Contagion and Children of Men - while they didn’t look far into the future and dealt with existing problems, it’s still horrifyingly accurate.
Jasper: “Pull my finger”
Brave New World
In some ways we’re already living it
Our drugs aren’t that good. And the system isn’t optimizing for maximum happiness.
I suppose he was referring to the general “this is fine” attitude.
Scroll down and keep the endorphins flowing.
Forced promiscuity?
Penultimate Truth. Predicted containing the cattle using fear of something that doesn’t even exist in reality.
The Road.
Beat me to it!
Price of obsidian gonna skyrocket.
You better start believing in cyberpunk dystopia, Miss Turner. You’re in one!
Not sure which one. But we already pretty much check all the boxes of cyberpunk.
I think we’re in the boring version of Shadowrun’s cyberpunk universe. Take out the magic, take out the idea that people perform runs doing vigilante tasks and take out the goblinifcation (so no orks/trolls) and no other races. But the idea of megacorps getting bigger and bigger while everything decays around us with escalating costs, yeah that part is real.
Damnit, I managed to trip into a Shadowrun campaign and I didn’t even roll a Dwarf.
It’s the shittiest form of cyberpunk.
We have cybernetic implants! But they’re only for people who need them or are being headed up by a dipshit (Elon’s Neuralink)…
We have AI! But it’s just a glorified chat bot and it’s not even necessarily good at even that…
We keep having gnarly pandemics of new diseases.
The mega corporations are exactly what you expect.
The quality of life is exactly as you expect, except even the best possible quality you could get if you were rich also kinda fucking sucks compared to fiction (can’t even live on Mars forever in a Matrix connected blow job machine IRL)…
The dystopia would be more bearable if I could become a cybernetic superman on Mars. Just sayin’.
Well said! I’m looking forward to the solarpunk/biopunk future nowadays because of… all that
You expected to be the main character, but you’ve just realized you’re just one of many NPCs in a cyberpunk reality, just trying yo get by, but getting screwed at every turn by corporations, governments and fate.
I always thought CEOs being greedy mythical dragons that compulsively hoard riches because it’s their nature, to be a brilliantly plausible fantasy element.
At this point it almost feels like a rational explanation for their inhuman behavior.
On this track that’s probably the only fantasy element we’d get LOL.
Idiocracy but mixed with the Neuromancer series and 1984.
Add a dash of « The Handmaid’s Tale »
More of a glug.
A combination of all the worst bits of the worst ones
Her.
Given that we’ve already had a few suicides caused by (or at least exacerbated by) LLM chatbots, I think we’re already there.
I think that it’d have to be one of those countless near-future works that are set in what basically amounts to being the present-day world.
I think that if you’re looking for something other than that, something more in a far-out setting, you’d need to ask something like “what futuristic work do you think society will most resemble in 200 years” or something like that. That forces things down the road a bit, and makes one pick among different predictions about how society will change in the future.
If we don’t dodge that bullet, Years and Years. Or Neuromancer.
Neuromancer would be an improvement at this point. Gibson underestimated just how bad corporations could get.
Idiocracy/Dont look up/1984/Judge Dredd
My bets on Robocop style corporate dictatorship until terminator style annihilation occurs.
Star Trek was never on the cards.
Actually, star trek might be. In their lore, things got a lot worse before they got better.
World War 3 began in 2026 according to TNG, we’re close!
In the aftermath, the world became an irradiated apocalyptic hellhole for almost a century, most cities destroyed and governments collapsed. I’d say we’re well on our way to that state, question is whether or not we emerge better on the other side. I’d almost be okay with that if there was some assurance that humanity would come out as Star Trek afterwards.
Bell Riots never happened, that timeline is broken.
I could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.
Just time for another bath!
The Simpsons
All of the negatives from Metropolis 2001
Metropolis (2001): How Capitalism Produces Fascism
The Temporal Messages of Metropolis
Elon Musk = Duke Red
V for Vendetta
I like your optimism
L for Luigi?
