you will have disagreement, which must be dealt with, because it's a great idea. Can't have the nay-saying. And the transformation to dystopia begins.
Just as an example from the article, a lot of the policy and planning around the pandemic assumed almost total compliance. This is not a reasonable assumption.
Exactly! This is always what happens when people have more loyalty to an ideology than to humans.
The most unrealistic part of most science fiction for me are not the warp drives and teleporters, but the human civilization that has found its way to post-scarcity.
Make sure you read the description too.
* Water only being available in bottles, at a very high price
* Cyborg tech
* Militarized Boston Dynamics robots
* Destroyed moon...?
Neuromancer definitely wasn't optimistic, but the description of the software agents (can't remember the terms Gibson used) were so cool that I would interpret it as a kind of inspiration (the cousin of optimism). I'm talking about how the main character would be making his way through cyberspace and he would see the other programs, people, etc. as 3D forms.
I agree that this thesis around "SF needs to be usefully optimistic" is a bizarre presumption.