Personally, as is often noted, “Idiocracy” is probably tops for current events… but for the farther future, I’d go Blade Runner Universe, most likely… just for the sheer scale of total biosphere degradation and megacorp control. How about you?
Not exactly sci fi, but the TV adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale bears some striking parallels to the current renaissance that extreme right ideologies are currently enjoying. Off the top of my head…
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It shows how quickly and easily street-level enforcement of an authoritarian system can be implemented, and that there is no shortage of people willing to take on that role.
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It shows that the architects of an oppressive system aren’t necessarily “true believers” in such a system, nor are they held to the standards demanded of the average citizen.
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It shows how extremist ideologies bleed beyond the borders of one country and begin to infect others.
You can see examples of all three of these in what’s happening now.
I really don’t want to be living in a Margaret Atwood book.
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Idiocracy 💯
It is the most unrealistic, dispite [gestures broadly to everything] because.
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President Dwayn Elezondo Mtn. Dew Herbert Comacho has a problem.
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They find the most qualified person to solve it, even though they are not sure 😉
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They (reluctantly) listen to his advice.
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Finally, once the day is saved, President Comacho does not take credit for it.
That is the most unrealistic part of the film.
Remember that’s it’s 500 years later. There will be plenty of time for things to get desperate enough that the masses will cry out for a savior, and the savior will look down and whisper, "no…
more brawndo on the plants."
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Movie leaders too understanding even if low IQ. Sigh…
Go away, ‘batin’.
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Exactly, is there any debate about this?
I mean aside from the president being much cooler and having a sort of good ending, of course.
Three way tie in my book:
That episode of Black Mirror where everyone had to ride stationary bikes and were forced to watch unskippable ads if they didn’t have credits, except everything you have to watch is AI slop instead of your crush doing porn.
Or the Handmaid’s Tale, but instead of some mysterious infertility crisis, fertile women are rare because they die in pregnancy and childbirth due to anti-science rhetoric flat out killing them. (Look up “free birthing”, etc.) At some point it gets bad enough that replacing your wife is more like getting a new pet.
Maybe the hot version of The Road. We just have wars over water and resources until the plantet’s too fucked for human life, and the survivors are left roaming around making jerky out of each other until the end.
Could be all three at once. Yay!
Lots of great answers here but the first that came to my mind is Gattaca.
I wish we had Gattaca instead of what we have. At least the shitty people would be genetically superior, for whatever that’s worth, instead of just richer.
We’re not there yet, but I could see a bit more fear-mongering smashing us into V For Vendetta territory
I think we’re closer to v for vendetta than we realize. We have secret police kidnapping people. We’re literally building concentration camps en masse even though we have the highest percentage of citizens incarcerated per capita in the world already. We got musk with a company literally putting brain chips in people and doing god knows what with huge government subsidies and he shut down ethics investigations into what he was doing so… yeah
THX 1138. The police robots force us to build them and beat us if we don’t. We have no idea who controls them.
I’ve not watched this yet, but that is terrifying.
George Lucas’s first movie. It’s pretty remarkable. They also keep everyone perpetually drugged up, strip everyone of their identities, and prohibit sexual relationships. The police robots will stop chasing you when it stops being cost effective, though
1984
With a little bit of Brave New World and Farenheit 451 sprinkled in
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
That rat snitch thief Orwell has nothing on Aldous Huxley.
Total surveillance plus child indoctrination plus no voter interest equals total gov control
Add cyberpunk 2077 to that mix
We’re in that part in the Star Trek timeline where everything is shitty.
Tomorrow I might as well see a manifestation of Q and watch a bewildered Picard shout “You can’t judge all of humanity by this barbaric time!”
WWIII is due to start next year.
Star Trek timeline had WW3 at 1996
Gotta do the Bell Riots first
Nope, 2026.
TOS had the “Eugenics Wars” / WW III start in the 1990’s, but the later series made alterations to the original timeline due to several time travel shenannigans. An easy way for the writers to explain why we aren’t currently living in a post-apocalyptic hell. All the major events will happen, just delayed accordingly.
Star Trek is supposed to happen in our future, so it’s hard to address our modern problems if they had to skip everything that happened after mid 90’s. Especially when the last 25 years have had a lot of mental stuff happening almost non-stop.
To be fair, it doesn’t feel like we’re that far away from camps for undesirables and the Bell Riots.
You are correct. It’s scary how things like these used to be just dystopic fiction. Now it is a completely plausible scenario in the very near future.
I would say that we will very soon find ourselves in 1984 or perhaps Brazil, with a little bit of The Circle and Her thrown in, but overall it will be more like The Road due to climate change, unless Elysium technology has been developed by then, which is unlikely, but if so, it will certainly be used as depicted in the film.
It’s not a sci-fi dystopia, but I just watched Zootopia again and the plot is harsher in hindsight. The villain is trying to gain power by turning everyone against a minority population and making them fear that minority. To think this came out before Trump’s first presidency.
Well, this isn’t a unique concept. The fact it goes horrible pretty quickly and people keep falling for it is the truly impressive part.
Also the cops can do whatever they want with impunity.
By the end, judy is BFs with the biggest mob boss in town, who she knows kills people.
That bugged me too. I also saw Zootopia 2 today. SPOILER ALERT Nick leads a prison break with seemingly no consequences in the end
Children of men.
Plastics that have accumulated in our bodies are going to have massive impacts on our bodys regular functions. Covid ran rampant causing mental decline and increased weaknesses to milder diseases, leading to further degradation of our body’s regular function. Authoritarianism is deep set into our politics Climate change is forcing more and more people into refugee status. The rich and wealthy continue to violate our planet for their own gain, building themselves bunkers and personal armies to defend themselves from the consequences of their actions.
For me it’s more the general feeling of everything going to shit and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Our legacy
fades and melts away
'cause tomorrow
may not ever beSo we dance and sing
try to bear the thought
of approaching
the end of our time
Robocop, corporate ownership of major infrastructure, militant authoritarian police force.
Where is our hero robot?
The same place as the heroes in every other piece of fiction… non-existent.
No one’s going to ride in on a white horse and slay our dragons for us.
Okay I’m gonna sound like an optimist, but I think The Expanse timeline, without the blue goo stuff, is a possible future.
I know it still doesn’t sound good since um… there are still human rights issues and corruption, but hey, at least humans didn’t go extinct. And we get to go to space.
I’m jealous of your optimism… and in the end of Caliban’s war right now! I loved the series. I can only hope…
I’m going with “They Live”.
The Running Man novel is set in 2025 and the second movie adaptation just came out. Things aren’t as bad as they are portrayed there. Reality shows aren’t killing people yet. But people are going on exploitative reality shows because they feel desperate for money.
Not too far away yet.
There is a squid games reality show which is based on a game where they kill people, and they pretend to kill them in the show so it’s being normalized.
And Mr beast has his gameshow which is similar, where they treat the contestants inhumanly just for the convenience of the production.
