“Telling them lies” lol its called newspapers, radios, and television, which is older than 1999. At least with the invention of smartphones, people can share videos to crosscheck facts (for those willing to seek the truth anyways). the murderer who killed George Floyd would be walking free without a phones with cameras and the internet that allows this to get spread.
2nd panel (2010) is valid tho
As for pandemic? Y’all didn’t pay attention in history class? Black plague? Only thing that stopped them from going worldwide was the travel technplogy was slower (they didn’t have planes)
4th panel (2024) is very USA-Centric, AFIAK the EU doesn’t have such lawless “grab people off the streets” right now.
Nope, and since our governments are virtually all coalitions it’s much more difficult for something like that to happen here. I’m thankful for the style of government my country has, where everyone needs to make concessions. It has its drawbacks, but it does protect the country against this type of power grab.
2nd panel: in 2010, I think jellyfin didn’t exist yet, so there are now better ways to own media, too
republicans literally talk about the last one as a dystopia
“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.”
To note: the “peak of our civilization” he’s talking about was 1999. Which is arguably kind of on point.
Except if you’re black, gay, trans, non-male, or live in a developing country.
Y2K bug was real. The people running our simulation didn’t notice and the bugs have been increasing at a compounding rate…
Yes, seeing the whole quote again for the first time in a while, I very much noticed that.
People used to literally die from nostalgia, so please stop before I do as well.
Smell of two-stroke while driving home from the ponds surrounded by sand pits. Dad has something cooking in the barbecue. It’s not even six yet, so you can easily smash a few hours of N64 before primetime TV begins.
Mmm
That’s the shit
Play a little bit, eat some of the sausages dad brought, turn the TV to the right channel, set video player to record and… bam, Stargate SG1 theme starts blaring and you press record. (Because you can never be sure you actually get to watch the episode without dad or an older sibling coming in and demanding they get to watch their show.) Run to get snacks on ad breaks. (God I miss it when the programs and the ads were segregated. Bring back segregation. NO NO NO, NOT LIKE THAT!)
If only those free services could have the ads where it makes sense and not have them randomly cut the program mid-sentence 😂
Yeah :D
Tv was programmed around breaks, completely.
Sometimes it was painfully obvious watching Conan, as they’d constantly say something like “back after these messages”, but where his show had like 3 ad breaks in the US, here it was just one. Or 2 here and 4 there I can’t recall.
And in drama, some younger people might some times wonder while there’s so much repetition as they binge. Like not just the “previously on”, but also either weirdly zooming out, cutting, zooming back in on a setting from outside, or even a weird cut to black for 1-2s then almost a repeat of the preceding 10 seconds.
The slight optimisation back then was pausing the VHS recording during the ads, then resuming once they continue, as a sort of adblock for you when you watch it later. (As you couldn’t have any other place to watch it necessarily. Sometimes for years.)
It’s really weird rewatching MythBusters at this point, because the show is so heavily structured around ad breaks. It starts with a teaser that includes clips of moments that will happen in the show, then it has an overview of the myths, then it splits into the A myths and the B myths. Each of these gets touched on, then there’s a preview of what will happen in the next segment after the ad, then there’s the implied break, then there’s a review of what happened before the break, then there’s a new piece… it’s constantly revisiting and excerpting things to blow up about 15 minutes of content into a 50-minute show.
Back then it all seemed so normal…
Back then it all seemed so normal…
Yeah, it did.
Futurama - S01E06 - Didn’t you have ads in the 20th century?
It’s important to remember that the notion of “humans are the virus” said by Smith shortly after or before this (which is a very popular opinion right now) is inherently ecofascist.
I don’t quite follow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
they will typically argue that overpopulation is the primary threat to the environment and that the only solution is a complete halt to immigration or, at their most extreme, genocide against various groups and ethnicities
Smith wasn’t arguing for the eradication of the human race, since his life and the life of all machines depend on it. He just hates the emotional inefficiency of it (free will and all that)
Yea. The Matrix was great and had good points but also had some very not-so-great points.
just plug me in, coach
i want to be juicy and delicious
I would totally take the Matrix over real life right now, especially if I’m allowed to know it’s a simulation. “I won’t wake up, I promise! I just want to have cool powers n shit!”
i don’t even need the powers, i just want some stability
Yes, I would also accept not knowing if knowing is off the table.
Nothing more dystopian than having society’s needs meet.
- Billionaires
Welp, that hits right in the feelings. I started writing a dystopian Handmaid’s Tale-esque as a warning about Trump, and I had to cut out the bit of Trump dying and his successor going insane, because… he showed his craziness.
Dystopian Sci-fi writer will end up writing Star trek eventually
Technically they already are…
Time to read The Dispossessed again
Lovely book.
Back like four years ago when I was at uni, I wrote a real cringy sci-fi short story set in a future where political dissent had been neutered almost completely by a total subversion of language via commodification.
Essentially everything and anything was a brand, “anarchy” was a brand of shoe, even “terror” was a pack of potato chips, and “terrorists” were stans of that pack of potato chips, making it impossible to even talk about any kind of rebellion or alternative thought, and bots would perpetuate these alternative definitions, making it seem like they were more common, sort of like how if you own 51% of some primitive blockchains you can manufacture transactions.
Sufficed to say I’m glad it’s not true, but it’s worrying how consensus reality has collapsed and is now shaped by the few rich and powerful interests, not too dissimilar from what I imagined as a fun hobby creative exercise in imagining the most soulcrushing world imaginable.
It was also just a prologue to a story that featured ‘carbon capture gone wrong’ turning the world into a Sahara-esque desert, through which caravans of brave desert travellers delivered scarce goods between human settlements, assisted by navigators who sit in office buildings and make sure the caravans don’t get lost in the constant sandstorms. Then there was a conspiracy by the main love interest, a Fallout-esque cartoonish A.I. and the navigators’ boss who liked to LARP as a pre-collapse middle manager, they’d drug the navigator crew to keep the protagonist from finding out the shock twist that the travellers are slaves, amongst other things like the fact the rich all left in space rockets, are in contact with earth, live in relative luxury and that there are still functioning rockets on earth.
Also at various stages of conception it had time travel, alt-history and of course - the space shuttle, because autism.
Even if your four-year-old narrative feels a bit “cringy” in retrospect, these sound like really interesting, imaginative, well-thought-out concepts and ideas for sci-fi worlds.
I hope you revisit these ideas in future, or get the chance and inspiration to write again.
This is part of why watching episodes of Trek that ruin the utopian ideas hurts so bad right now.
I wanted that escape to where there were people who always did the right thing and institutions were dependable and honest. The “The Pegasus” hit, with canon black ops. Then the captain nuked a planet…
I like the detail that after 2019, he couldn’t afford another laptop.
Either he can’t afford, or anything for sale is worse than what he already had.
I dunno what is happening faster.
anything for sale is worse than what he already had.
hear hear. 10 year old laptop, still going strong
I’m still rocking the same laptop since 2018.
Hell yeah. For most things (including writing like the article) that should be sufficient. The biggest worry is obviously the battery.
Only laptop I got new was a low-end Razer by winning a raffle. I have a couple other hand-me-downs too, but none of them keep a charge for longer than 5 minutes anymore.
I think the first four panels might end up being a prerequisite for the fifth. Unfortunately.
Then there’s Atlas Shrugged.
The new meta of dystopian fiction is utopia that we can never have.
So the plot of Elysium? Utopia for the rich and hardcore survival on a dying planet for the poors.
“The future has arrived - it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” -William Gibson
This is me. I have three unfinished scifi/horror manuscripts that will probably remain so because I took so long to write them that the future I created would be a boring dystopia if it got published today.
Post apocalyptic stuff still sells, though, or stuff that is so esoteric and far in the future that it’ll be timeless for another 20-50 years.
