The things that matter to literary people (character and story) are entirely secondary and are generally pasted on as an afterthought.

An interesting insight. Dystopian science fiction is cheaper by Tyler Cowen. The original is The Remarkable Neal Stephenson Interview by Damien Walter.

In my discussions with people interested in books and reading, there is a sturdy disinterest in the economics and commerce of the book business and a desire to ascribe outcomes to social issues (bias, risk aversion, fear, etc.) rather than to logical outcomes from economic first principles. This is evident in a new campaign, an extenuation of one that has been going on since 1965, to increase the number of African-American characters in books (see New Initiative Aims To Encourage Diversity In Kids' Publishing by NPR Staff). The challenge for people wanting to highlight particular attributes (race, culture, gender, class, etc.) is that the market numbers can get very small very quickly. This is compounded by changes in the industry, there are fewer channels to market (independent bookstores) where customers can be exposed to a broader and more varied selection rather than the best selling titles from the catalogue of biggest publishers. It is all about economics. If a publisher cannot find a market among readers for its wares it will not continue, it cannot continue to publish those books. In the NPR article, First Book seeks to rectify that problem by guaranteeing that they will buy 10,000 copies of any book with an African-American protagonist. But Coretta Scott King award has been around for several decades to bring commercial attention to books by and about African-Americans and still books go out of print pretty quickly owing to low demand. First Book is committing the limited depth fallacy. They are correct that the biggest barrier is that people aren't buying the books they wish to propagate. Offering to purchase books that meet their specified criteria deals with the first level issue. But as is so often the case, by dealing with the symptom, they have overlooked the cause.

People have to want to read the books. If they are not desired, then all First Book has done is create a temporary subsidy that will at some point disappear and everything will revert to the norm. Simply buying books that are not read is a mere palliative. People have to want to read the books and that is the problem that needs solving.

From the interview with Stephenson, he highlights an even less observed commercial influence in the publishing industry.

DW – We seem to have a lot of these negative cultural narratives about technology – the apocalypse of course, environmental collapse, but also the most negative assessment of our economic situation, that capitalism has reached its end game and technology won’t power it any further. Do we face a hard limit on our current development? What comes next?

NS - It is worth pointing out that the narratives are just that: narratives. We should begin by asking ourselves where those narratives come from and why they are that way; there’s no prima facie evidence that they have any connection whatsoever to how the future’s actually going to play out. Except, of course, insofar as they might make people so discouraged and skeptical that they become self-fulfilling prophecies.

For practical purposes, the only narratives that matter are the ones we see on screens in video games, TV series, and movies (much as I would like to believe in the power of the written word to sway the imagination, it just doesn’t have the same ability to swerve the zeitgeist as the screen-based media).

In the budget of a video game or a movie, writing is a very small wedge of the pie. The money all goes into other wedges. In both games and movies the production of visuals is very expensive, and the people responsible for creating those visuals hold sway in proportion to their share of the budget.

I hope I won’t come off as unduly cynical if I say that such people (or, barring that, their paymasters) are looking for the biggest possible bang for the buck. And it is much easier and cheaper to take the existing visual environment and degrade it than it is to create a new vision of the future from whole cloth. That’s why New York keeps getting destroyed in movies: it’s relatively easy to take an iconic structure like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and knock it over than it is to design a future environment from scratch. A few weeks ago I think I actually groaned out loud when I was watching OBLIVION and saw the wrecked Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ground. The same movie makes repeated use of a degraded version of the Empire State Building’s observation deck. If you view that in strictly economic terms–which is how studio executives think–this is an example of leveraging a set of expensive and carefully thought-out design decisions that were made in 1930 by the ESB’s architects and using them to create a compelling visual environment, for minimal budget, of a future world.

As a counter-example, you might look at AVATAR, in which they actually did go to the trouble of creating a new planet from whole cloth. This was far more creative and visually interesting than putting dirt on the Empire State Building, but it was also quite expensive, and it was a project that very few people are capable of attempting. Only James Cameron has the clout to combine such a large budget with so much creative independence; he was able to turn Rick Carter loose on the design and create magic. But in basically every other movie, game, and TV show, the creators of the visual environment are caught in a trap where their work is expensive enough to draw scrutiny from executives who are, by and large, unwilling to take chances on anything new, and will always steer in the direction of something that is cheaper to produce and that they have seen before. And this ends up being the degraded near-future environment seen in so many dystopian movies.

That environment also works well with movie stars, who make a fine impression in those surroundings and the inevitable plot complications that arise from them. Again, the AVATAR counter-example is instructive. The world was so fascinating and vivid that it tended to draw attention away from the stars.

Compared to all of these considerations, the things that matter to literary people (character and story) are entirely secondary and are generally pasted on as an afterthought. So, what you are characterizing as “negative cultural narratives about technology” are, in my view, just an epiphenomenon of decisions made by entertainment executives who basically don’t care about narrative at all. Taking those narratives seriously is kind of like looking at a Rolls-Royce and assuming that it is made entirely out of a giant block of paint.

Everything comes down to supply and demand. Because people aren't demanding what you want to supply doesn't make them evil.