Stuck World

The age of stuck:

Pop culture, performing its canary-in-the-coal-mine function, has been trying to warn us about stucktopia. Every age gets the dystopian nightmares it most fears: In the 1930s and ’40s, it was George Orwell and Aldous Huxley’s visions of totalitarianism; at the millennium, it was dark imaginings of societal collapse, whether a zombie apocalypse or the hunger games. Our new fictional nightmares are all about being trapped: mice running in an endless maze, too cowed by the complexity of the system to plow through the dead ends and find freedom. Televised portrayals of stuckopia can’t defeat authoritarian governments or teach us how to do so ourselves. But they do offer a first step toward action — a way to recognize what parts of us are purposely staying stuck. Considered together, these shows force us to consider whether we’ll stay content with our meager daily doses of cold comfort in a larger, broken system — or toss them aside and find a new way to live.

The office has become the new dystopia...