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The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius made the link to fossil fuels in 1896, but it took another six decades before the American scientist Roger Revelle warned that a hotter planet might have rather negative consequences for human civilization. Scientific consensus on climate change arrived in 1979 (crystallized by the Carter administration's Charney Report), but widespread public alarm didn't set in until 1988, on the hottest June 23 in the history of Washington, DC, when NASA scientist James Hansen told the US Senate that global warming was no longer a theory-it had already arrived. Margeaux Walter's art utilizes mediums including photography, installation, video, and performance to portray issues related to conservation, climate change, consumption, and waste.

The nineties are defined by historians as ‘the longest decade’. With the world being coded as a huge village along the axis of globalization, the need for all ethnic, religious, and racial subjectivities to be evaluated as a sub-unit of this ‘global village’, the abolition of national borders, products of the global market reaching beyond the borders of the farthest villages, and magnificent advances in communication technologies have developed at a dizzying speed and has encompased the world like a web, with no public or individual boundaries pertaining to privacy. With this in mind, , I saw that there was a global approach in Turkish playwriting. First I thought that this approach was based on the concern regarding the end of the millennium equaling the end of the world. Long after I completed my doctoral dissertation, I quickly realized that these plays were in fact thematically tied to eschatological myths, without any mythological basis by the authors. I analyzed three plays written in the late nineties from a dramatic perspective. I reviewed the data obtained by the qualitative analysis method based on descriptive model in terms of structure (fictionality), content (the relation to eschatological myths), and the aesthetic dimension (the author’s artistic originality ). This review constitutes an evaluation of authors struggling to produce their own original work, their own reality and subjects, which is a local problem for our theater. At the point of importing surface aesthetics and the world’s theme, I suggestmaking the parable one’s own, by discussing and problematizing with in-depth thought. In the plays I have studied, the apocalypse, which is an ancient theme considered to be an eschatological myth, is reduced to an imported phenomenon. On the other hand, playwriters read about Christian figures like Jesus Christ and the possibilities of nuclear and cosmic catastrophe under the influence of globalization. Reading common ideas of the world as a path to its roots will ensure the originality of our authorship.

The re-emerging nature of virtual reality (VR) and recurring waves of hype have made this technology a conduit for imaginations of solving complex social and ecological problems. Recent iterations of VR, such as mobile VR and VR head mounted displays (HMDs) for casual users, have made it evident that the spatial relations of VR are multiple and complex. This article utilizes the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia to explore how spatilities of VR are imagined and practiced as counter-spaces in a digital landscape of smartphones and social media. Focusing on the heterotopia’s ability to provide a space for contesting and inverting the societies within which they exist, I show how VR is constantly juxtaposed against other technologies, digital places, and techno-embodiments in user imaginaries and practices. Through ethnographic materials on domestic VR usage collected in Swedish homes, I found that notions of VR as an “other” or different medium are laden with imaginings of VR technology bringing about a better society—a virtual utopia. These positive futures are paired with and derived from dystopic imaginaries and fictions. Recognizing the necessity to take media imaginaries and their inherent spatiality seriously, through how they are expressed and acted upon in the digital geographies of everyday life, I explore how VR users’ contesting ideas are deployed to make VR a hopeful other in a technological landscape. I conclude that conceptualizations that are slippery, self-contradicting, and do works as tricksters have much to offer digital geographies.

Science and technology transform the frontiers of knowledge and have deep and powerful impacts on society, demonstrating how social reality varies with each era of the world. As a set of fictional representations of technologically driven future worlds, the Metaverse is increasingly shaping the socio-technical imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, i.e., the outcome of radical transformations of dominant structures, processes, practices, and cultures. At the core of the systematic exploration of science and technology is the relationships between scientific knowledge, technological systems, and values and ethics from a wide range of perspectives. Positioned within science of science, this study investigates the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the wider social context in which it is embedded. Therefore, it adopts an analytical and philosophical framework of STS, and in doing so, it employs an integrated approach to discourse analysis, supported by a comparative analysis of the Metaverse and Ambient Intelligence. This study shows that the Metaverse as a scientific and technological activity is socially constructed, politically driven, economically conditioned, and historically situated. That is, it is inherently human and hence value-laden, as well as can only be understood as contextualized within the socio-political-economic-historical framework that gives rise to it, sustains it, and makes it durable by material effects and networks. This view in turn corroborates that the Metaverse raises serious concerns as to determinism, social exclusion, marginalization, privacy erosion, surveillance, control, democratic backsliding, hive mentality, cyber-utopianism, and dystopianism. This study argues that, due to the problematic nature of the Metaverse in terms of its inherent ethical and social implications, there need to be more explicit processes and practices for enhancing public participation and allowing a more democratic public role in its shaping and control, especially early in the decision-making process of its development—when the opportunity for effective inputs and informed choices is greatest. The novelty of this study lies in that it is the first of its kind with respect to probing the link between the Metaverse and data-driven smart cities from an STS perspective. The main contribution of this study lies in deepening and extending social scientific critiques and understandings of the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities based on the analysis and evaluation of the Metaverse and the warning signals and troubling visions it conveys and animates in order to help construct desirable alternative futures for the greater good of all citizens. The ultimate goal is to structure the Metaverse in ways that are morally acceptable and collectively the most democratically beneficial for society.

CARL SCHMITT’S DIE BURIBUNKEN AS A SATIRICAL DYSTOPIA The paper focuses on some early writings of the German legal and political thinker Carl Schmitt. During the First World War Schmitt published three essays in the Catholic journal Summa. In this paper I aver that those three articles – though remarkably various in content and literary form – are connected thematically and conceptually. The paper particularly attempts at an interpretation of Die Buribunken which is apparently only dystopian text in Schmitt’s oeuvre. I try to show in what ways it engages with modernity and Hegelian philosophy of history. I also point out rather surprising topicality of the text in the digital age. CARL SCHMITT’S DIE BURIBUNKEN AS A SATIRICAL DYSTOPIA The paper focuses on some early writings of the German legal and political thinker Carl Schmitt. During the First World War Schmitt published three essays in the Catholic journal Summa. In this paper I aver that those three articles – though remarkably various in content and literary form – are connected thematically and conceptually. The paper particularly attempts at an interpretation of Die Buribunken which is apparently only dystopian text in Schmitt’s oeuvre. I try to show in what ways it engages with modernity and Hegelian philosophy of history. I also point out rather surprising topicality of the text in the digital age.

In today’s global order, for those seeking a just, equal, and healthy existence for humanity and nature, it is time to exercise the transformative utopian impulse. Yet, against such praxis, capitalism’s retrieval mechanism subsumes and consumes the potential of utopianism. Within this co-optation, an enclosure of “eutopian” sensibility within a resigned “dystopian” structure of feeling compromises the radical utopian project through practices of disciplined “improvement” within the “realism” of the existing order. Herein, this essay discusses two symptomatic texts that it argues are imbricated within this dystopian ambience. With great respect for its author, I read Dystopia: A Natural History, by Gregory Claeys, as a component of this hegemonic structure of feeling rather than a challenge to it; meanwhile, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Dystopias Now” as a negation of that negation, as the author takes an anti-anti-utopian stance that reasserts the radical utopian project.

This article examines the complex implications of artificial intelligence (AI) in societal and commercial contexts and challenges both utopian and dystopian perspectives. It highlights two key areas: AI’s impact on the meaning of labor and on human-machine interaction. We argue that AI will not only displace jobs but also enhance employment by augmenting human capabilities. While fears of automation are rooted in current socio-economic structures, AI has the potential to shift discourse towards a more optimistic view, emphasizing human augmentation. The article advocates for a balanced approach to harness AI’s potential while mitigating alarmism. We also call for further research into AI's future trajectory aiming to harness its benefits while addressing associated risks and concerns.

Piotr Szulkin był jednym z najważniejszych twórców polskiego kina ostatniej dekady PRL, który w intrygujący sposób próbował także tworzyć „kino osobne” w realiach wolnej Polski. Niestety, autor ten do dziś nie doczekał się w naszym kraju dedykowanej mu monografii akademickiej ani antologii tekstów naukowych poświęconych jego dziełom (filmy, teatry telewizji, opowiadania literackie i obrazy). Z kolei artykuły popularnonaukowe na temat kina Szulkina skupiają się najczęściej na odczytaniach tego fenomenu polskiej kultury w kluczach politycznych, historiozoficznych bądź związanych z poetyką dystopii. A przecież zarówno fantastyczno-naukowa tetralogia reżysera, jak i kilka innych jego produkcji kinowych oraz telewizyjnych to pozycje, które wykraczają daleko poza te perspektywy. Filmy Szulkina można bowiem uznać za arcyciekawe przykłady kreatywnego czerpania z różnych tradycji myśli frankofońskiej (m.in. Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard), estetycznych postaw poetyki absurdu i groteski (z Beckettem na czele), a także z tez wybranych antropologów i socjologów kultury (Girard czy Bauman). Oprócz tego typu tropów w swoim filmoznawczym upamiętnieniu zmarłego niedawno reżysera Konefał stara się również odnaleźć wątki i strategie narracyjne z dzieł Piotra Szulkina, które mogą się wydawać interesujące dla młodszego pokolenia widzów, nieznającego jego twórczości (autor bazuje tu na opiniach studentów gdańskiego filmoznawstwa oraz norweskich doktorantów z Arktycznego Uniwersytetu w Tromsø).

The paper examines the manner in which female anger and anxiety are channelled through two recent American reproductive dystopias, Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018) and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017). Starting from these two novels, I argue that anger and anxiety in feminist dystopias represent both the vehicle for political and social critique and the response to (potential) oppressive reproductive practices.

Seoul systematically removed all graveyards that once lay within the city and its surrounding areas, a phenomenon notably distinct from urban development patterns in other parts of the world. After the Korean War, refugees and migrants poured into the devastated capital. In this postwar environment, cemeteries—traditionally sites of mourning and death—transformed into spaces of survival for displaced populations. With the military demarcation line preventing their return home, refugees began to envision their lost hometowns as “absent places”: unattainable utopias, idealized lands where all beauty resides—the very origin and endpoint of life. In contrast, Seoul, where they were forced to settle, became a “dystopia,” stripped of sanctity. Over time, however, the next generation reinterpreted this dystopia, gradually transforming it into a heterotopia. As Seoul’s urban landscape expanded, this heterotopia evolved into a Christian paradise. The second generation, having never experienced the trauma of displacement, found the newly constructed city comfortable and secure. Reinforced concrete buildings and asphalt roads became symbolic of paradise. The development of Gangnam—famously captured in Psy’s global hit “Gangnam Style”—represents a belated cultural revolution among younger generations in modern South Korea and exemplifies the transformation into a concrete paradise.