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?

  • gigastasio@sh.itjust.works
    983·
    10 days ago

    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…

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          9·
          9 days ago

          This was obvious even to me as a child when I watched the movie in the 90s.

          Crazy that we need a writer to say it.

          • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
            5·
            9 days ago

            If you didn’t see the movies at the same time you were aware of who Trump was, what he looked like, and what his business plan stood for, you don’t necessarily get the connection. If you’re younger, the connection may not happen because BTTF is “1980s” and Trump is right here, right now. Or, yet Alternatively, you may just think Trump, Biff, and every other person in that social class just looked like that in the 80s

            • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              2·
              8 days ago

              Trump was all over the media at that time, he was basically the archetype of the rich American villain in every 80s and 90s movie. Some More News did like a 2 hour video about it.

              He was literally in Home Alone 2.

              • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
                2·
                8 days ago

                I’m glad it was obvious for you. It wasn’t for me. Aside from Biff being an existing 1985/1955 character prior to “Trump” Biff, the retrofuturistic dystopian 1985 in BTTF2 may as well be the decade before Robocop picks up in the same universe. It all looks the same to me, so I’m in the “that’s what the 80s looked like” boat. I offered alternative, reasonable options for why not everyone made the connection as well as you did. I mean, I bet more than half the people on this platform were born after Home Alone 2. Our classics are not their classics.

    • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
      9·
      9 days ago

      It is the most unrealistic, dispite [gestures broadly to everything] because.

      1. President Dwayn Elezondo Mtn. Dew Herbert Comacho has a problem.

      2. They find the most qualified person to solve it, even though they are not sure 😉

      3. They (reluctantly) listen to his advice.

      4. Finally, once the day is saved, President Comacho does not take credit for it.

      That is the most unrealistic part of the film.

      • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
        3·
        8 days ago

        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."

    • Strider@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 days ago

      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.

  • sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.todayEnglish
    451·
    10 days ago

    It seems like we’re shifting into Minority Report. There are actual pre crime divisions in police departments now and the surveillance state continues to grow exponentially.

  • BranBucket@lemmy.world
    361·
    9 days ago

    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!

    • Formfiller@lemmy.world
      16·
      9 days ago

      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

    • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
      4·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • Profligate_parasite@lemmy.worldOP
      16·
      9 days ago

      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!”

          • Lorindól@sopuli.xyz
            2·
            8 days ago

            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.

            • Darkaga@lemmy.world
              2·
              8 days ago

              To be fair, it doesn’t feel like we’re that far away from camps for undesirables and the Bell Riots.

              • Lorindól@sopuli.xyz
                1·
                8 days ago

                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.

      • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 days ago

        “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.

  • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
    17·
    10 days ago

    THX 1138. The police robots force us to build them and beat us if we don’t. We have no idea who controls them.

  • Zorque@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    9 days ago

    Robocop, corporate ownership of major infrastructure, militant authoritarian police force.

      • Zorque@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        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.

    • WildPalmTree@lemmy.world
      5·
      9 days ago

      I’ve never been able to quite let go of that movie. It’s very on-the-nose but still hits home. So many of us are what we see as the bad guys in the movie; just move it all down to earth and there we are.