Wall-E by way of 1984.
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.
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.
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Damnit, I managed to trip into a Shadowrun campaign and I didn’t even roll a Dwarf.
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.
100% its cyberpunk. corpo takeover with having to use technology to get by even when it is bad for you.
Yeah, but where the hell are my leg implants that allow me to double jump and air dash already?
air dash is a skill. your just being lazy.
That would be cool…but I tell ya what, we have Ray Bans that you can talk to which require an account and act as a personal body cam to use your every waking moment for spying, registering shadow-accounts for everyone you interact with, and ai training.
How’s that sound?
(Man, we’re in the stupidest timeline aren’t we…)
We don’t even get cool neon signs, everything is sad beige now… :(
Makes me think of
LOL! Aerodynamic efficiency is great and all but I’m also already SO tired of every compact and crossover looking like a friggin’ jellybean.
honestly the neon all over like tokyo is one of the more unrelistic aspects to me. same with the private link. all the ads will be straight to the optic nerve and it will be so dreary when looking at it plainly.
WALL-E. We just don’t have a way to escape yet, but the rest is happening regardless.
That’s a very optimistic view of our future.
I’m sure Bezass and Muskpoo got us covered, just most of us can’t afford to leave with them.
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V for Vendetta
I like your optimism
L for Luigi?
A combination of Snow Crash and Idiocracy
Ah I love Snow Crash.
We’re already at the point of bizarre self-parody, cringe-irony, ultra-capitalism, but instead of pizza delivering street-samurai and a fascinating metaverse…
…we got grub/dash/food/rabbit/whatever and…“meta.” Ugh.
I hate so much that Idiocracy was so on the mark. Knowledge being lost, culture being 100% based on consumption, corporate warmonger leadership. The entertainment is basically there if you look at YouTube’s front page it’s like:
"OW! MuH bAwLz! (For $48,000,000?!?!?!) - 2 hrs. ago | 3 million views"
"Slappin buttz n’ moar munee - UpGrAyD (ft. GoonOhioSkebedeezyFR) - 1 day ago | 7.5 million views"
Might as well throw some Terminator and ‘The Machine Stops’ in there.
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.
Lots of good suggestions so far, Brave New World and Don’t Look Up would be right up there for me. But my #1 is this…
The Machine Stops (PDF) Written in 1909 so out of copyright, this book is so ahead of its time it makes remarkable reading today. The amount of things predicted that describe the modern day is incredible. It’s also not that long, so well worth a read.
100% no doubt The parable of the sower and subsequent book. I read that book - started reading it - in June this year and read it over about a month. It was very creepy to be reading a sci fy book set in the future that is now my present and while it is not as bad right now as Octavia Butler makes it out to be, we are definitely heading there if drastic action is not taken immediately.
Edit: the books in order: (Only two, sadly she died while writing the third but still both worth reading, there isn’t a clif hanger at the end) https://www.octaviabutler.com/parableseries
Absolutely this! Octavia Butler literally wrote a fascist American president with the slogan “Make America Great Again” in 1993.
I do believe that a lot of aspects of The Ministry for the Future by K.S. Robinson have chances of becoming true.
The deadly heatwave in south Asia, governments going rogue and playing with geo engineering on their own, climate refugee camps and the general sense of too little too late.
But the book is fairly optimistic, so hopefully, people of the world getting together and accepting a new paradigm will come to be true.
I could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.
Just time for another bath!
1984
The Water Knife by Paolo Baccigalupi is pretty on the nose for the near future of the southern US
It thought that Vegas was an abomination, a testament to the vanity of mankind but that book made me understand that Phoenix has twice as many people, is bigger though sure, is a little wetter on average and should hold that title.
How is this one of the cheapest cities to live in in the US? Why are we moving the micro chip industry there?
Horizon Zero Dawn: Total extinction by the 2060s because some mad, narcissistic Elon Musk guy overestimates himself and fucks it up for the whole world? Doesn’t sound too far-fetched to me right now.
