The bright past versus the dark future

So one thing I’ve noticed for a while is the title name.

If you examine stories set in the past, you will find they can be bright or dark. As a general rule, the west will be dark and the East bright, at least as far as isekai and regular fantasy goes. This is so true that it’s noteworthy when the opposite happens - an Eastern story that is truly fucked, and there aren’t any modern illustrations of the reverse for the west.

But if you look at the future, it’s always fucking dark. Every fucking time, no matter who makes it or why.

The absolute best it can manage is seeming positivity through extreme naivety (Soy Trek, Soy Wars), saving themselves at the eleventh hour and fighting a last ditch effort for survival (Starshatter) or the science fiction elements primarily exist as a means of entering the fantasy world which, as far as the postmodern viewer is concerned is the past, even if the natives are far more advanced than Clown World in most ways because they understand that shaking their asses on camera does not an advanced civilization make (PRO).

It is theoritically possible that advanced technology won’t result in a dystopia, and as far as Clown World is concerned, advanced technology of certain types is the best it can do at fixing certain key problems.

But for the most part, Uncle Ted is right.

And it isn’t that technology is intrinsically Evil, but rather that anything will be corrupted in Clown World, and retarded NPCs aren’t sapient and so cannot manage or utilize it responsibly, resulting in them getting filtered out at least as hard as PRO filters them out. (Most LitRPG comes out more fucked than the scifi both because of this and the generalized western soy and subversion)

Incidentally, the makers of the Ark have obviously crossed that line, but the story doesn’t focus on them much for reasons you can likely deduce already if you read the first four books. And a central part of the conflict at the beginning of PRO is because Gerulf isn’t sure if it’s run by based people or if he’d effectively get the death penalty for a Power Word: Trigger or at least be docked 1,000 XP for wrongthink as Soy Valley is the most likely origin point of any such technology, so trusting it would be the pinnacle of foolishness.

But even ignoring the direct aspects of technology, it makes everything and everyone very cheap and disposable. Oh, your ship is destroyed, well everyone is dead and there is no surviving that. Oh, this ship is orbitally bombarding a planet, well six gobillion dead is barely a footnote. While scifi isn’t the only genre that does this (and I mock cultivation slop for essentially the same reasons) it is the most obvious offender.

Given the nature of it, I’m not even sure that it’s a fixable problem, as either you’ve reached the point where you’ve transcended conflict, or any conflict that does occur by definition makes the story dark purely because of its scope and scale. But it’s telling that no one really tries, because no one can imagine a bright future even though writers are Gods who, unlike a certain other entity claiming that title, need not be psychopathic and demented and alien in the malicious sense of the word.