The increasing urgency in the state of our world has increased the number of media that incorporate environmental themes and highlight the impact of human activity on the natural world. Popular culture reflects the contemporary ecological crisis through portraying despondent landscapes. This can be seen in popular works of science and dystopian fiction like The Matrix, Wall-E, and Ready Player One. Through these depictions, the ecological crisis is not only presented as ongoing and imminent but serves to educate and warn us about the trajectory of our own world.
Popular culture often presents the contemporary ecological crisis as unavoidable and imminent through grim dystopian landscapes. Through genres like science fiction and dystopian fiction, stories are often set in devastated post-apocalypic landscapes and neon infused corporate dystopias. These bleak versions of the future are how popular culture presents the impending ecological collapse to audiences. Through various forms of media, popular culture portray how corporate structures and systems that have brought our planet to the brink of annihilation. This is depicted in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. The novel takes place in 2044, and depicts a bleak landscape of overcrowded cities, social malaise, and endemic food shortages (Nordstrom, 2016, p. 242). The world is crumbling, faced with poverty, global violence, and environmental collapse (Nordstrom, 2016, p. 242). The protagonist, Wade Watts, is an orphaned teenage boy who lives in a slum complex of trailers called ‘the stacks’ on the outskirts of Oklaholma City. The stacks are precarious piles of trailer homes stacked on top of one another and loosely held together with a vertical network of girders. Berlant (2011) highlights that “traditional infrastructures for reproducing life— at work, in intimacy, politically—are crumbling at a threatening pace” (p.5). This grim reality is portrayed in Ready Player One as the crumbling traditional infrastructures of housing has led to a massive urban housing shortage. This housing shortage is the result of an “oil crash and the onset of [an] energy crisis [that led] large cities [to be] flooded with refugees from surrounding suburban and rural areas” (Ernest Cline, 2011, p.21). Therefore, the imminent crisis is displayed through the despondent setting of dystopian popular culture.
Further, dystopian stories can serve as warning of the trajectory of our own world. Society in Ready Player One “no longer have enough energy to keep [their] civilization running like it was before” (Ernest Cline, 2011, p.17). Therefore, they have had to cut back on resources which has led to an ongoing “Global Energy Crisis” (Ernest Cline, 2011, p.17). This “ongoing economic recession” prevalent in Ready Player One (p.5) can be likened to the “ongoing crisis and loss” occurring in our current world that Berlant (2011) emphasises (p.5). The contemporary climate change is reflected through dystopian worlds where “polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. [Further,] plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless.” (Ernest Cline, 2011, p.17). These environmental changes described in Ready Player One has events that are already happening in today’s society (Saatsi, 2018, p.67). Therefore, these presentations of the contemporary ecological crisis suggests that this fate of the natural world has already been sealed. This is because bleak visions of the future have become so ubiquitous through popular culture like Ready Player that the end of the world seems mundane and inevitable (Bulfin, 2017, p.142). Therefore, popular culture reflects how the ecological crisis and climate change is an ongoing and imminent problem.
Moreover, Ready Player One hints that the ecological crisis is worsened by capitalist consumer society. This is portrayed through advertisements that encourage players to use real money to purchase credits to travel within OASIS and purchase equipment to play despite many not having enough money to pay for their rent and food. Berlant (2011) suggests that the contemporary crisis is due to the “state’s withdrawal from the uneven expansion of economic opportunity, social norms, and legal rights that motored so much postwar optimism for democratic access to the good life” (p.3). Although not blatant, Ready Player One suggests that are is an uneven expansion of economic opportunity through the portrayal of a company called Innovative Online Industries (IOI) who attempt to takeover OASIS. Further, IOI’s monopolization of numerous services like internet access and transportation suggest that Ready Player One’s world has become a capitalist consumer economy (Saatsi, 2018, p.67). This is also suggested through Wade’s assertion that OASIS would become a “corporate-run dystopia” if IOI took control of OASIS (Ernest Cline, 2011, p.33). Although everyone can access OASIS for as little as a quarter, IOI had access to resources, money, and expertise not equally distributed to others. Under contemporary capitalism, Berlant (2011) highlights that there are “dynamic relations of hypervigilance, unreliable agency, and dissipated subjectivity” (p.9). Therefore, popular culture attempts to show how capitalism has reduced individuality and dissipated subjectivity which has compounded the effects of the ecological crisis. This reduction of individuality can be seen in Ready Player One as IOI individuals are differentiated only through a number and sent into the game like mass-produced clones. Therefore, dystopian popular culture presents the ecological crisis as a fate already sealed due to capitalism.
As viewers, we need to be aware of how some popular culture doesn’t encourage us to take steps towards solving the ecological crisis. Nevertheless, similar to Cline’s conclusion of Ready Player One, we need to remember that the only way to make real change is to be present in the real world.
Have you read or watched Ready Player One? What are your thoughts? Comment down below