Survival is insufficient: Degenerate utopian nostalgia in popular culture post-apocalyptic fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From SARS to H1N1, and most recently COVID-19, global disease outbreaks have defined the past several decades. For many, we are living in what can only be described as a pre-apocalyptic moment. Indeed, we are currently facing a global pandemic outbreak – a situation that had been previously described as imminent and perhaps even long overdue. Consequently, the publication of pandemic narratives has increased exponentially, which exposes a heightened social concern about the risk of viral outbreak. But instead of speaking to these growing anxieties and providing models to interpret our current position, a growing body of popular culture post-apocalyptic fiction remains deeply entrenched in a dangerous nostalgia that undermines the construction of hypothetical models that could appropriately respond to these threats. I argue that these texts can therefore be read as degenerate utopias , Louis Marin’s term for the false utopian myths that circulate within a society. A degenerate utopia is thus not really a utopia at all, but rather an ideology that elevates the past to a false state of perfection. My article examines the construction of degenerate utopian realities through collective memory in Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".