

Dystopia Tracker – explore sci-fi predictions as they become realities - davidbauer
http://www.dystopiatracker.com/

======
avivo
This is very clever idea. But why just look at negative predictions?

We've also made so many steps toward utopia, and sometime utopian patterns are
deeply linked to the dystopian patterns. (e.g. elimination of crime and
ubiquitous surveillance). It would be even more fascinating to see these
together (and substantially less depressing!).

Edit: The intro in the comments addresses this:

"Why so pessimistic?

Agreed, the name Dystopia Tracker is rather gloomy. Yet I’m actually not
pessimistic about the future and technology’s role in it. It’s just that I
think it’s crucial we stay wary about possible negative developments to get
the best possible version of a tech-enabled future. Of course, you’re more
than welcome to enter promising predictions and their realisations to the
Dystopia Tracker. Not least because for most predictions, different people
will have different opinions on whether its realisation would do more good or
more harm."

~~~
DrStalker
Add the ability to filter to show utopian/sydtopian/all and then include a
trend graph showing how many utopian predictions have come to pass vs. how
many dystopian ones.

------
davidbauer
If you want to learn a little more about this project, read this, «Introducing
Dystopia Tracker»: [https://medium.com/tech-talk/introducing-dystopia-
tracker-18...](https://medium.com/tech-talk/introducing-dystopia-
tracker-18abfccded96)

~~~
UweSchmidt
Nice, comes with an API even. Seems like a serious project, not just a novelty
website.

May I ask what kind of effort you've spent on the site? You've manually
translated many of the english contributions :)

Suggestion: \- Add a little category icon to each card. Took a while to
realize that the colors correspond to categories, and when I open the category
dropdown the cards are offscreen so I can't tell/remember which is which.

\- the "Bootstrap blue" doesn't seem to fit the rest of the (beautiful) theme.

\- The title search has some titles available for which no cards exist. I'd
love to know if anything from "A Fire Upon The Deep" has become reality
already...

~~~
davidbauer
Thanks for the kind words.

Re effort: I've built this while embedded with the great folks at Journalism++
in Berlin and Paris in roughly 4 weeks full time. Plus some time for polishing
and adding initial content.

Thanks for the suggestions. Will consider all of them. We wanted to get this
off the ground and see if anyone is interested, but definitely planning to put
more work into it (also on the timeline view which currently isn't available).

Titles showing up in the search even if they don't have any recorded
predictions yet is intentional. Hope this prompts people to add predictions
from sources they know.

------
notahacker
Proposed realization of Fahrenheit 451: "2012 You don't own your eBooks."

...nah

That said, systematically tracking predictions made by speculative fiction is
one of the better ideas I've had and never bothered to start implementing, so
nice to see someone working on it.

------
pdkl95
I've been using Max Headroom as a benchmark. I think we may b e up to ~80% of
th episodes becoming _literally_ true. It's been an episode every other year,
approximately.

