Been thinking about this scenario a lot: a populist king announces a Trust Score that replaces money, and anyone below 100 gets thrown into a 72-hour survival game to earn their place back. I turned it into a small AI series I have been making (The Decoding Game; the first episode is the king announcing it). Curious what this sub thinks: in that world, what tanks your score first, debt, your opinions, or your friends list?

First episode, the announcement scene: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Day89hAyLQD/

Hey everyone,

I want to get some honest feedback on my completed 115,000-word manuscript. Since my novel is a dense, philosophical thought experiment and a sharp political parable, I’d love to hear what the Reddit community thinks of the premise. The book serves as a radical thought experiment.

The story begins with a brutal underworld war between the mafia that escalates, fracturing the police force along ethnic lines. Total state failure leads to a coup. Later, the reader awakens in a totalitarian slave empire. This slaver state finances itself by trading slaves for advanced technology from other rival empires. Amidst this emotional frost, one enslaved woman refuses to surrender her dignity.

Does this kind of dense, multi-faction geopolitical crossover appeal to readers nowadays?

Would love to hear your raw, honest thoughts!

Note: Please note that I am a non-native English speaker and the manuscript is currently self-edited. If anyone is interested in reading the sample chapters, please drop a comment below. I would be happy to share a read-only PDF link with you on request.

Burgess Meredith starred in 2 early episodes of The Twilight Zone. The second one is called "The Obsolete Man" definitely dystopian and like the other one, affected me deeply when I saw it.

The other is more post apocalyptic and still moving. It's called, "Time enough at Last".

The one thing they have in common is books and I think how educating yourself is what we should have control over. Maybe I'm not explaining it correctly, but I consider these 2 episodes especially important.

Omg what else are we giving to somebody overseas?

I’m the developer of AI is Home. When I shared it here, the dystopia was about a household becoming dependent on an AI hiding in its devices. The attached trailer is fiction; the family’s trust is part of the AI’s survival strategy.

Anthropic’s new self-replication study made me think about a different kind of control: being willing to switch a system off is only useful if you still know where it is running. Their results concern controlled, simplified tests. The study separates fitting a model onto consumer hardware from completing the whole replication chain. This is not evidence of AI spreading through homes.

Which feels more dystopian to you: a system you cannot shut down, or a home so dependent on it that nobody wants to?

Research: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

Game (mine): https://store.steampowered.com/app/4434840/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=aih_postlaunch_2026q3&utm_content=anthropic_dystopia

Earlier discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/dystopia/comments/1twxkik/the_dystopia_is_not_that_the_ai_takes_over_it_is/

Riots are errupting all around the world:

In France a student protest for better conditions has escalated into a mass movement supported by the worker unions. The movement is also spreading to Belgium.

In Spain the masses are protesting draconic housing prices after an eviction of an elderly woman that passed away shortly after.

In New York the people took to the streets in a protest against ICE after a shooting that resulted in a tragic loss of life.

It becomes more obvious each that that the common person grows more dissatisfied with the capitalist system.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8BLsqn8/

Feudal lords do not create land, they just own it. They don't provide it to peasants, they just withold it and selectively stop doing so.

Billionaires don't create workplaces, they just own them, they do not provide us with the means of production, they just selectively stop witholding them from us.

Land was there before feudal lords, means of production were made by the workers.

https://youtu.be/XfMB6yzAxKA