Those preparing for one apocalypse or another (and their personal shoppers) are driven by myriad forces: facts, prejudices and profits among them. But I’ll add another cause to those obvious ones: hope. I don’t believe the culture of dystopia is ringing cash registers because people are literally hopeful that billions of human beings will die, but I do think many hold dear the fantasy of a post-civilization because of the disquiet the developed word causes. To think that it could all be over is to ease anxieties. Maybe we don’t only fear scarcity but also the absence of it. From Jason Concepcion at Grantland:

“Modern life is way too dark for stories about building great nations. Tides are in full ebb. Dystopian fiction and media is a reaction to our reaction to the now constant whisper of bad fucking news: terrorism, financial crisis, the erosion of the middle class, historic drought, racial animus, global warming, choosing between water and energy. In dystopian stories, as in real life, the only sane reaction to a stranger with a gun is fear and flight.

Dystopias reflect the fear that our future will be one of scarcity, without the the promise of a great manifest destiny. ‘In a way, how can you be a sane and compassionate human being and not be increasingly alarmed by what’s happening to the planet, when it’s potentially civilization-ending?’ said author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) recently in the New York Times.

Dystopian fiction takes the stark drama of the frontier and moves it into your neighborhood. This modern-frontier idea manifests itself most tellingly on reality television. Shows like Doomsday Castle and Doomsday Preppers take environmental and economic fears and view them through the lens of America’s demographic shift.

Both shows can be summed up as terrified white people stockpiling food and guns. One man on Doomsday Preppers explains his system for hiding and securing food supply caches thusly: ‘Out here in the rural areas, people are going to be spilling out to take what farmers have. I’m not going to allow my family to be a target.'”

Predictive sentencing (likely unconstitutional) is already a reality in America, as is predictive policing. Right now the anti-crime efforts focus on algorithms crunching numbers, but in the longer run brain imaging and genetic testing could be used to identify the potentially hyperviolent or criminal, which, of course, sounds more troubling than lawlessness itself. From Henrick Karoliszyn at Aeon:

“These early predictive systems are only the start. In years to come, many legal experts speculate, brain scans and DNA analysis could help to identify potential criminals at the young age of three. Some evidence for the approach came in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: researchers from the US and the UK tested 78 male subjects for different forms of the so-called ‘warrior gene’, which codes for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), a gene that breaks down crucial neurotransmitters in the brain. One version of MAOA works efficiently; but another version breaks down brain chemicals only sluggishly, and has long been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. Some researchers held that, in war-prone societies, up to two-thirds of individuals had the low-activity gene – versus the more typical percentage of just one-third, found in the more peaceful nations of the world.

To see if this controversial hypothesis held up in the lab, researchers asked the same 78 subjects to take a second test. They were to hurt individuals they believed had stolen money from them by ordering varying amounts of painful hot sauce in their food. (In reality, the ‘thief’ was a computer, so no person was actually hurt.) The findings yielded the first empirical proof that those with the low-activity form of the gene – the warriors among us – did indeed dish out more pain.

These findings soon found their way into criminal court: in 2009, at a trial in Tennessee, the defendant Bradley Waldroup was accused of killing his wife’s friend – by shooting her eight times and slicing her head open – and then slicing his wife again and again with a machete. Yet despite the glaring evidence, he avoided a first-degree murder conviction based in part on the warrior gene defence. He had it.”

While Facebook’s recent research on unwitting customers wasn’t as upsetting as, say, the Stanford Prison Experiment, it rightly brought about an avalanche of criticism. But what does this mean for social scientists who wish to conduct experiments from the Internet’s wealth of data rather than lab-based trials, studies which won’t produce profits but knowledge, which could bring to light hidden prejudices? From the Economist:

“When it emerged in June that Facebook had secretly manipulated the emotional tenor of what a small fraction of users saw, outrage ensued. Even though this kind of experimentation is within the bounds laid out by tick-box user agreements, many column inches were devoted to the ethical considerations of subjecting users to such fiddling.

Online, many people simply typed ‘derp.’ The word is used as a postscript to a stupid action or statement; it is probably a bastardisation, of the kind that the internet tends to produce, of ‘duh.’ A new academic initiative aims to reclaim the word, at the same time putting social-media research on a more ethical footing: DERP, the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership.

The effort brings together 18 academic fellows and five social-media partners: Imgur, an image and video repository; Reddit and Fark, two community-driven news and discussion sites; StackExchange, a collection of question-and-answer sites; and video-sharing service Twitch (recently acquired by Amazon for $970m).

Collaborations of this sort are not new; Facebook’s folly was just particularly publicised. Some of the most innovative digital research to date has studied the simple process of Reddit users asking for a gift of pizza. Research by Tim Althoff of Stanford University, in California, and colleagues analysed the sentiments involved in 22,000 posts on Reddit’s ‘Random Acts of Pizza’ (its tagline: ‘Restoring faith in humanity, one slice at a time’).

Their paper ‘How to ask for a Favor,’ shows that pizza-pie philanthropy was correlated to how early in the month the request was made, and how needy an asker appeared to be (rather than merely how desirous). As mundane as these results might seem, they represent the vanguard of social-network science. This analysis of thousands of real people interacting in a real situation—as opposed to a few dozen underpaid undergraduates in a trumped-up psychology-lab scenario—showed that, contrary to psychologists’ expectations, Reddit users rewarded neither requests that sounded upbeat nor those from people who seemed similar to themselves.”