This world is turning out less like the movie Idiocracy and more like the series Continuum.

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I'm sure there's someone who could make an argument why Ted Kazinsky (did I spell that correctly?) is a timetraveller.

Soulifix

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.

ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed

Second Season?

There are 4 seasons!

Did you just come back from the past or something?

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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.

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I still think it's on track for Idiocracy.

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I just finished rewatching this yesterday. It's on Prime by the way. And as the show continued I was like "Wait, am I siding with Liber8"? The terrorist group in the show. Seriously there are so many parallels to real life.

The people with the money making our laws. Our presidential cabinet is about to be made up of billions of dollars. Other corporations are buying the government so they can have political power. Lobbying.

The first episode when we saw the first grassroots support of Liber8 trying to take down a corporation using violence I thought of Luigi and his overwhelming support by the public.

The Liber8 group has supporters and they have a peaceful protest on a school campus that are arrested because they are "supporting terrorists". But really they are just supporting the cause, not the few violent people. Which is exactly like supporting the Palestinians. The police consider every Palestinian as a terrorist even though it's only a few.

The time travel gets a little wonky at times but damn was it a fascinating show of the gray area. I kept flipping back and forth on who was right. And shit, the twist in season 3 I didn't see coming and basically upended the series. Definitely worth a quick watch. 4 short seasons.

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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

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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!

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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.

IninewCrow

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

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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.

OpenStars

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.

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It's on Prime now. Give it a watch.

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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.

Jo Miran

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::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
Her views change over time and also with what happens to her.
:::

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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

snooggums

Seriously there are so many parallels to real life. This was made in 2012. A bit ahead of its time.

Like with most movies and books that seem ahead of their time because they 'predict the future', the show was based on an existing trend that was happening and they accurately predicted the obvious outcome. That isn't a criticism of their artistic ability, just pointing out that we were well on this path back in 2012 and the show happened to highlight that trend.

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you see all these trends... and are still paying for Prime?

Hemingways_Shotgun

It was a pretty good show that sadly got forgotten. But yes, on my second rewatch recently (In Canada at least it's also on Tubi for free...) I was immediately with Liber8. They are the protagonists. And I think that was kind of the point of the show by the end.