What system would you use for a Bioshockish campaign? Ideally something unassuming/generic...

That is too weird to not work. So kinda fallout? How does it go wrong?

It would be a society which has placed all its faith in the opinions of experts. Enormous projects for the betterment of mankind are enacted, but the lives of the people it is intended to help get forgotten about in the process. The powerless are ground underfoot in the name of progress. If you want to be particularly cynical you could paint the powerful as perverting the projects to suit their interests, while convincing themselves they have the best interests of the masses at heart.

Alternatively you could do it as a sort of contemporary techno-libertarianism flavored for the fifties. Advances in technology will solve all our problems, and in the process of perusing this alternative paths to solving problems are neglected, and the negative side effects of new technology are ignored.

Pretty similar to Fallout, yeah. Basically imagine a combination of the Think Tank from OWB and Walt Disney's obsession with the "world of tomorrow" and planned communities.

A technological marvel of a city in space/on the moon, built by the scientific visionaries of the greatest generation who grew increasingly bitter about the failure of technology to deliver on it's promised futures, and ruled over by a MULTIVAC style thinking machine meant to plan every action to benefit the common good.

I was thinking a combination of both, particularly the last one and exploring the consequences of what happens when those technologies start to fail.

There is a thread archived somewhere, I can't find it at the moment, called "The Monorail of Broken Dreams" in which the City was a hidden lunar utopia that followed just he ideals you're laying out. It's worth a read.

I looked again and found it:

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/24089431/

Personally, I’m not one for dismissing the value of ‘rule by experts’ especially since we have a bunch of idiots running around ignoring the experts because they’ve convinced themselves they know best (anti-vaxxers for instance).

Me I’d make it about how any ruling class gets corrupt, authotarian, and inept once you shunt social mobility and close off the ranks of the ruling.
So moving into system shock/new Prey?

I’ve felt that a sixties/seventies bioshock in space was the next step in bioshock for a while. Where does the dystopia factor in then?

It is meant to be a dystopian exaggeration of an existing philosophy.

The dystopia comes in when it all starts falling apart, when people start chafing under a system that wants to dictate every move ,when the geniuses who run the systems that keep everything functioning stop wanting to do the dirty work of maintaining them in favor of their own grand designs, and when the little society they've built starts cracking because no one ever imagined what impact any of the technology they were using would have.

You are probably fine if you are doing this with just a few guys. It just rubs me the wrong way with the message being ‘don’t trust the experts’.
So like everyone just starts checking out after a while?

bump