We reach for the binary of utopia and dystopia so flagrantly as framing devices. Particularly dystopia, which understandably is deployed in politics, climate discourse, AI debates, culture wars, national identity etc. But they increasingly feel less like imaginative categories and more like moral sorting codes.

Everything is either liberation or catastrophe. Progress or collapse. Enlightenment or delusion. You are either on the right side of history or you are the problem history must overcome.

Reading an article by Barbara Klonowska entitled; "On desire, failure and fear: Utopia and dystopia in contemporary cinema," she argues that classical utopias have largely disappeared from cinema, surviving mostly as nostalgia or irony: failed communes, ruined paradises, broken dreams of collective life. Dystopia, meanwhile, has flourished, but often by becoming less political. It has moved away from detailed projections of social organisation and toward individual survival, romance, adventure, spectacle:

“The individualistic and narcissistic turn of contemporary culture at the expense of communal spirit and social responsibility must affect both utopias and dystopias as both of them are forms of social dreaming and ways of imagining society and social structures on a world scale. The fact that contemporary dystopias hardly seem interested in society at large, in serious detailed projections of nightmarish social organizations or environmental disasters, focusing instead on the individual and the local, is not a good prognostic not so much perhaps for their productivity in the future, as for the inspiration they may provide. Thus reduced, dystopias may lose their function of a mental experiment and an in vitro testing of viable hypotheses and may become merely one of the available forms of entertainment.” (Klonowska, 2018: 25)

So the concepts of utopia and dystopia are not just optimistic and pessimistic genres. They are ways of imagining social life at scale. They ask: what kinds of institutions produce what kinds of people? What forms of power become normalised? What happens when our desires are organised by particular economic, technological or ideological systems?

Reading her text I was thinking about this point: how contemporary dystopia often lets us feel politically alert while quietly removing politics from the centre of the frame.

We get dread, trauma, alienation, survival, paranoia, collapse. But these are mostly experienced through the lone protagonist, the family unit, the small enclave, and the localised emergency.

The wider system becomes atmosphere. The social order becomes mise-en-scène. The dystopia is no longer a hypothesis to be tested; it is a world to be escaped from, survived, gamified, aestheticised.

And perhaps that tells us something uncomfortable about the present.

Our own political imagination has become dystopian in form but individualistic in content. We are very good at diagnosing catastrophe, less good at imagining structures. Public debate increasingly works through mutually incompatible apocalypses. For one side, progressive change is utopian justice; for another, it is authoritarian nightmare. For one side, technological acceleration is emancipation; for another, human obsolescence. For one side, the past is the thing we must escape; for another, the future is the disaster already arriving.

So the real problem may not be that we are trapped between utopia and dystopia.

The problem is that both have hardened into polemical identities.

They no longer help us think.

If dystopia becomes merely a mood — a cinematic texture, a political posture, a personalised feeling of doom — then it loses its philosophical force. It stops asking what society is becoming and merely confirms a kind of political-psychological stagnation.

It’s so telling that any visions alluding to a potential utopian future are always nostalgic ruins of a failed past.