I agree that dystopian fiction is far from a new thing, and our current collective angst does not seem any greater than it did in the past.
The two elements I find most interesting about the most successful dystopias are that...
1. They are almost inevitably set in the near future, meaning that the world can be a slightly more extreme version of the world we currently inhabit.
2. They feel cathartic to experience, partly because unlike our current world where we struggle to understand what holds us back, in the near future world being portrayed the extreme elements of the world are the clear danger and allow us to be confident in knowing what will help improve things. This clarity of purpose can be cathartic.
Whether we want to admit it or not, one of the values of future-based fiction is to line up our expectations of what we expect in this time period. We're unwittingly programming ourselves to prepare for the worst. I wish we took the time to explore more diverse ideas of how our future might look like.
But it's not an either/or proposition. There are sci-fi works that are just in the future without being overtly dystopian or utopian. Asimov's Foundation Series and the Ender/Bean books, for example. Literature is dominated with dystopia now not just because of narrative possibilities, but because it sells and perhaps speaks to a contemporary world view many of us share. I can't speculate too much on why dystopia is popular, but it's just clearly not just because it's easier to write.
A lot of dystopias have involved visions of the future where important parts of society have been largely subsumed by corporations. Those two ideas don't really conflict.
Dystopian because these are very high tech which naturally concentrates their use and abuse by the super rich nation states and corporations while the rest of humanity will be watched like caged animals with no scope for any kind of opt out or pushback.
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