I agree that it can be interesting to think about, but not on most of the specific points they made.
Q: How do “we” know when we are in a dystopia?
A: “We” don’t, because it depends upon what one’s ideal society would be, and people generally cannot be assumed to share those ideals (unless we are being lazy).
One tricky thing about Utopia is that whereas More posits it as a form of ideal society, this is not to say that it is described as a society worth striving for! Utopia literally means “no-place”. The actual opposite of a dystopia would be the similarly-pronounced Eutopia, a good or pleasant place - and even more than 500 years later, people still confuse these!
Problematic also is the assertion that since Thomas More is noted for coining the term for his book, that anything anyone describes as a utopia owes something to More’s ideas.
The connotation of a dystopia being necessarily inescapable is recent and owes more to Orwell and Huxley than John Stuart Mill who coined that term. A dystopia is no more innately inescapable than a eutopia is inevitable. And I can’t credit Rand as belonging to the same cautionary political fiction canon as Orwell or Huxley either.
What I did enjoy was the 2.5 minutes or so of describing what Thomas More’s ideal society was like. Although there wasn’t any context provided about what More himself thought of the system. I can imagine some alt-right dipshits come to the realization that: “Heeeey… Progressives are considered utopian - and Utopia had slaves! So progressives are crypto-slavers! They are the real racists/exploiters/oppressors here!” It can come off as a vague “socialism is scary!” critique.
