In the series, corporations get a bailout when things get bad, collude to make it worse with profits over people and then basically buy off world governments in a reverse bail out to take control of the system. With a “Corporate Congress” and all people having a “life debt”.
Oh, and the time travel aspect of it is pretty cool too.
+1 for referencing Continuum. “Canadian Sci-Fi starring Roger Cross” is probably one of my favorite sub-genres of it, and Continuum is at the top of that list (Dark Matter is a close second).
Canadian Sci-Fi starring Roger Cross
That made me laugh out loud because it’s so damn true.
Ooh the guy from Dark Matter is in this? I’ll have to watch it now.
Yeah, but he’s mean in Continuum lol. In Dark Matter he was probably the nicest of the 6 main characters.
It might be worth pointing out there are two sci-fi shows called “Dark Matter”.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4159076/ <-- This is the crazy fun space sci-fi show from 2015 that ended abruptly. This is the one I think you referenced.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19231492/ <-- This is the more somber sci-fi show from 2024 with the focus on dimensional travel. It is good, but I prefer the other.
OMG yes! I’ve had moments in the last few months where I can see a portion of the show play out in something benign in the news. Though most dystopian stories seem to have something in common with what is transpiring right now in the real world just enough to think there are commonalities. Good call out!
It’s all Patrick Duffy’s dream, or that Canadian kid in a coma, or maybe the windfish
Society was only looking like Idiocracy during the 2000s. But soon as the world got turned upside down in the 2010s, the comparison grew more distant.
Are you sure about that? Look who just got elected president of the US again.
You also have that stupid movement where liberal women are withholding sex as a protest. Sounds an awful lot like the beginning of Idiocracy to me.
Idiocracy was too optimistic. it supposes that when people are having problems they will realize, realize they can’t fix it, and try to find someone who knows more than them to fix them
It’s also not how genetics works. Smart people don’t only have smart children and dumb people don’t only have dumb children.
People evolved from ape-like predecessors. Would you say the children of a predecessor and the children of a modern human are equally likely to be of a similar intelligence?
Nah. The existence of evolution in no way validates your pseudo-science racism. Billions of years of natural selection doesn’t equate to your garbage notion that “certain people” shouldn’t procreate.
When did I say that only certain types of people shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce?
I’m antinatalist, I don’t think anyone should be allowed to being life into the world, which is filled with so much suffering, without the consent of the child.
Regardless, I was just disputing the claim that intelligence is in no way a heritable trait.
You’re defending eugenics.
The apes figured out how to make tools out of stone. They knew how to make fire and knew which plants they could and couldn’t eat. People today aren’t smarter than their ancestors because they have access to sophisticated tech.
A lot of people conflate “knowledge” and “intelligence.” Not the guy you replied to, they seem like a troll; but still, a lot of people.
Our ancestors had intelligence in spades. They figured out an insane amount of stuff just to survive; and it’s not too far back in the grand scheme of things that they had to remember it all because they had no way to record it. The first caveman to make a handaxe had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but they figured it out. Wheels, bows, fire, the entire concept of agriculture… They figured out how all of that worked from scratch, with no reference material.
Modern humanity builds on that with knowledge. We’ve figured out how to record everything our ancestors discovered, and all of our new discoveries as well. We’ve put men on the moon, figured out how to make electricity from things like waterfalls and glowing rocks, and almost everyone has a tiny computer in their pocket.
None of that means that we’re more intelligent now, though. All of that knowledge is iterative, so we’ve just been applying that same intelligence at a continually higher level throughout history.
Try this story about ‘intelligence’
Our ancestors had intelligence in spades. They figured out an insane amount of stuff just to survive;
The idea of “surviving” doesn’t even come into play in the evaluation of other species. Stupid as hell species survive for hundreds of thousands of years on Earth, that’s how conducive it is to life. You seem to have some unfounded civilized cavemen POV on our ancestors when really we’re still all apes + advanced language.
The dawn of civilization wasn’t us going from some lone person survival style steam game where we came into the world solo dolo in a pair of underwear.
The fact that nine people m people think that intelligence is actually a highly inheritable trait is worrying.
The eugenics component of the movie is gross, no wonder I fail to remember it.
IIRC, the movie had no eugenics component. You appear to be conflating the concept of “darwinism” (natural selection) with the concept of “eugenics”.
The concept of “reproductive rights” allows for individuals to make their own selections for themselves and their offspirng; those choices do not constitute “eugenics” until they are imposed in another.
If the state is not applying selective pressure, it is not eugenics.
The apocalyptic scenario depicted in the movie is suggested to be brought about by failing to encourage the correct couples to reproduce. Implying that certain people for certain reasons are unworthy because their progeny are not suitable stewards of the planet.
I’m going to have to go watch the movie again, but I don’t recall any message that the state created (or failed to stop) the “idiotization” of the populace.
The overarching message seemed to blame rampant consumerism, not evolutionary pressure.
No, it wasn’t. The implication was that the smart people didn’t procreate as much as the stupid people, and that generation after generation saw the intelligence of the species go down.
Worth had nothing to do with it.
Works have meanings beyond their surface-level detail and literal meaning. They also have themes and clear implications. And Idiocracy certainly has those. It has clear undertones of eugenics.
The first is the clear implication that population demographics require active management. In the movie, there was no mass government program to encourage births among those of low intelligence and discourage births among the intelligent. This situation developed entirely naturally through culture acting on its own. A viewer could only conclude that if this horrible future is to be avoided, that we need to start worrying a lot more about who is reproducing in what numbers. We either need government mandates or major cultural initiatives to encourage reproduction among the deserving. Idiocracy never outright endorses eugenics, but the implication is obvious. Writers aren’t idiots. They know the clear implications of their work. You don’t end up with a political movie that clearly implies the solution is genocide without realizing that’s the obvious implication.
The second is the theme that intelligence is something that can be bred or selected for at all through the social stratification we have now. Are those with PhDs really more intelligent, by writ of birth, than those that never graduate high school? Or it mostly about circumstances of birth, opportunities, personal choices, or even neonatal environmental pollutant exposure? Do we have any real evidence that intelligence differences within the species are something that can truly be selected for? Hell, what kind of intelligence are we talking about? Scholastic ability, emotional intelligence, executive reasoning, etc? There are many types of intelligence. And the very idea that the poor and those of lower educational attainment are of genetically lower intelligence is a key eugenics theme.
Yes, Idiocracy never comes right out and explicitly endorses eugenics. But the implications and themes are undeniably pro-eugenics.
The eugenics component of the movie
Don’t do drugs, it’s bad for you. You remembered the wrong movie.
There is though, there’s a whole scene about poor=dumb and horny vs rich=smart and chaste. It’s very easy to forget since it doesn’t solidly tie in as much as the producers may have hoped
There’s an implied statement in that scene: “if their parents and grandparents were different people, this world would not be in ruins.” Mercifully a lot of viewers interpreted the film as a satirical view of the progression of society in general or humanity overall. But the scene as it is laid out says the wealthy smart people died out and left only the dumb poors to inherit the earth.
No, the scene is about how the wealthy people wait for the best financial opportunity to afford their kid the best while the dumb people just have kids. The wealthy folks wait too long and have no kids.
The movie is about how “dumb” people outbred “smart” people and it ruined the planet/humanity. Replace those traits with the races of your choice or any other genetic trait and tell me if you’re still OK with that narrative.
Race isn’t the result of choices but being less educated certainly is to some degree a function of choice. Your suggestion of replacing a trait that involves choices with one that is not chosen at any level is a false equivalence.
The premise was that it was a gradual decline to that point though. There would have been millions of opportunities to right the ship up until that point. It’s optimistic that at some point, at SOME point, people will decide to do what the smartest people think. But the movie is pretty pessimistic that there was entire generations that didn’t ever do that even once.
Not just that but the story also suggests that the US can fail so terribly while still functioning to be able to still host monster truck rallies and have a working water system that can pump millions of gallons of mountain dew
Brawndo, its what plants crave
Your point, like many similar, misses the fact that idiocracy is MANY cycles in before they attempt to right the ship. There is an entire population of adults in there that seemed to have been born into the already broken world and developed wholly inside of it (and probably several generations). Not a lot of “Back in my day” in that world, because back in “that day” everyone was still a fucking moron in a broken world.
500 years covered in the link below alone. Settle in, we’re just getting started. Unfortunately we’ll never live to see the movie, “Ass” or to see it win those 8 Oscars.
The forerunners to these trends were observable even back then, and also, history repeats itself. Check out HG Wells Time Machine from 1895 (not 1985, actually 1895), and Animal Farm by George Orwell in 1945, or even Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, written around 380 BCE.
The closer we get to the future, the higher the resolution of the prediction - using our exact words & phrases like “social media” - but it is eerie how accurate those hundreds to thousands of years old works are as well.
Actually, it’s more like Revelations from the Bible. Trump is the devil, corporations are the horsemen, chatgpt is the mark of the beast and israel is in conflict. It’s all right there!
Now if that made you scoff or roll your eyes, realize that conflating our real, actual lives with fiction is just as useful. It’s entertainment, not prophecy. Can we just fucking stop already?
Wasn’t The Book of Revelation just an acid, fever dream fanfic about Nero coming back from the dead? Kinda not relevant.
I’m aware. Feel free to read my entire comment.
Wow, you’re right, it IS like Revelations!
It’s Tommy Westphall’s world. We’re just living in it.
I dunno if my politics have changed or my recollection of the show is just hazy, but my first reaction reading the synopsis on IMDb is “Wait, Kiera was a cop?” These days I would certainly be rooting for the “terrorists”. Maybe it was about her learning the truth? Methinks I need to rewatch.
Tap for spoiler
Her views change over time and also with what happens to her.
Too bad we don’t have time-traveling Unabombers
I’m sure there’s someone who could make an argument why Ted Kazinsky (did I spell that correctly?) is a timetraveller.
Kazinsky probably “killed himself” because he took a look at the world of 2023 and realized that no one listened to a single word he said.
“Killed himself” by Mark Zuck, that’s it!
Honestly the world is much better than it was.
For instance, around 140 million people were killed in WWI and WWII.
That’s correct. It IS better than it was. And it’s important to KEEP it that way. But in case you haven’t noticed, world history is following pretty much the exact same path beat-for-beat that it did in the lead up to that war that cost 140 million lives.
It’s not whether we are better off than we were in the past. It’s a question of whether or not we’re going to stay that way. Because the next world war might claim a billion or more. (exaggerating for effect of course)
the next world war might claim a billion or more
That’s still just 1 out of 8. You’d barely notice.
Edit: Doubling down on the downvotes. Here my proposition – an even split between China, India and the US. That leaves China and India at just over 1B each and the US to 12M, which is fair.
Did they release a second season?
There’s 4 seasons…
Second Season?
There are 4 seasons!
Did you just come back from the past or something? 😅
Look I haven’t been on netflix for some time due to their habit of canceling shows. That’s where I saw it.
Not everyone pays that close attention.
It’s on Prime now. Give it a watch.
Also on 🏴☠️Bay 😉
I still think it’s on track for Idiocracy.
Nah, Idiocracy somehow got to 2505 with a livable Earth. We are not on that track.
Good point, but I meant more the general civilization rather than the timeline.
Tbh it’s starting to look more like Altered Carbon, except the core tech is complete vaporware because eel-on-musk made it.
That, or CP2077.
I still think Infinite Jest is in pole position:
- unqualified populist US president
- canada (and mexico?) subjugated to the US
- subsidised time (selling everything including the calendar to the highest bidder)
- catapulting garbage into giant superfund sites
edit: also I think we can be on track for both Infinite Jest and Idiocracy
Do you have a link? I don’t think I’m finding the right Infinite Jest.
