[amyjess]

Office Space and Silicon Valley, sure, but Idiocracy has aged _horribly_.

That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the movie to promote their pseudoscience about race and intelligence.

[rbanffy]

> Idiocracy has aged _horribly_.

Are you sure? Who is the POTUS now?

[powvans]

And in the movie the POTUS was Dwayne Camacho an ex pro wrestler... and in real life many people want an ex pro wrestler named Dwayne Johnson to run for POTUS as an improvement to the current POTUS?!

I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but Mike Judge made this stuff up before it was real life!

[SamReidHughes]

The current POTUS is also an ex pro wrestler.

[ryanmercer]

Yup, 2 WrestleMania events.

[amyjess]

When I said "Bush-era", I was talking more of the national zeitgeist during Bush's presidency and not so much about how Bush himself was perceived.

The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time, and much of the future situation feels like it comes from "what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work). Something made nowadays would probably start with a premise that comes from "Millenials can't afford anything".

Mainstream culture during the Bush era was also before the sudden explosion in nerd culture. Superheroes hadn't eaten the entertainment industry yet, nostalgia wasn't yet a driving force in pop culture, and it was still uncool to admit that you enjoy RPGs or reading comic books or doing whatever else nerds do. A parody of modern cultural memes would resemble Ready Player One more than Idiocracy, and Ready Player One wasn't even intended as parody. Instead, Idiocracy spends a lot of time lampooning shock reality TV (e.g. Ow My Balls), which was a huge thing in the mid-00s with shows like Jackass and Fear Factor but isn't big anymore. And the general culture is different. Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now. Even in bro-culture you wouldn't see that in 2018 (I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia around, but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore), and so a parody of modern bro-culture probably wouldn't even mention it. TBH, a parody of modern bro-culture would probably involve MRAs and redpillers and pseudo-intellectuals who worship Jordan Peterson.

Like, the _idea_ of a movie about the future being full of stupid people would still be relevant in 2018 (and you can thank Trump for that), but it wouldn't be Idiocracy because Idiocracy was more about parodying mid-00s pop culture than anything else. I'd imagine a late-10s Idiocracy would involve some combination of nerd culture turned mainstream eating the world, '90s nostalgia (with "only '90s kids remember" somehow being reiterated over and over 500 years in the future), avocado toast, and nobody being able to afford a house.

[Apocryphon]

This is a pretty great pop cultural analysis of American society of when Idiocracy was created.

I think the movie is a reflection of the time it was created, but it's a little less tied to that moment than you think. If you think of it as a subversion of the generic Jetsons vision of automation leading to mass complacency then it could be a more universal film than you portray it as. (Probably pre-Jetsons but '50s postwar sci-fi probably exemplifies that vision the best. Or maybe it extends further back, and the Idiocrats are just tackier versions of the Eloi from Wells.)

I think the big realization we have now is that automation is far less utopian than we expected, it comes with complications and externalities and inequality, with a lot of what we have now is just abstracting away work so that someone less well-off and farther away is doing it. Funnily enough one minor "plothole" I always had with Idiocracy is that if everyone is stupid, how were the machines still semi-functional? How did their society produce the cameramen at the monster truck death rally? Obviously, the whole movie is a satire or lampoon, but it made me think how society could culturally regress while still remaining technologically semi-functional, buoyed by artifacts of the ancient past like the Eloi or some descendent race from a fantasy setting.

I think if you were to make an Idiocracy today it would have to be focused on how social media and the 24/7 online culture have disrupted the way we relate to one another. Instead of 1001 channels of trashy reality TV it would be conspiracy theories and fringe ideas and charlatans appealing to both emotion and pseudo-logic. (Interspersed with unboxing videos and ASMR and live-streaming, sure.) It feels like anti-intellectualism today is fueled more by anger and zeal (this applies to all political stripes). The current boom feels a lot less even and people are far more desperate and stressed out. Our attention spans are even more frayed. Whereas the original Idiocracy was more about complacency birthed from prosperity, as you pointed out. (Though that rather ignores specific Bush administration policies that could be criticized as anti-intellectual, whether culture wars at home or military aggression abroad. But maybe their absence from that film makes it, as I mentioned earlier, more generic.)

[dragonwriter]

> The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time

It was a fairly modest aggregate growth period with unusually poor distributional effects, where the bottom 3 quintiles so real income drops and the fourth was flat.

Which is actually a lot like the subsequent expansions.

> what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work).

Er, the trend of automation and distraction hasn't really changed (indeed, it's gained even more cultural currency), though the shock genre has moved from reality TV to online video venues, often relayed by social media; not any less of a thing, just a slightly different medium. Though I guess a VR headset worn on the smart toilet would be more 2018 dystopian futurism than the big screen.

> Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now.

No, using slurs implying homosexuality and lack of manliness as anti-intellectual insults isn't less of thing now than it was then. If anything, both anti-intellectualism, it's time to homophobia, and it's tendency to conflate those two opposed things has increased.

> but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore

I've seen them about as much in the last two years (including on mass media outlets) as I did in the whole of the 1990s, in the specific confluence of homophobic insults with anti-intellectualism. Less of “gay” as a generic equivalent of “bad”, sure, but that wasn't the context of “you talk faggy”.

[scoggs]

Thanks, I was really baffled to see that comment.

[PhasmaFelis]

Yeah, Idiocracy is kind of insidiously awful because it thinks that cultural changes are actually genetic. You don't have to follow its arguments very far at all to come to the conclusion that ignorance can be fixed, not by education, but by restricting breeding rights. We all know where that leads.

(Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/603/)

[dragonwriter]

> Yeah, Idiocracy is kind of insidiously awful because it thinks that cultural changes are actually genetic.

But...they are (or, rather, they can reasonably be expected to produce genetic changes which reinforce themselves.) Because cultural changes effect mate selection, and also otherwise improve the relative fitness of those naturally inclined to thrive in the cultural environment.

[PhasmaFelis]

Most people who obsess over celebrities, or fall for every ad they see, or whatever else Idiocracy thinks is the downfall of society, aren't mentally impaired. They were raised in a society that discourages critical thinking skills and devalues education. They're ignorant, in other words. You don't fix ignorance with eugenics. You fix it with education.

[Aeolun]

A more healthy and smart society?

[Cyph0n]

Have you heard about the story of eugenics and Nazi Germany?

[Aeolun]

It seems to me the conditions are completely different.

There’s nothing racial or political about this.

It’s certainly ethically dubious. And I’m not certain it actually has any effect.

[PhasmaFelis]

Which group of people do you trust to decide which other groups should be allowed to continue and which should become extinct, without any bias or personal preference?

Eugenics is always political.

> It’s certainly ethically dubious. And I’m not certain it actually has any effect.

Then why are you defending it? I'm confused.

[Aeolun]

If it does works it is entirely possible it will lead to a healthier and smarter society.

I see it mainly as an implementation problem, not necessarily objectively bad by itself.

A bit like communism :)