The fact that you find one fictional account more compelling than another is really worth examining. It could, of course, support your argument that it is more "realistic as a prediction" ...
but it could just as well support my argument that fiction *shapes* how we think we are, so when we read a lot of dystopic fiction, which matches the worst examples of how we are, but set in different conditions, we recognize that who we are (right now) matches, so we assume that means that who we are (right now) is who we are (under all conditions ever) ... that is to say "it is hard-wired".
That is a kind of cynicism that I find unappealing, but it is also really hard to break, since because dystopic capitalism is where we live, and all we have ever known, we have absorbed its tenets, treat it as human nature, and so find stories that show us in competition with the people who have what we have only worse to be more compelling than stories which show us people who would not want to trade what they have for what we have, but would be happy to just give us what they have.
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but it could just as well support my argument that fiction *shapes* how we think we are, so when we read a lot of dystopic fiction, which matches the worst examples of how we are, but set in different conditions, we recognize that who we are (right now) matches, so we assume that means that who we are (right now) is who we are (under all conditions ever) ... that is to say "it is hard-wired".
That is a kind of cynicism that I find unappealing, but it is also really hard to break, since because dystopic capitalism is where we live, and all we have ever known, we have absorbed its tenets, treat it as human nature, and so find stories that show us in competition with the people who have what we have only worse to be more compelling than stories which show us people who would not want to trade what they have for what we have, but would be happy to just give us what they have.