Models of Future Societies Between the Non-fiction of the Pandemic Years and Contemporary Science Fiction

Abstract

Here, I report on two researches conducted between 2020 and 2023 with some colleagues from the University of Turin. The first was on the essays about the future of our own societies written in the years that just preceded the Cov-2 Sars pandemic and during the pandemic itself. The second, on behalf of ForwardTo, a think tank founded to build scenarios of the future, was on the contents of films and TV series in the science fiction genre produced from 2000 to the present day, in order to understand what types of societies they prefigured. What I discovered is that the narratives used by the authors of such factual and fictional texts are very similar, so that it seems that there is the same cultural model behind them. This leads me to assume that such cultural model plays an important role in enabling us to imagine the future of our life together. Hence, I try to describe its structural principles, recurring to the instrument of the semiotic mapping and using some examples taken from Haraway (2016), Fagan (2017), Berardi (2020), Giaccardi and Magatti (2020), Padoan (2020), Pozzi and Dusi (2021), Salvati and Dilmore (2021) and from Mad Max: Fury Road (USA, 2005) and Foundation (USA, 2021-ongoing). This allows me to show that the types of societies that are criticised or promoted in my corpus of analysis – the individualistic, tribal, responsible and inclusive ones – are inter-defined and that their meaning depends, at the same time, on the differences from the others and on the connections that they have with all of them. I also show that one of such societies, the inclusive one, which I define as complex, multi-perspective, responsible and based on the logics of the non-unlimited desire, is the most recurrent and appreciated, giving a hint of the kind of world that the authors of the texts I analysed would prefer to create in the future.