Could you imagine living in a world where companies would live in a world where corporations would do anything to increase profits? I’m guessing you can. I can too because it sounds exactly like our world today. But what happens if we keep moving in this direction?

This is the theme behind my newest short story, Compulsion. It is a dystopian story which explores the ways that corporations are willing to exploit their customers and their employees for money when gone unchecked.

In this project, we focused on dystopia and how it functions as social criticism. It was our goal to explore dystopian fiction, find out what makes it an effective way to represent issues in our society, and then apply that to our own writing.

As a way to get some experience in the world of dystopian fiction, I read 1984. I found it to be a shocking but interesting book that really made me think about the importance of privacy and the dangers of control.  I absolutely loved this book and would recommend it to everyone as a way to learn about authoritarianism (which you can also learn more about from our documentary The Cost of Silence).

At the start of this project, I created a learning intention as a way to set my intention for what I want to accomplish and what I want to take out of the project. I chose to focus on pushing my creative ideas to their fullest. This year, my main goal is to push myself outside of my comfort zone. In this case, I wanted to push for full integration of my creative vision without taking shortcuts to make it easier to write. This made the story more difficult and it required more thought. I found myself having to force myself not to cut parts out or to change things to make them easier to write.

I wanted to create a story that showed what corporations (and even governments) are willing to do for money, no matter how exploitative of the people. I also wanted to parody social media companies by making products more addictive to consumers. The story took a lot of careful planning and even more careful writing, but I love the way it turned out. I ended up creating one of my favourite creative works ever. If I were to write the story again, I would probably include a lot more presence of people who are important to my main character to give the story a more personal and emotional tone. However, I am very proud of how it turned out and love the story and world that I created.

Click here to read Compulsion by Silas M

Dystopia is important as it allows us to look at our society with a critical lens. It allows us to represent issues in our society in a creative and engaging way. We can use it to warn people about what can happen if certain problems in our society get out of hand. Dystopia serves as an important way to criticize parts of our society that people may not always think about and give warnings about the negative consequences of current issues.