You better start believing in cyberpunk dystopia, Miss Turner. You're in one!
Not sure which one. But we already pretty much check all the boxes of cyberpunk.
Permanently Deleted
It's the shittiest form of cyberpunk.
We have cybernetic implants! But they're only for people who need them or are being headed up by a dipshit (Elon's Neuralink)...
We have AI! But it's just a glorified chat bot and it's not even necessarily good at even that...
We keep having gnarly pandemics of new diseases.
The mega corporations are exactly what you expect.
The quality of life is exactly as you expect, except even the best possible quality you could get if you were rich also kinda fucking sucks compared to fiction (can't even live on Mars forever in a Matrix connected blow job machine IRL)...
The dystopia would be more bearable if I could become a cybernetic superman on Mars. Just sayin'.
I always thought CEOs being greedy mythical dragons that compulsively hoard riches because it's their nature, to be a brilliantly plausible fantasy element.
At this point it almost feels like a rational explanation for their inhuman behavior.
On this track that's probably the only fantasy element we'd get LOL.
Damnit, I managed to trip into a Shadowrun campaign and I didn't even roll a Dwarf.
100% its cyberpunk. corpo takeover with having to use technology to get by even when it is bad for you.
Yeah, but where the hell are my leg implants that allow me to double jump and air dash already?
air dash is a skill. your just being lazy.
That would be cool...but I tell ya what, we have Ray Bans that you can talk to which require an account and act as a personal body cam to use your every waking moment for spying, registering shadow-accounts for everyone you interact with, and ai training.
How's that sound?
(Man, we're in the stupidest timeline aren't we...)
Idiocracy.
Birth rates are down everywhere and the majority of the people left making lots of babies are not the ones you wish would be having them. Being virtuous and on the "right side of history" means nothing if those values die with you and are not passed to the next generation.
Being virtuous and on the "right side of history" means nothing if those values die with you and are not passed to the next generation.
Why not?
People more or less adopt their values from their parents and the people they grow up with. The christian right and redneck hillbillys are making kids and thus their beliefs will carry over to the next generation but this is much less the case with the liberal left where not having children is much more common. Basically, the more educated you are the less likely you're to have kids. This is true all over the world.
the majority of the people left making lots of babies are not the ones you wish would be having them
Found the eugenicist
This is not the first time i've seen sentiments similar to this around here. Just know this is an extremely elitist and racist viewpoint, and is one of the core arguments in favor of eugenics.
A eugenist pov would defend selecting human individuals based on their genetic makeup, something people have no control over and is effectively a prejudice. Idiocracy shows the degeneracy of society based on societal factors such as disinformation, wealth, etc. and is an accurate prediction of western society's current state (specifically US, but is also valid in part for US-aligned nationstates such as France). My guess as a layman is there is some inverse statistical correlation between political knowledge and babymaking, but as we know, correlation isn't causation, and if there is anyone to blame, it's the bourgeoisie. Cut some heads in time for spring, they'll regrow better
Idiocracy but mixed with the Neuromancer series and 1984.
Add a dash of « The Handmaid’s Tale »
More of a glug.
WALL-E. We just don't have a way to escape yet, but the rest is happening regardless.
That's a very optimistic view of our future.
I’m sure Bezass and Muskpoo got us covered, just most of us can’t afford to leave with them.
Aww yeah, Bezass is even better than Jeffy Kisses (my name for him).
V for Vendetta
I like your optimism
L for Luigi?
A combination of Snow Crash and Idiocracy
Ah I love Snow Crash.
We're already at the point of bizarre self-parody, cringe-irony, ultra-capitalism, but instead of pizza delivering street-samurai and a fascinating metaverse...
...we got grub/dash/food/rabbit/whatever and..."meta." Ugh.
I hate so much that Idiocracy was so on the mark. Knowledge being lost, culture being 100% based on consumption, corporate warmonger leadership. The entertainment is basically there if you look at YouTube's front page it's like:
"OW! MuH bAwLz! (For $48,000,000?!?!?!) - 2 hrs. ago | 3 million views"
"Slappin buttz n' moar munee - UpGrAyD (ft. GoonOhioSkebedeezyFR) - 1 day ago | 7.5 million views"
Might as well throw some Terminator and 'The Machine Stops' in there.
Lots of good suggestions so far, Brave New World and Don't Look Up would be right up there for me. But my #1 is this...
The Machine Stops (PDF) Written in 1909 so out of copyright, this book is so ahead of its time it makes remarkable reading today. The amount of things predicted that describe the modern day is incredible. It's also not that long, so well worth a read.
100% no doubt The parable of the sower and subsequent book. I read that book - started reading it - in June this year and read it over about a month. It was very creepy to be reading a sci fy book set in the future that is now my present and while it is not as bad right now as Octavia Butler makes it out to be, we are definitely heading there if drastic action is not taken immediately.
Edit: the books in order: (Only two, sadly she died while writing the third but still both worth reading, there isn't a clif hanger at the end) https://www.octaviabutler.com/parableseries
Absolutely this! Octavia Butler literally wrote a fascist American president with the slogan "Make America Great Again" in 1993.
Her.
Given that we've already had a few suicides caused by (or at least exacerbated by) LLM chatbots, I think we're already there.
I do believe that a lot of aspects of The Ministry for the Future by K.S. Robinson have chances of becoming true.
The deadly heatwave in south Asia, governments going rogue and playing with geo engineering on their own, climate refugee camps and the general sense of too little too late.
But the book is fairly optimistic, so hopefully, people of the world getting together and accepting a new paradigm will come to be true.
I could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.
Just time for another bath!
1984
Horizon Zero Dawn: Total extinction by the 2060s because some mad, narcissistic Elon Musk guy overestimates himself and fucks it up for the whole world? Doesn't sound too far-fetched to me right now.
The Water Knife by Paolo Baccigalupi is pretty on the nose for the near future of the southern US
It thought that Vegas was an abomination, a testament to the vanity of mankind but that book made me understand that Phoenix has twice as many people, is bigger though sure, is a little wetter on average and should hold that title.
How is this one of the cheapest cities to live in in the US? Why are we moving the micro chip industry there?
Parable of the Sower
It was written as near future fiction anyway. In fact the dates mentioned in the book start out in our past. Just the catalyst events haven’t quite happened yet. Add a few years to the dates and I could see us heading towards that kind of societal break down.
This book is haunting. It made me seriously consider buying a gun. If I could convince my wife to read it, we'd probably have an armory by now.
Brave New World
We’re already living it
Our drugs aren't that good. And the system isn't optimizing for maximum happiness.
Scroll down and keep the endorphins flowing.
I suppose he was referring to the general "this is fine" attitude.
Forced promiscuity?
I'm going to go obscure here and say that the world of 2077 from the television show Continuum
It ran for a few seasons; I enjoyed it for the most part. Not the best, not the worst. But definitely in terms of the premise where Corporations have essentially bought out failing governments, leading to an advanced surveillance state, and anti-corporate terrorists, etc... etc...
Been reading Corey Doctorow lately and catch myself thinking, "Aw c'mon! That's not how it works!" And then remember, he's writing about the near future.
Radicalized was pretty damn close to the mark. Sure in this case Luigi was radicalized from back pain and not cancer.
Dune.
Not the cool parts, the Butlerian Jihad.
I'd have gone with WH40Ks war with the men of iron but there's absolutely no chance we reach golden age of technology levels before we fuck ourselves.
Our history sounds shockingly similar to Animal Farm.
Get invaded by the Saud dynasty, an ultraconservative, wahhabist group
Become an absolute monarch, where criticism = death by beheading
Pretend how it's great here, and how nothing ever goes wrong here
Become a lifeless country, where all our work and natural resources are reserved for the Sauds
By islamic law, we are all equal. But some of us, are more equal than others.
Next step, is probably to centralize all power to MBS, which he partially already did.
A combination of all the worst bits of the worst ones
"Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority. The Farm, immediately. - death sentence in Ellison's book 'A Boy and His Dog'
Awesome book. The whole series was good, except the last one.
All of the negatives from Metropolis 2001
Metropolis (2001): How Capitalism Produces Fascism
The Temporal Messages of Metropolis
Elon Musk = Duke Red
Lots of good responses in this thread so far, but I keep thinking of the newest Gibson trilogy with regards to "the jackpot" where the majority of the population dies from a series of "not quite the big one" pandemics and climate issues and society is taken over by the kleptocracy. I love Gibson's books, but I wish he would stop accurately predicting our demise.
The Simpsons
I've gotta go with Mad Max here. Between the words oil obsession, rising aggression and dumbing down of society I can't see it going any other way.
As an American I'd absolutely say Idiocracy, but that's just my little corner of humanity.
If we don't dodge that bullet, Years and Years. Or Neuromancer.
Neuromancer would be an improvement at this point. Gibson underestimated just how bad corporations could get.
Blade Runner
Penultimate Truth. Predicted containing the cattle using fear of something that doesn't even exist in reality.
Can we choose? I'll pick the Matrix. Yes we are slaves to the machines, but at least they give us happy dreams
How far ahead do you want to go? The Borg are a more likely future phase of humanity than Star Trek's Federation, though without FTL travel, we're gonna be stuck crawling from rock to rock in our own neighbourhood for a very long time.
There's also a bit in old kid's TV show The Girl From Tomorrow where, at one point, something mucks up the timeline so badly that the future she comes from ceases to exist and all of the Earth's land ends up an uninhabitable desert, devoid of life. That seems pretty likely too.
These two things are not mutually exclusive either.
As bland and forgettable as it was, the film adaptation of "Tomorrowland."
The premise (or at least my takeaway) basically being that, we might have been headed toward a techno-utopia of optimistic and bright developments, but greed and cynicism took over the spirit of invention, and everyone collectively became cynical and pessimistic about the future as a result.
Technology and those who claimed to wield it became enemies of the people.
Many of our most popular "near future" stories and entertainment are about societal collapse, disaster, the worst of humanity turning on themselves, and technology being used for its worst purposes. We almost enjoy morbidly indulging in forecasting our own bad ending, over and over and over. Warnings became franchises co-opted by the bad powers they warned against.
Partially, we'll get a crappy future because we've all been conditioned and used to the idea that it's inevitable and there's nothing we can do about it. This reduces our will to fight it, and instead we settle for merely enduring it.
If we had hope and fire and a taste of something better, we'd stop giving in to doomerism and just accepting it when it keeps getting worse.
This is why I really like the emergence of Solar Punk. It's a hopeful and bright rebellion against endless neon acid rain tumbling down towering corporate fortresses, rusting everybody's work-leased cyber-limbs as they gig-work 24/7 to afford neural software updates.
Instead, it's about embracing communitarianism, careful stewardship of natural resources, sustainable existence in tandem with nature instead of against it, open and free knowledge to all, endless invention with human thriving in mind.
If people actually believed, not merely that's how it should be, but that it could be ...we could make some real progress.
The Road.
Price of obsidian gonna skyrocket.
Beat me to it!
I don't know about closest, but definitely most likely, Tank Girl. Basically, water and power will be extreme scarcities for the majority and a corporation that bottles up the water to keep it from becoming free through rain and owns all of central power grid will be the effective government. It will take a few more decades for the water to get bottled up by Nestlé, et al., and the water infrastructure to fail in more cities. And then the fossil fuel industry to run out of resources and collapse and thus leave only the few nuclear reactors as the only major power sources, without renewables investment, which can be grabbed by the water owners by saying they need the power to collect the water bottles and they need to "secure" the dangerous reactors with the military hardware they collected to protect "their" water sources from protesters and poor people over the years.
Mediocrity.
Wall-E by way of 1984.
People are talking about really wonderful interesting things, but I can't even choose between those I'm thinking about.
Star Wars EU - because that's what I see around. Lots of stupidity, evil and decay, but in the end there's the sky and the life with all its beauty. The old part of it, which mostly was happening after Empire's institution while the rebels were not something close to victory in anyone's opinion.
Vacuum Flowers - that's the "worse is better" evolutionary optimism. That it will all become only worse, there's no good defeating evil, we will all die, but - life finds a way, humanity finds a way, and so on. It will go on.
Heinlein's Door into Summer - some parts are too much like our reality.
Actually I think all 3 have the same general idea, I just can't quite catch it.
Funny, I’d have said we’re closer to the new Star Wars cinematic trilogy than the EU.
You think you’ve won, then a few years later, oh look, fascism is back and it’s killing people in job lots again.
fElon is trying to make droids.
"Wow, I can't believe it, after all that sacrifice, we've won against the fascist empire!"
"Somehow Putrumpatine returned. :("
Honestly though, I think we're seeing a lot of the prequel trilogy ring true, especially since it has a lot of similarities to historical empire corruption and collapse.
Except the bad guys in government are ridiculously, cartoonishly obvious and don't even need to hide anymore.
I think that it'd have to be one of those countless near-future works that are set in what basically amounts to being the present-day world.
I think that if you're looking for something other than that, something more in a far-out setting, you'd need to ask something like "what futuristic work do you think society will most resemble in 200 years" or something like that. That forces things down the road a bit, and makes one pick among different predictions about how society will change in the future.
Contagion and Children of Men - while they didn't look far into the future and dealt with existing problems, it's still horrifyingly accurate.
Jasper: "Pull my finger"
