A still from the movie Demolition Man in which some police officers prepare to confront a character played by Wesley Snipes.
Top Text: Demolition Man: A movie which depicts a horrifying dystopia…
Bottom Text:…in which food is too healthy, bidets are common, and cops literally don’t know how to assault a black man.
Comrade, I rented that movie from a locally-owned VHS rental shop that used physical membership cards.
Sure it’s a dystopia, but it’s a dystopia where they solved too many problems. John Spartan gets into a high speed car crash and his car instantly fills up with safety foam and he’s completely unharmed. The police force is ethnically and gender diverse. Guns are museum pieces. The cops don’t know HOW to assault somebody.
Sure they’ve killed a large amount of choice, and the guy in charge of it all seems to be determined to secure even more power for himself because of course he’s a sociopath with Mr. Rogers’ speech patterns, but all told I’d much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.
What Pluribus is.
But all the dystopian elements is not necessarily the price for the improvements. The message of the movie (to me) was “don’t get fooled by some shiny surface when the core is rotten.”
And your choice is not between “bad” and “worse”. We can imagine even better futures (Star Trek Federation citizenship seems to be pretty neat (if you’re not trying to settle some fringe worlds at the cardassian border) for example), so we can work on these.
If the right people don’t have power do you know what happens? The wrong people get it!
Holy shit, I had no idea Raymond Cocteau was this before he was Raymond Cocteau. That’s total genius casting.