Just down the road from where I live is an excellent bakery. Our London neighbourhood has lately transformed itself from the kind of place where the local caff would serve you a homely bap to a place where this new bakery seems right at home; sourdough loaves, cardamom rolls, flat whites made from single-origin coffee and small jars of jam at £6 each. I confess that I love this bakery. I feel guilty about it. I recognise that my presence – and the presence of other people like me, calling ourselves middle class but really, by the standards of any other time in the history of the world, fabulously well-off – in this neighbourhood is one of the reasons it exists, and also why it's harder and harder to find a cup of coffee that does not cost £2.70.
Recently the bakery has put up a small sign by its cash register. “Sorry,” says the sign, “Card payment only.” No more digging around for heavy pound coins that chink together with the weight of something earned and saved: tap your card, tap your phone, and you and your coffee can be on your way.
Unless you don't have a card or a phone to tap. If all you have is coins, tough luck, and the sign on the “cash register” might as well say: “Keep out”. So, says the novelist Sam Byers, in considering what a dystopia might or might not be, we must ask ourselves: a dystopia for whom? “Many people – not just around the world but in this country – will tell you they are living in a dystopia,” he tells me. “If you are homeless and trying to register for benefits and the system won't accept your application, you're living in a dystopia. If you have arrived in this country and have refugee status but don't have a home address, you can't get a bank account: you're living in a dystopia.” When we talk about dystopian fiction, Byers says, we have to wonder: “Are we just imagining something that other people are already experiencing?”
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