John Titor's Utopian Dystopia

I've just read all 19 pages of the Titor archive -- great work, ATS!

While I am very open-minded, there is something about John Titor's story that bothers me: it sounds like a classic Utopian future narrative.

Now, billions of people dead & unsuitable drinking water--doesn't sound at first like a Utopia, does it? But remember--Titor doesn't sound too upset about all the dead. He says early on that it sounds like all the "right" people died. Then he says that he doesn't want to give out any information that might prevent the deaths, because he thinks it was a good thing that our population got drastically reduced. Right off the bat, I really don't trust this guy--not that I think he is pulling a hoax (which is very well possible I'm afraid), but I don't trust him as a human being.

Who are the "right" people who died? The people in the cities. Presumably the rich, the "elite," the politicians, many of the intellectuals, people involved in the "machine." Also, a lot of ordinary people just trying to live their lives (but are presumably tainted by the "city life). Furthermore, Titor explicitly states that the people in the cities are "the enemy" -- as well as the government & industry in general.

Who survives? Those who subscribe to a combination of a communal hippie farming environment & survivalist compound. Now, I have no problem with the idyllic-sounding hippie part of this equation. It's all the guns guns guns & talk of how the "urban elite" are the enemy that needed to die that gives me pause.

This narrative reminds me just too much of other radical utopian stories--like those that preceeded the Nazis and also The Turner Diaries. Except here instead of discriminating against race or religion, we discriminate against class & capitalism. Is it any coincidence that it's Russia that nukes only the "bad" capitalist cities, leaving the country relatively untouched in order that communes may be built? Also, there is a fixation with elements like big capitalist "big-wigs" like Bill Gates meeting untimely ends--was he drawn-and-quartered by the Revolution?

It is the strong ideological bend to this narrative that makes it the most suspect in my opinion--not the seemingly fantastic time-travel elements (like I said, I'm open-minded).

I'm not a conservative or extreme pro-capitalist pro-status-quo type of person. I harbor my own New World Order fears. But these types of narratives need to be looked at with a critical eye. If you read some of the pre-Nazi pastoral utopian stories, of a pure, pre-industral Germany (before all the "evil intellectuals and other nasties" gotta hold of it), it's kinda similar. I also took a course in college about "Utopias" and I guess I'm really relating the Titor stuff to what I learned. But this is why it is so important to collect this stuff and post it on ATS--so we can read exactly what Titor wrote, & make up our own minds.

You're quite right about the "utopian story." A number of people said that it was basically a rip-off of an existing science fiction story. I'm unfamiliar with the story named, but it had a lot of standard archetypes that made me believe this is true.

Well... that and all the bad science and cardboard scenarios.