Now, gamers, don’t get your hopes up too much. I’m going to talk a bit today about a difference between Fallout the TV series and Fallout the video-game franchise—but only as this difference pertains to a bigger environmental and human behavioural point I want to make with both.
William Gibson is credited with saying that “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” But when the expression was first uttered, there was an implication in that word, “future”, that merits greater scrutiny. Is “the future” always a good thing? We often treat it as such, but it might be more accurate to suggest that many futures are already here—some good, some grim, and all in active tension with one another.
Let’s talk about the “grim” first, before we eye the “good” with suspicion.
The places in our world already living out terrible futures find humans and surrounding ecosystems afflicted by pollutants emerging from modern industry. They’re deprived of critical resources so that their environments can serve material production processes for others. They’re driven from their homes by desertification, rising heat and water levels, air quality crises, and extreme weather events—then stigmatized and exploited as immigrants, wherever they land next.
They’re plagued by war, disease, and pestilence in more expansive measures, too; and if such a region hasn’t entirely fallen prey to autocratic rule, its core institutions are either lost to local warfare, or so useless as to cede everyday operations to black markets run by corrupt nongovernmental actors. Ethnic divisions will have surged as a means of deciding who does and does not matter. Education, media, restorative justice, and the protection of human rights will have receded into pipe dreams, too.
And to be clear:
None of this is a game, in the parts of our current world already so afflicted.
Nevertheless, in other parts of the world we still use games, and similar forms of entertainment media, to explore what such an existence might look like. The whole notion of “apocalyptic” and “post-apocalyptic” landscapes is fun background colour to some, played out on devices that rely on mineral life cycles and energy economies that make those same apocalyptic conditions an everyday reality to others.
(As do smartphones, or whatever device you’re using to read this piece today.)
Now, there are many hand-wringing advocates“for” and “against” video games and dystopian entertainment media. Some think these activities desensitize us. Others think they help us to conceptualize the challenge—and maybe even to prepare better for it. Policy engineering games like Half Earth Socialism might be more expressly suited to the task of training us to adopt a long-term mindset to environmental crisis, but immersive sensory experiences like Fallout are always going to be more popular cultural touchstones for building a vocabulary around related topics.
In other words: it’s silly to spend our time fretting about whether something helps or hinders, when it’s already the vocabulary used by many to talk about our dying world.
Fallout imagines a world that fell into cultural freeze around mid-20th-century Cold War aesthetics* and then entered a hot war via nuclear apocalypse. Some people survived in bunker societies, while others endured radiation sickness on the surface. In the decades after initial planetary ruin, each cluster of survivors—surface and “vault”-bound alike—then strove to rebuild society in its own way.
*Unnervingly, those mid-20th-century aesthetics are supposed to resurge in the 2070s, which doesn’t bode well for the trajectory of current US politics.
The recent TV adaptation of the Fallout franchise crafts a new story in 2296, 135 years after the start of events from the original video game. There’s a lot of narrative safety in that temporal remove, but it also comes with the streamlining of some in-game world-building that first raised huge questions about what it means to survive.
One of the most striking changes lies with the treatment of irradiated people called “ghouls”, who in Fallout backstory went about building communities for themselves, too. Some ghouls are feral, but many are simply differently human in this post-apocalyptic landscape, and go about fairly normal lives. Although their communities weren’t always open to “smoothskins”, the reverse was also true, and prejudice led to violence within and between these groups, the same as it does for us today.
In the TV adaptation, ghouls still exist, but there’s little sign of their alt-communities, which plays into the story arc’s dominant claim that flourishing societies are only really possible in the vaults: bunkers developed by people over 200 years ago, who’d each gone to great pains to see their view of society carried into the new world.
Now, the show’s core, elitist idea about the preservation of “civilization” does get destroyed over the course of Season One, as our pluckiest protagonist leaves her vault to save her father from a vicious gang on the surface. However, even when a late-season reveal shows that people had already emerged and started rebuilding—leaving Vault 33 very much behind the times, instead of would-be saviours to all—the focus shifts to other humans who still look human, surviving and thriving together.
Ghouls remain peripheral elements in all alt-societies discussed.
And therein lies my core fascination today—because there are many ways to code for who “counts” and who doesn’t in our media. Who really “belongs” to the solution, and who’s just part of the background noise in all our grand narratives of survival?
Granted, the CGI and costuming necessary to create a more intricate ghoul society would have presented a significant material constraint on this TV adaptation, but there’s no reason that historical examples couldn’t have come up more prominently in world-building dialogue. So what does it say about how we represent the world beyond our own, familiar cultures, that the TV show dropped this part?
In the broader Fallout universe, we learn that some ghouls were part of an experiment among the creators of the vaults. Some people wanted to see what would happen to humans partially protected, partially irradiated in the fallout. A few even underwent ghoulification before the apocalypse, to prepare themselves for its outcome. Many animals in the broader world also became ghoulified: trapped them in a state where they could not procreate, but could live for a greatly extended lifespan.
In the TV series, ghouls are turned into addicts: deteriorating beings that require routine access to a special drug to keep from going feral. This further classifies them as lost causes, barely holding onto a semblance of humanity they’ll still lose in time.
What this leaves is a show with fragmented aspects of Western nostalgia to cover the whole of the coming, post-nuclear world. And what do those fragments contain? Well, there’s a military cult that covets ancient tech; and the “middle America” Vault 33 crew, which lives with ancient tech; and the “Wild West” of certain junk towns and rogue bands along the way, which runs on ancient bottle caps for currency.
In all parts, then, the abiding aesthetic is one of a cultural freeze.
The idea that nuclear disaster will simply halt societal advancement.
The idea that nothing new can be expected to emerge from the ashes—least of all from anyone who doesn’t look and move through the world like us.
What’s the lesson to be taken from a depiction of apocalypse like this, about how best to navigate the apocalypse already here among our own?
The problem with our ‘good’ futures
Grim futures abound in the latest iteration of Fallout.
But what about the “good” futures? How do we square the idea of some of us doing just fine, more or less, while the rest of the world burns?
In both our world and Fallout, the good and the grim coexist for a reason. Just as a few vault societies in the video game and TV series benefit from past choices that inflicted great pain on others, so too do our “good” futures rely on great suffering and hardship elsewhere. In advanced industrial economies especially, we continue to enjoy material luxuries, global travel plans, and finance systems that craft new ways for “value” to go up even when labour does not—all while the emissions profiles behind these and other cultural perks accelerate environmental disaster for the rest of the world.
This disparity in outcome doesn’t trouble many of us, though, because we don’t expect the bubble to burst while we’re still here. Sure, the fallout will come—heck, it might already be here, somewhere—but how is that our concern? We’re just trying to get by in our own “vaults”, which have their own pressing problems and politics, too.
And after all, we didn’t make this system, did we?
We’re just playing out the character profiles we were born into, inside it.
But even if we can’t change the past, or wave our hands to fix the sharp divide in human futures that past transgressions have already yielded, we can at least reframe how we think about others affected by them.
In Fallout, the TV show, many humans are already surviving outside what’s considered a good life to our plucky vault-raised protagonist. In the video games, there are even more societies in tension: more ways that even the hardest-hit humans have learned to cope with their circumstances, and to carve out lives in community anyway.
In our world, too, there are a wealth of lessons in resilience and climate mitigation outside our cultural freeze: lessons to be learned, that is, from many on the margins.
As we strive to make sense of a world where “good” (techno-materialist luxury) futures for some already come at the cost of “grim” (toxic, resource-deprived) futures for others, it might not be the worst intellectual exercise to try to imagine futures that don’t look like either. What might the future-present look like instead, if we really tried to reduce human “want” across the board?
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
What's the word for an aphorism that has become hoary and moldy and wasn't all that good to begin with?
What, William Gibson, on earth is "evenly distributed"? How about nothing, and especially nothing like economic justice and nothing like good fortune.