By: Stephanie Alana-Christie Disney’s 2016 animated film, Moana begins with the theft of the heart of the Polynesian goddess Te Fiti from the island of Motunui. The demigod Maui steals the heart of Te Fiti in order to bless the islanders with gifts. The gifts include fire from beneath the earth to keep them warm, […]

By: Maggie Mayer When people hear the words utopia and dystopia, what do they think of? Most people think that a utopia is an ideal society where everyone gets along with each other and all problems are fixed, while a dystopia is the complete destruction of society and no one has hope for the future. Some […]

By: Kirsten Cooper Technology has come a long way in a short amount of time. In a Ted Talk entitled “Beware, online ‘filter bubbles,’” Eli Parser explains that search engines and other tools online filter our content and tailor future content to include information and services we frequently search for and click on. This means the […]

By: Rachael Carmichael Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was onto something when he wrote the fictional dystopia, Harrison Bergeron, disguised as a utopian society set in the United States in 2081. In this short story, everyone is finally “equal” due to the creation of the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments of the Constitution. The government-mandated equality is purportedly […]

By: Samantha Kubiak In the novel Parable of the Sower, author Octavia Butler sets up a menacing dystopia in a future, collapsing United States, set in the 2020s. The country has become ravaged by the crippling effects of climate change, enormous wealth inequality, and rampant capitalistic greed. The story itself centers on a young woman […]

By: Allison Akers Human error and the failure of utopia is a common theme in Death Note: an anime series about a genius high school student named Light Yagami. Light finds a notebook called the “Death Note,” which has the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it. The series follows Light’s attempts […]

By: Taliyah Jarrett Technology—the root of social unrest and turmoil in the dystopian television series, Black Mirror. This futuristic world brings fantasized technologies and real world concepts to life, but always with a twist. In the real world, for instance, software engineers are developing incredibly realistic virtual reality video games. Black Mirror translates this idea into […]

By: Marisa Sloan Traditionally, the word “dystopia” evokes a panoptic, authoritarian government subjugating its citizens with machinery, or orchestrating their lives through mind control amidst environmental degradation. Yet the murder, abuse, and trauma born out of dystopic regimes begin with internal violence, the murky well of human thought, rather than the systems themselves. Without the […]

By: Natalie Kuss Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence in technology. From operating systems to high tech robots, there seems to be no limit to how AI can be used. As artificial intelligence continues to be programmed to adapt and mimic human behavior, society has begun to imagine what a world would […]

By: Jacob Garrett In 1832, when Joseph Smith was only seventeen years old, he claimed he was visited by an angel named Moroni, who led him to discover golden tablets that detailed how a lost tribe of Israel sailed to what eventually became the United States.  It was this story that formed the basis for […]