Ask Lemmy

Not exactly sci fi, but the TV adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale bears some striking parallels to the current renaissance that extreme right ideologies are currently enjoying. Off the top of my head…

• It shows how quickly and easily street-level enforcement of an authoritarian system can be implemented, and that there is no shortage of people willing to take on that role.

• It shows that the architects of an oppressive system aren’t necessarily “true believers” in such a system, nor are they held to the standards demanded of the average citizen.

• It shows how extremist ideologies bleed beyond the borders of one country and begin to infect others.

You can see examples of all three of these in what’s happening now.

Back to the Future 2's bad timeline.

Idiocracy 💯

It seems like we're shifting into Minority Report. There are actual pre crime divisions in police departments now and the surveillance state continues to grow exponentially.

Three way tie in my book:

That episode of Black Mirror where everyone had to ride stationary bikes and were forced to watch unskippable ads if they didn't have credits, except everything you have to watch is AI slop instead of your crush doing porn.

Or the Handmaid's Tale, but instead of some mysterious infertility crisis, fertile women are rare because they die in pregnancy and childbirth due to anti-science rhetoric flat out killing them. (Look up "free birthing", etc.) At some point it gets bad enough that replacing your wife is more like getting a new pet.

Maybe the hot version of The Road. We just have wars over water and resources until the plantet's too fucked for human life, and the survivors are left roaming around making jerky out of each other until the end.

Could be all three at once. Yay!

We're not there yet, but I could see a bit more fear-mongering smashing us into V For Vendetta territory

Lots of great answers here but the first that came to my mind is Gattaca.

We're in that part in the Star Trek timeline where everything is shitty.

Present day isn't Idiocracy, in the Idiocracy the president cared about his people and listened to the world's smartest man to fix the crops.

Right now it's like Johnny Mnemonic.

In the future possibly Wall-E or Elysium (most likely Elysium).

Children of Men

Elysium - rich people living in space or enclaves; the rest of us in slums with robots and AIs controlling us.

1984

THX 1138. The police robots force us to build them and beat us if we don't. We have no idea who controls them.

Children of men.

Plastics that have accumulated in our bodies are going to have massive impacts on our bodys regular functions. Covid ran rampant causing mental decline and increased weaknesses to milder diseases, leading to further degradation of our body's regular function. Authoritarianism is deep set into our politics Climate change is forcing more and more people into refugee status. The rich and wealthy continue to violate our planet for their own gain, building themselves bunkers and personal armies to defend themselves from the consequences of their actions.

Okay I'm gonna sound like an optimist, but I think The Expanse timeline, without the blue goo stuff, is a possible future.

I know it still doesn't sound good since um... there are still human rights issues and corruption, but hey, at least humans didn't go extinct. And we get to go to space.

Robocop, corporate ownership of major infrastructure, militant authoritarian police force.

I would say that we will very soon find ourselves in 1984 or perhaps Brazil, with a little bit of The Circle and Her thrown in, but overall it will be more like The Road due to climate change, unless Elysium technology has been developed by then, which is unlikely, but if so, it will certainly be used as depicted in the film.

It's not a sci-fi dystopia, but I just watched Zootopia again and the plot is harsher in hindsight. The villain is trying to gain power by turning everyone against a minority population and making them fear that minority. To think this came out before Trump's first presidency.

Cyberpunk 2077 but without any of the cool tech shit.

I dunno but I feel like if we get another year of trump, we will be doing “the running man” competition with immigrants

Feels like Judge Dredd

I'm going with "They Live".

Maybe recency bias, but a lot of stuff from the new Running Man hits home. Maybe not the murder TV show but (obviously minor worldbuilding spoilers):

Bifurcated society, where the have nots have to check in to enter the nice part of town. (Related story: A couple years ago, I visited America for a wedding. After the pre-wedding reception, I was walking back to my hotel through an upscale neighbourhood, in a suit. Within a half hour private security drove by, got out of the car, hand on gun and explained they'd received calls about me walking on the sidewalk. The guy then insisted he drive me to a more suitable area.)

Unions existed but reporting to them gets you blacklisted, people need work so safety regulations only exist on paper.

Veterans Affairs is taken over by the Y and reduced to a miserable hostel and not much else.

Time in a green park is awarded by lottery and only briefly.

Ubiquitous private security.

One media network, that is free and mostly exists to pit haves vs have nots. (Pretty much social media already)

Etc. I think the part that really gets me is you don't have to imagine particularly hard to see us getting there.

Elysium seems a good candidate.

Wall-E

The Running Man novel is set in 2025 and the second movie adaptation just came out. Things aren't as bad as they are portrayed there. Reality shows aren't killing people yet. But people are going on exploitative reality shows because they feel desperate for money.

Idiocracy.

Not a movie yet (AFAIK), but Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower is downright uncanny.

Shadowrun.

OK, maybe without all the supernatural elements.

Cyberpunk but without the cool stuff like cyber ware or flying cars.

Right now: Deus Ex, specifically the Adam Jensen games

in the Near future, best case we get Cyberpunk 2077, worst case we get Horizon Zero dawn’s Faro Plague

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

Visionary Aldous Huxley

I've always thought it would be like Tank Girl but the big company is basically a merger of Amazon and Nestle.

I don't know, I'm not sure anyone has made a movie about a boring-ass dystopia where the rich plunder everything and the rest of us are too propagandized to care no matter how desperate things get. I'm going for a special mix of Harrison Bergeron, The Day After Tomorrow and The Road ultimately. Oh and Snowcrash , but until we get there I'm sure "The Frog Boil" will be a hit when it does come out.

Quality land by Marc Uwe Kling. The world is basically ruled by hyper capitalistic cooperations, people are rated by their productivity people don’t buy stuff actively, it’s bought for them by their personal AI when the algorithm thinks they need it.

The plot partly follows the presidential election between an AI powered Robot that tries to act in the interest of humanity versus a populist right wing TV cook that’s a shockingly close prediction of Trump. The other part is about the main character on his mission to refund an item he didn’t actually want.

To this day my favourite dystopian book.