69
Black Mirror’s pessimism porn won’t lead us to a better future | Louis Anslow
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
69 points (65.6% liked)
Technology
68639 readers
3498 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Despite him being a tech bro and everything, I do think we need more shows like Star Trek these days to show us what a functional future with technology could look like. I think the only examples we see any more in popular culture are dystopian, and I think we are starting to believe that those are the only possible outcomes of the path we are on. Even Star Trek these days is pretty dark.
We need to again try to imagine a world in which the better half of humanity succeeds.
It's a shame the nu-Trek is utter mass appeal apolitical dogshit that has nothing to say about anything except that Alex Kurtzman should not be let anywhere near a production of anything other than a Big Mac.
EDIT: By the way, if anybody is looking for something with the same sort of tight drama, clever storytelling and progressive politics (but not virtue signaling for its own sake) and confronting complicated issues and good people doing what's right overcoming them, but would also like it to be a bit more human, down to earth and character centric then trek veteran writer of TNG and DS9 - Ronald D. Moore and I - his biggest fan girl this side of the internet - would like to invite you to watch For All Mankind.
It is an alternate history show where the soviets "win" the race to the moon and the space race continues and every season is set in a new decade, or at least that is the tagline because underneath the goofy premise and out of context clips of the sea dragon or nuclear space planes or AK-47s wielded by cosmonauts on the moon, what you'll find is a tightly written complex drama about an ensemble cast of characters and their changing relationships to themselves, each other and the tumultous world around them.
The show covers everything from the consequences of operation paperclip, misoginy, red scare and cold war distrust to civil rights, feminism, yuppie culture, privatisation of space, startup culture, homophobia, labour unions, psychedelics, PTSD, opioids, threat of nuclear war, militarization and so, so much more.
I really can't say enough good things about it. Oh yeah - the licensed song choice is great. Petula Clark's The World Song, M83, Smashing Pumpkins, John Lennon screaming his lungs out in 'Well Well Well'? And that earworm song from actual IRL North Korea which is the first and only song I've ever heard of theirs? If only they didn't use 'Come as You Are' but oh well nothing's perfect.
The first season is a bit rough in places at the start as the show finds it's footing and the stupid generically modern intro animation and music really sucks but S2 is an actual masterpiece of TV.
eh they try to be political they just suck at it.
That’s a relatively new phenomenon. All tech media was positive and the stuff of dreams until around the 2010s. Because we were seeing a steady and noticeable shift in the power dynamics. We were being pulled deeper under a capitalist nightmare instead of flying in a techno futuristic dreamscape. We couldn’t see anything but the piling negative aspects of our technology: it’s killing us, it’s enslaving us, its being used to spy on us, we’re being told it’s a wonder but we keep finding out it’s a horror. This isn’t on us for not being enlightened enough to see asimov’s words. We’re too aware of the active manipulation and torture. They made us the product, and they made the things we bought spy machines and tools of manipulation and deception.
We need to create better, freer tech, free from the oligarchs currently wringing us all dry while they build their multimillion dollar doomsday bunkers with the money they’re stealing from us if we are going to build the better world in which the better half of humanity succeeds. Art imitates life. And currently they’re outsourcing art to the oligarchs machines that are 10000x worse for the planet and the power dynamics.
There's been plenty of negative portrayals of new technology throughout the history of sci-fi. Heck, the very first one is usually considered to be "Frankenstein", and it's all about how new technology can backfire spectacularly.
I think the problem is not the existence of negative portrayals, but the absence of positive ones. There aren't a lot of shows for folks who want to see a positive view of the future, where technology solves problems rather than always being the source of them. That used to be the domain of things like Star Trek but modern Star Trek is a pale shadow that no longer paints a particularly rosy view of humanity's future. The Orville took up that mantle, I suppose, but it's stretched pretty thin.
Hard to imagine when reality keeps showing otherwise.
At the end of the day, the future is written by human beings, and unless we have a collective vision of where we are trying to go, the darker forces among us will take control and do as they wish with us.
Yes, I loved classic Trek for showing a better a future, where humans have moved beyond our greed, prejudice, and self-destructive tendencies. That was the through line in TOS and TNG, even if it wasn't always 100% on-point and didn't always age well (you need to view TOS in its historical context to get past the baked-in 1960s sexism, for example).
There's a place for cautionary tales, and there's a place for aspirational tales.
I liked Discovery well enough for what it was, but I hated its picture of a future where good humans are the exception rather than the rule.
Nowadays, I think solarpunk is where its at.
Yeah similar to what Vince Gilligan said, we need to make more stories about good people, because the media illiterate just start glamorizing the bad characters and completely miss the point