AHC: A Dystopic 2010s

(in before "isn't that OTL?"

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it (please accept it), is to have the 2010s decade be as realistically dystopic as possible, with a PoD of no earlier than 2007.
 
Ukrainian Crisis escalates as WW3.

Or then one certain person in Washington decides to nuke North Korea.
 
Occupy Wall Street get very bad, some protesters gab and kill some VIPs, looting and burning of some brokerage houses. The Stock Exchange get "attacked" with a group doing a sit it and the police and security use a bit too much force removing them, all filled and shown. Protests break out over most of the USA, people see rich people as the problem. "Law and Order" politicians get elected on the promise of cracking down, the use of voter ID is used to stop groups of people from voting (poor/unemployed/arrested)
To make the cities "safe", mandatory ID is required, that ID has to be shown to police.

China takes notes and gives pointers to the US.

Russia seeing that the US is distracted with internal issues moves in to keep Russian citizen "safe"
 
I'm not sure if you could achieve full-on dystopia in less than 15 years. To me, difference between a mere post-collapse scenario and a dystopia is that the latter is a society that's more or less functional but horrifyingly oppressive and highly fortified against any uprising. For an example of a universe with both, look at Star Trek. The era of Sanctuary Districts for the poor and "undesirables" of society and needing a license to use the internet would be dystopian; the years between World War III and First Contact where nation-states were gone and various "factions" took their place would be a post-collapse scenario. For a real life examples, the Great Depression before the New Deal could be considered a post-collapse scenario; China is becoming increasingly more dystopian (if all news about them is to be believed).

I think the latest POD you could have to make things dystopian all over by now is the September 11th attacks being worse. Say that the plane that hit the Pentagon hits the Capitol building instead. Or more of the hijackings succeed and one of them hits a major power plant and disables the grid for much of the country. For America, it seems like the prophecies that supposedly said the world would end at the end of the second millennium came true, but a few years late. Emboldened, al-Qaeda attack several other targets in North America and Western Europe. To settle the chaos down and restore order, several governments declare martial law. Culturally, the mood becomes one of paranoia and clinging to extreme nationalism for comfort.

Through technology, by 2019 much of the Western world is a full-on surveillance state, with any dissent treated as "treason" and therefore punished accordingly.
 
Have Clinton beat Obama in 2008. She’s likely to try toeing a line that ends up pissing off both the right and the grassroots left. That should increase polarization, discord and violence in our political system.
 
Have Flight 93 hit it’s target, causing widespread damage.

Further terrorist attacks in US/Europe-must have one chemical or biological attack on a major transport system in say 2004

US goes to war with Iran in 2006 or around that time

significant damage to world oil production as a result-by 2009 World is under hyper militarised hyper nationalist USA with a far worse global depression and strict controls on Liberty in us and Europe. Have US anti-terroirst legislation creep into European countries putting Europe in a weird legal satellite of the US.

Or have the Soviet Union implode very violently in the late 90s so that by the 2010s most of mainland Europe is in poverty and Asia is under some kind of economic subjection from China as the US and UK heal their wounds from the Soviet Civil War
 
Have worst version of Great Recession of which would have turned into a redux version of Second Great Depression with the worst consequence are widespread unemployment, increased political polarization, and fallout from the effects of Second Great Depression and a deadly terrorist attack as well as Saudi Arabia had plunged into violent civil war by 2011 which had nearly crippled oil production prompting joint NATO intervention on protecting oil fields of former Saudi Arabia that resulted in increased protests over continued financial problems that had allowed the continuous rise of political extremism of which had contributed to the switching of various Western states into surveillance state with any people who had committed an act of dissent will be treated as "treason" and therefore punished accordingly.
 
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