In case you've never heard of "boring dystopia" before, the term was coined by the late British academic and cultural theorist Mark Fisher in 2015. It refers to the bland and mildly coercive signs that flourish in a late-stage capitalist society, which give out pervasive feelings of unease, discontent, and isolation.

That same year, Fisher started a Facebook group that documented these signs as a way to become more aware of the world around us. Members got the chance to share pictures of rarely seen England and the page quickly filled with eerie images of broken machinery, ragged shop signs, and cameras closely monitoring decaying streets.

The group brought together examples of "Silicon Valley ideology, PR and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have." All of this was accompanied by a description: "Neoliberal England is a boring dystopia. Here's why."

"[The group] wasn't that well thought-out at the start, to be honest," Fisher said in an interview with Vice. "I'd never done a Facebook group before." See, he shut down the community when he noticed it started to become like any other group on the platform.

"It was just recirculating 'content' and sending links, keeping people inside what I would call capitalist cyberspace instead of looking outside at their own environment. It felt like it was reinforcing the condition it was intended to displace," Fisher explained. Although many felt it was an untimely end for the popular group, 'A Boring Dystopia' sprung up in its wake soon after. The subreddit was created in 2016 and has already amassed over 750k devoted members eagerly waiting for the newest posts.

"Boring Dystopia was partly about the fact that no one can care about stuff any more," said Fisher. "It's not that they don't care, but in a city like London, or any intensely pressured urban metropolis — add to that the pressures of capitalist cyberspace and people just feel like they perpetually have no time."

"Our resources for caring are depleted, and that has aesthetic consequences," he added.

Previously, we reached out to Macon Holt, Ph.D., a researcher at Copenhagen Business School and author of Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, to learn more about this phenomenon. According to him, "boring dystopia" is related to another term introduced by Fisher — "capitalist realism". He used it to describe "the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable form of the political, social and cultural organization following the end of the cold war."

"Boring dystopia is more about the aesthetic experience of living in capitalist realism at a point in time when the system appears ever more unsustainable (ecologically, [politically], and in terms of increasing inequality and decreasing standards of living) but in which no other way to organize society has emerged," Holt told Bored Panda.

Although we may imagine a dystopian future similar to exciting movies like Blade Runner or The Matrix from the '80s and '90s that offered depictions of going out with a bang, it is more likely to consist of mundane scenarios. "As the years in which those images came around, none of the dreams or nightmares came true," Holt said. 

"Instead, space travel is becoming the hobby of billionaires while they ignore the ecological crises they could perhaps help with, AI and robots seem either to be surveilling us while they vacuum or when we click on a link, and the VR worlds of the metaverse are just ways to charge us more rent for spaces that we can't actually occupy."

While this list involves some of the most evident examples of boring dystopia, Holt mentioned bureaucracy is also a common one. "Like the terms of a rental contract that forbid tenants to use cooking oil on the stove, so a landlord can keep the deposit if a single drop is found on the extractor fan hood."

"NFTs are perhaps a good example of boring dystopia," he continued. "If a sci-fi writer were to dream up a situation in which people paid the money they had earned doing actual work for a certificate of verification that they own a .jpeg of a bored ape, their editor would probably say the world the story depicted would be too depressing to publish."

He also noted that our beloved Bored Panda also draws attention to the conditions of contemporary boring dystopia in its name and tries to break up the monotony of the everyday. "In boring dystopia, people are often anxious about work, housing and the future of the planet, and there's very little to alleviate this. As Mark Fisher put it 'No one is bored, everything is boring.'"

For some, pictures pointing out modern-day dystopian reality could be a source of entertainment. For others, they may create a daunting sense of a lost future. Speaking of the latter one, Holt said that the material things that make people feel that way (skyrocketing housing prices, student-loan debts, insane medical bills — the list goes on) stem from actions at various levels of society. 

"It is just what happens when the interests of people with power align," he added. "Boring dystopia is the experience of our faith in the future having been betrayed. There is no quick fix. Instead, to quote Donna Haraway, we have to 'stay with the trouble' if we want to commit to a future we can flourish in."

"One piece of advice that is really easy for coming to terms with and starting to imagine a way out of boring dystopia would be to read Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? It is an incredibly accessible piece of critical theory and is only about 86 pages long. It is a great jumping-off point for finding out more. Read it with friends and talk about it after. It is a great way to feel less alone in a world that seems to be ever more isolating," Holt concluded.