I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!" It was an early screener and I think that reaction was a surprise to the film team. I own a copy and watch it more than once a year. One of my favorite hard satires.
Agreed. It’s cited so often on Reddit by people who want to establish their superiority over the masses. “It’s a documentary!!” is a meme unto itself.
It’s also got a kind of weird eugenics-y vibe to it when you step back and examine it as a movie that’s making Serious Statements. But it isn’t. It’s not a bad movie. But it’s a comedy, the satirical elements are heavily over exaggerated by fans.
It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling truth from fiction.
I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political.
For instance, their famous 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens article they post all over their page whenever there is some high profile gun related crime. It's all over their page and no doubt they get a bump in traffic from smug people who feel it's clever. It's just so exhausting. It was a great headline, but by the time the joke gets its own Wikipedia, it might be time to retire it. You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Look at their trending article: Critics Outraged By Flippant School Shooting Plotline In ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’. Where's the joke? There is obviously no school shooting plotline. It's not clever or creative. I guess the joke is school shootings are a thing, and Mario is a popular movie?
It's basically South Parks criticism of Family Guy where they write jokes by having a seal put together random words from popular culture. School shootings + Mario = funny. And this stuff gets clicks because people think they're clever or subversive when it's just lazy and unoriginal.
I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate truth/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence.
If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
Indignant behavior may have been a result of a perceived attack on viewers belief system. Possibly combined with no 2nd order awareness of thought. Additionally, a subtle “critique” framing from the screening host or “open mic” framing may prime the participants to command attention. Outrage is the easiest when one has no conceptual lens to add interpretive value.
Yep. The studio didn't know what the hell to do with it.
I'm guessing that we (those of us who have seen it despite the lack of promotion) are lucky that they didn't just can it completely, or demand it get cut to ribbons and reformed as something else.
I wasn't insulted, but it did feel a bit too on the nose to really work as satire.
Idiocracy got there just in time, before things became so stupid that satire wasn't possible any more. You have to exaggerate so hard that it lacks the feeling of cleverness required by satire.
The Onion struggles on. They've always been true masters of the form. I wrote my own news satire back in the 80s and quit when I saw The Onion; they were far better than I would ever be. Practically nobody else can still pull off satire here in the worst timeline.
Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness.
"Don't Look Up" captures a lot more of the actual dynamics. Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, the people are just normal humans made stupid by their cultural environment, incentives and suchlike.
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
Even if the creator specifically had eugenics in mind, I think he stumbled upon a greater truth.
Consider this. You can take anyone from any group in your nation, place them in a different nation, with a different culture, and they will adopt the mannerisms and accents of that culture.
We focus on race constantly, but it's clear that culture drives the norms that we see in any group. And culture may be persistent (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic.
With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.
While genes must play a part in this (if they didn't, all non-humans would also share our IQ*), genetics shift on a much slower timescale than the entire history of IQ tests.
* This pattern matches to the Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical technique, ergo I am suspicious of people who try to tie genetics and IQ until they're clear they're not making a racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers.
I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convincing themselves that they are right.
Unfortunately I fear it's more like EQ than IQ. The driver is more about the people. They do not like the kind of people who are trying to prevent climate change, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
Yes, it's hard for some to believe, but there are people in my family who are otherwise very intelligent but will not change their opinions on some things. Like climate change.
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
All of these effects are explained much better by social factors. If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
Hold on.
Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves.
I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
> It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.
No, they showed that the gloves could have introduced microplastic-like particles in some samples depending on how they are handled. It just feels like one of those studies secretly funded by an oil company to throw shade.
I think the intent of Mike Judge's joke was less so an outright promotion of eugenics and more so mocking the upper crust of American society's approach to family planning. (That of which Judge was intimately familiar with during his time in SV when he worked for a graphics card company.)
A lot of his work with KotH analyzed the same dynamics of educated and uneducated America and the interplay and I think Idiocracy is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions.
It is curious that there's no reported disgenic effect though - that seems counter to evolutionary theory? Perhaps it's only limiting the rate of growth of IQ/intelligence.
There's a classic sci-fi story in which we rely on computers, the population gets dumber to the point noone knows how to make/fix the computers. I think in that there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
That's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
All kinds of people voted for the Nazi party, including very intelligent and respectable professors, and there was no special split in intelligence between either side voters (or measure of that).
What's ironic is using nazi-like thinking (the idiot masses who vote far right vs the enlightened people who vote left), instead of treating it as a complex political matter, and accepting that perfectly intelligent people can just as well fall for that shit.
I didn't read Idiocracy as eugenics/anti-eugenics. It wasn't saying that stupid people breeding made the population stupid, it was saying that the less educated breeding resulted in the more educated being pushed to the periphery and eventually fading out.
The people of the film's future were not stupid, just massively uninformed and misinformed. They were able to grasp the problem and solution in the end.
Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. It is a good few years since I last watched it. There is the title, of course, but educationally-disasavantaged-ocracy would not have been catchy enough!
I'm afraid you are misremembering. The movie is explicitly eugenicist. The people of the future are explicitly biologically stupid. The opening transcript is unambiguous:
[Man Narrating] As the 21st century began… human evolution was at a turning point.
Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest… the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest… a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man… now began to favor different traits.
[Reporter] The Joey Buttafuoco case-
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized… and more intelligent.
But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
A dumbing down.
How did this happen?
Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.
With no natural predators to thin the herd… it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most… and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.
Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.
I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly.
I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore.
It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
But there is no need to disproof this because there is no evidence that it has any truth to it.
Can't remember in details that part of the film. Was it explicitly eugenics? Otherwise it could be seen as not getting the same education, depending on parental situation.
> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)
I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?
>It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans
So it's a documentary?
Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".
>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true
No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.
>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?
while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment.
> I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy … Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!"
I watched this movie really late. Let's say within the past 2 years or so. After watching it, all I could think was, "This isn't a comedy, it's a tragedy."
I suspect it depends on how hopeful or hopeless you feel about the world.
If you already believe that humanity is doomed to self-destruction, then there's nothing left to do but make fun of it and laugh, enjoy the ride to hell. George Carlin is a perfect example of this, rooting for the disasters.
I mean, Office Space and Silicon Valley are legit funny. I doubt how I can be "frustratingly sad" after watching either of the two because in Office Space, (spoilers ahead) but the ending is actually quite happy and more about realizing life's about what you want and it might not be a desk job and Silicon Valley is hilarious in terms of how it parodies the 2010s tech culture but its more about "look what tech has become" rather than "oh my god everything sucks, all idiots everywhere, we're doomed" type energy.
Also a lot of Silicon Valley stuff is kindda bs esp the arc where one single dude figures out such a massive leap in tech so quickly and then solves P=NP using freaking AI and then doesn't sell out to Hooli. You gotta suspend a lot of disblief for that but people don't talk about how unrealistic the main plot is
Also the episode where Jared has to explain scrum to vet developers like Dinesh and Gilfoyle. Like you seriously think they didn't know what scum was before meeting Jared?
That'd leave even more room for drama. I'm imagining Gavin hiring thousands of cheap, unskilled laborers ("Hooli's industry-leading AI research team") to mash keys until they rediscover the prompt that generated middle-out compression with a patent-free clean room process. He never reproduces it because Gilfoyle's self-hosted LLM improved its own memory efficiency when when Dinesh got upset and started unplugging GPUs.
I refuse to watch it. I really like most Mike Judge’s stuff, but this I just don’t want to see and think those thoughts. I know we live in a dystopic satire of existence, you don’t have to show me. Now please let me take these new cybernetic info drugs and let me crawl into a hole sleep shielded from the Neon-Tokyo’s toxic rain.
It’s what happens when you let people get what they want.
Like children, adults need guidance. Kids would eat candy and drink OJ till their baby teeth rot off and they are riddled with onset of many diseases if left to their own devices. Adults have similar tendencies and if you remove the guardrails (perhaps to distract from other dysfunction), you get adults who seek short term pleasure whether that be food, perversion, laziness, etc. That’s why culture and taboos matter. They keep people from undermining themselves. Obviously things can go in the other direction too far like North Korea and Iran, etc.
I like to say "adults are children without teachers". It feels like this in many contexts, but I started to say it during covid. When people looked at statistics, made wrong conclusions (because they don't know how to read statistics), and genuinely believed they were right. When children do that, they have a figure of authority (the teacher) who can tell them that they actually did not understand it at all.
I was in highschool with a guy who absolutely sucked at maths. Everybody knew it, he knew it, nobody could deny it because he was clearly struggling in class. I have no problem with that and I was actually trying to help when I could. But years later when covid hit, he was one of those very vocal people claiming complete nonsense based on "the numbers". He did not have a teacher at this point to give him bad grades and telling him that he was completely wrong. Being an adult, he felt like he was right.
Not quite sure "Ow My Balls / Jackass" argument should count, the Jackass franchise is older than Idiocracy and was most likely an inspiration for that bit.
And I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Returns (1986) graphic novel. There are grotesque parodies of talking head news anchors and even a caricature of then-president Ronald Regan. Situation all fracked up.
"A character is literally named 'Upgraydd' with creative spelling. In the future, names have become increasingly absurd — just random syllables, product names, and numbers."
He was! Frito Pendejo (Joe's lawyer) and the cop Beef Supreme are better examples. Or of course the wrestler-president Camacho whose middle name is literally Mountain Dew.
I don't remember if it's ever explicitly stated, but I certainly took that to be the implication. Maybe it's actually funnier if they're doing it pro bono, now I am suddenly unsure.
The irony is that it only implies we have be in the proto-Idiocracy stage for a while, regardless of whether people who live in bubbles do not understand that “Upgraydd” type characters are not exactly a new or invented thing.
I just watched a new dinosaur cartoon made for kids and it has cartoon dinosaurs that farts a lot and I looked it up and in reddit people are saying "duh..farts are funny..why do you have a problem with it?"
I just finished up Pluribus S01; to me this could have been a take on AI.
The AI could have been The Joined; a population of beings who want only to make the remaining humans happy, by giving humans what they want, but they (The Joined) also acknowledge that in the long run their approach will result in an almost an Extinction-Level , mass starvation, etc.
I always saw black mirror as explicitly a near-future satire of the present, not commentary on where humanity is headed. I think something like Children of Men would fill the british angle better.
A handful of Black Mirror episodes land on a more optimistic (or at least not entirely bleak) note, though "happy" might be overstating it for any of them. Bittersweet, maybe.
Eulogy and Hotel Reverie from the newest season are at 70-75%, and I think they both end on a similarly bittersweet note like San Junipero. The one with Miley Cyrus is at 65% and is about as happy an ending as Black Mirror episodes get.
I always thought the comparison to real life falls a bit flat. In the movie there’s a scene where Camacho has a town hall and the audience yells something about everything bad. Camacho fires his gun in the air for silence and acknowledges things are bad and says he’s going to ask the smartest person in the world to help.
So in this scenario the people are allowed to voice real concerns directly to the president without fear of retribution. The president acknowledges things are bad. He describes a plan, with real actionable steps, to help the situation. And to wrap it all up follows through with it and is genuinely interested in making the country / world a better place. None of these things apply to America’s current situation.
At the core of it, in the movie everyone is dumb but well meaning, while in real life most of the idiots are also malicious. They keep voting for the same thing because it hurts their perceived enemies, not because they think their vote will make the country better.
The profusion of LLMs with secret weights and prompts will also give us the The Truman Show's false-friendships, product placement, and fraudulent recommendations.
Without also making us famous or taking care of our daily needs.
I think in some ways we are past it; unfortunately not the funny ways. Some examples:
1. The presidents response to bombing of school girls was basically "stop hitting yourself"
2. Fox news host Dept. of Defense head and the "Dept. of War" name "change"
3. Building a grand ballroom while taking benefits away from hungry kids
4. Elon musk on stage with the chainsaw bragging about acts that save no money but did harm the poorest people on earth.
5. The fact that our media does not really care about any of this unless they get a ratings bump from it
Obviously we all could go on and on.. but the biggest loss IMO is objective truth. There are and will always be things that are true and I feel that we are losing a hold of that so that bad actors can just say to us: "no thats not what your seeing".
Its like in the movie, if they had looked at the plant growing and said: "Thats FAKE NEWS" then run to the field and claimed they did it all.
Man, that font used for the individual attribute evaluation percentage badge is horrible.
I’m guessing based on the color coding that what could also be a slanted and italicized 1 is actually slanted and italicized 7, but talk about a horrible font, on top of what looks like about 10 different other fonts used on the site.
I guess that is in keeping with the theme; the Idiocracy status tracking site is also Idiocracy.
so, I'm not the only one who was scrolling it and thinking, "damn, it's so horrible and illegible, it must be on-brand with the topic." I even thought that the Dark Reader extension messed things up yet again.
- "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. They pay me every time i say it" vs "Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war"
- "Florida's in Georgia, dumbass" vs "We setled Aberbaijan and Albania"
- "Secretary of education is kinda stupid, but he 's president's brother" vs "Donald Trump's White House is a family affair"
I ve been watching Idiocracy over and over for years, as a documentary.
In many ways the movie is more merciful than reality. Frito , a really dumb man who purchased his "lawyer degree" in costco, could afford his own comfy apartment and car. He was not addicted on his phone all day , constantly worried about what others think of him. The govt would take care of your neglected kids. Employment by brawndo kept the world quiet. Leaders were too dumb to make wars. People too dumb to make culture wars. Their president was smarter.
The misspellings in signage though, is comedically reminiscent of AI image generators.
Every time Idiocracy comes up, I feel obligated to point out that it is WILDLY optimistic. The people are dumb, not evil. They struggle to adapt and learn, but are willing to try and willing to accept new information with evidence.
To be a proper prophecy, Idiocracy is also missing the entire society ON TOP of the one portrayed, which has infinite amount of wealth and is probably isolating with servants on some island for decades already...
A series that hits even closer is BrainDead, about an alien that gets into politicians' heads and polarizes them completely. It's very fun, and each episode recap at the beginning is done via lyrics of a folky song.
Worth a watch and laugh. And cry.
I don't think so. Trump is exceptional compared to political tradition for a very long time, as evidenced currently by most developed world leaders shunning his illegal war campaign. In fact, who else can be comparable?
If you are at least tiny bit curious about looking beyond your IT bubble you know that the majority of population has always been dumb. It’s just biological fact of life.
For better or worse hundreds years ago they didn’t get any power. Today they got internet, got exposure and got power. Nothing is changing on a fundamental human nature or statistical level.
But idiocracy is not about that majority. It is about the thought leaders becoming dumb. Internet, instead of elevating the majority to the level of intellectuals, dragged the intellectuals to the level of the dumb majority.
If you mix poison in milk, milk becomes poison and not the other way. Pretty obvious in hindsight..
People keep saying this is the US as if anything about this regime is in any way legitimate, let alone abides by the Constitution, regardless of whether you like that or not. The founders of America tried to set up a system that would prevent the very thing that this thing still called America has become. Washington warned about foreign entanglements, now that’s basically all America is. It’s an extremely complicated story, but calling it America is basically “deadnaming” it. No founder of America would in any way agree with anything going on today and would be horrified of what it has become.
The repeated, systemic manner in which the Constitution is and long has been inherently violated in every possible way for many decades now, makes it self-evidently not a legitimate government; which would require having abide by the foundational supreme law that would confer actual legitimacy.
It’s like signing a contract and then not only not abiding by it, but committing all kinds of other offenses/crimes on top of that. The contract is clearly no longer valid.
Not only due to the duration of the violation of the Constitution, but the near impossibility of restoring and reversing all the violations at this point makes this thing we still call America something, but a legitimate USA based on the Constitution it is not, no matter how you look at it.
People may have a hard time accepting that because of various mental conditioning structures, but regardless of whether people are willing to accept that or not… this is simply not the USA. It’s basically identity theft, regardless of who the actual person behind the fake identity is.
Is Mexico still an Aztec empire? No. Would China still be China if Russia conquered China but still called it China? No. The closest analogue from history seems to be when Britain controlled India and still kept its name and used certain aspects of India’s culture for control to facilitate the exploitation.
Just because the hostile takeover by a kind of parasitic civilizational private equity firm through a leveraged buyout called the national debt has kept the branding of “USA”, does not mean it’s not been gutted.
Even the “right” is equally merely holding onto something that does not actually exist anymore, kind of like an old guy in an old steel mill that some private equity firm has taken over to financially plunder, vehemently defends the new management without understanding one bit of what’s going on, because all he has left after 50 years of working there is delusional hope.
I’m not sure what else to call it, but it sure is not the USA anymore than an ant infected with the “ zombie ant fungus”, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is still an ant from the second it is infected with the spore that then spreads and controls the ant in ways that are not yet fully understood.
It is like any abusive or parasitic relationship, you may not realize you’re in for abuse and parasitism, but the abusers and the parasites sure know that about you.
Sorry, but no. It is the USA. But now without the veneer, this rot was there for a long time, it's just that people no longer feel any need to pretend they're respectable. Other places have similar problems, where I live, in NL, there are a lot of things that would not have passed in public in the 80's or the 90's that people routinely engage in now because it has been normalized. The only difference though is that it is public rather than said behind closed doors. No country is immune from this. The only way to fix it is to own it.
I mean, you could probably make these comparispns in 2006 when the movie came out. Perhaps it wasnt prophetic but rather just a sature of the general human condition
In Idiocracy, president Camacho actually had the decent idea of trying listen to (somewhat) reasonable people with relevant abilities or skills rather than insisting that his failures are actually successes and just trying to force it until that worked. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
I'd like to bring your attention to the fact that society had deteriorated to the point of imminent famine before Camacho thought to try and listen to the smartest person around in an attempt to avert disaster. We are not quite there yet.
You haven’t internalized what “the fertilizer the world uses to grow food is missing, this spring, because of a needless war” actually means, have you?
I'd argue that as soon as Camacho became aware of Not Sure's IQ test, he reached out. He didn't call on him before because he didn't know he existed (and/or he wasn't around), so he couldn't have helped prior.
If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job.
> If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job.
Isn't that a bit like a wooly mammoth? In theory it could exist but in practice you're not going to find anybody that is both mentally capable and at the same time stupid enough to eat his slop.
That leaves evil enough and there are plenty of those...
There are plenty of intelligent people that are willing to ride on the back of the Trump regime. That seems mostly to be the problem, in fact.
Whoever suggested that using Tariffs to provide a handle to move stocks that they could use to trade, I very much doubt it came from Trump. That was provided the means to keep all the greedy grubbers in the Republican party onside whilst they hid Trump's involvement with Epstein so the train could keep running.
Musk is evil. But he's clever, he knew to over pay for Twitter so he could use it to help swing elections and put himself in political power. He failed to get the response to his salute he expected, and knew enough to slink off into the background (or listen to his advisors telling him that). Amazingly he's still making money hand-over-fist from USA's regime. You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
They've absolutely destroyed USA, there is no Constitution now, there's not even lip service to war crime treaties. But there's a lot of intelligent people onboard that we underestimate at our peril.
I've generally held that Camacho is actually a model political leader. Despite growing up in a society that apparently didn't value education, he managed to rise to the top. He made legitimate, albeit ineffective attempts to address issues the country's problems. When someone showed up who had better ideas he promptly delegated both authority and responsibility.
I think that’s where Idiocracy goes wrong; stupidity is indistinguishable from evil when deployed at scale. Living through 2026 I find the distinction meaningless -- Hanlon's razor needs refinement.
I can't take this seriously - blaming Trump but not Joe Biden, though latter had obvious symptoms of cognitive decline AND many "smart" people claimed otherwise. If you are literally tricked to doubt your own eyes, your natural judgements and being constantly gaslighted to think otherwise - then this should be called out as well. If this does not fullfil the criteria for "Idiocracy", then nothing does.
I hear people make this comparison all the time, and while it is facially a bit funny I guess, I really don't think it holds up in any serious way.
What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
* The primary plot point of idiocracy is that poor (and thus, stupid - the film never explains why this correlation exists in that universe, though) people are the only ones who reproduce. For this reason, there is evolutionary pressure toward decreased intelligence. It's an odious premise on its face IMO, and certainly not what is happening in the USA: our birth rates are declining _because_ people are not economically stable.
* President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn. And he seems to be sincere and transparent. Trump's illusion runs precisely counter to this: he has every resource he can possibly need, but chooses to enrich himself and his friends instead of advancing the public interest.
Virtually every plot point of Idiocracy can be broken down this way. I see very, very little of the film universe that is consistent with our sociopolitical trajectory.
If you want a Mike Judge film that shines light on uncomfortable truths about 21st-century America, the obvious choice is Office Space.
This feels like nitpicking. Idiocracy was never supposed to be accurate; the important part is how it seems less ridiculous as time goes on.
The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time. The source of this is irrelevant. In reality, it turned out that the source of the stupidity was an increasingly poor education system, increasing inequality, and carefully designed injection of addictive technologies and medicines into the general populace.
Where idiocracy really failed in its predictions was in the development of AI, as that appears to increasingly substitute for lack of common understanding.
Also all of this only really holds for the US and maybe the UK.
> The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time.
...and in doing so, it depicts a world that is not at all reminiscent of the one in which we live.
The white house is not occupied by idiots, but by thieves and murders and sexual predators. The American landscape is not a Brawndo-dustbowl, but a highly profitable, productive, and delicious-but-toxic bounty of subsidized factory farms, stemming not from a misunderstanding of botany, but a misapplication of that understanding.
The same is true of the medical industry, the justice system - literally every institution portrayed in the entire film, with the possible exception of waste disposal / the trash avalanche.
Yes, the opposite direction. I pointed out two examples, but I think you can watch the film front to back and find them in every scene. The doctor, lawyer, judge, the storyline about the plants/electrolytes (which has a big opportunity to point to greed and factory farming and utterly whiffs), the Brawndo/unemployment subplot, the intensity of public interest in civic affairs - literally every major plot point runs in the opposite direction of today's realities.
Seems to me like two different paths to the same end. One stupid, the other more evil or at least rapacious, but the destination is ultimately the same.
It's not about Trump, but society as a whole. The president was a symptom, as is Trump.
> It's an odious premise on its face IMO
It's estimated that 1/3 of your intelligence is hereditary. A modern problem is that classes separate more from each other than before: white collar doesn't really mingle with blue collar, ethnic boundaries galore, etc. Before, people were educated and put on the social ladder according to birth. That made that a lot of smart people stayed in their community. Nowadays, they tend to move away. That means there's a development towards stratification of intelligence. Add LLMs to education, and we're on the fast track.
For thousands of years people were unsure if they’d have food the next day and still had a lot of kids. This happens today in the poorest parts of the world.
People are not having kids because they don’t want them. Those that can use birth control and failing that access abortion, etc.
People stopped having kids precisely the moment they had the option to.
> President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn.
Camacho does so because he literally has no other option, there is an imminent famine he has to deal with. If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump, then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
> If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump,
That's exactly the point: the world of the film is, in every way that matters, the opposite of the reality in which we live. So how are these strained comparisons useful?
> then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
Obviously we can't know, because the universe of Idiocracy is on rails toward stupidity and poverty, and never even considers greed and abundance as features of its janky political lens. In the first few minutes of the film, it establishes that poor, stupid people are to blame for every societal ill, and then it depicts a future in which no character ever even grapples with any other antagonist than the poverty and stupidity of his ancestors.
Is that today's world?! For who? Are the poor people in Iran and Gaza and Yemen who are dealing with explosives raining down on them (rather than Brawndo) stupid? Do you think their fate is attributable to the proclivity of previous generations to breed in inverse proportion to their material wealth?
It's just such an asinine premise it's hard to even understand what would qualify as a sound comparison, but it's certainly not any of those listed on this website.
I think you could have done this in the 1980s and 1990s and found a lot of fits: MTV, reality shows, daytime TV, junk food everywhere, pop music becoming increasingly trite and simple, newspapers and commentary declining toward grade school level vocabulary.
In the 50s you would have had suburban conformity and doctors recommending cigarettes. In the 60s you had people trying to become enlightened by taking drugs and listening to con men claiming to be Eastern gurus. In the 70s you had dumb new age cults and a lot of very bad movies and ugly fashion.
Mass media and any culture dominated by mass media tends to race to the bottom. There are many forces that drive it. Dumb culture is loud and viral. Lies and bullshit cost zero to produce and are expensive to debunk. Quality takes time and cost to make and drowns in quantity.
Attempts to frantically fight these forces normally turn into their own dystopias, usually taking the form of authoritarian nightmares or moralistic crusades. These often end up looking deeply stupid in retrospect too.
Yet we are still here. So somehow quality finds a way.
As you look back in time things look less dumb because of survivorship bias. The dumb shit is forgotten.
Our age will be remembered as when we taught the sand to think, made rockets that land vertically, returned to the Moon, and developed quantum computers.
Nobody will remember that we used AI to make TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR, that the guy with the rocket company acted like a thirteen year old 4chan edgelord, or that our president during the return to the moon couldn’t speak complete sentences.
That's fine, if we only care about ourselves. I guess the harder part is convincing everyone else to unplug from mass media and not raise their kids on it.
Aren't you all proud that anywhere in the world you go there is a fridge with coca cola, so it's a sound and solid investment? Smart people of HN and reddit?
This is just silly to portray idiocracy as a prediction of the future.
Yes the current president of America is a movie actor, this was not idiocracy predicting the future, Ronald Reagan was a movie actor president before idiocracy came out.
The movie satirised what was already happening, there is nothing special about nowadays.
In the sense of the word "prediction", it is certainly one. It was forecasting a future by painting a dotted line from the data they had, and they made a satire out of it.
They took Reagan being an actor and on their satirical dotted line they saw a president being a Wrestler. So not a 100% prediction but not that far off from a reality-show personality with "WWE experience" I'd say.
It isn't really the fact that the president is a movie actor that's damning there. It's the fact that the president uses wrestling catch phrases and behavior (Trump was even in WWE). Back when Idiocracy came out, the very idea of President Camacho seemed absurd. Nobody would bat an eye at that anymore.
Yes, the movie was a satire and took the current observations to their logical extreme. The point is that we're pretty darn close to the extreme right now.
Nothing special? A sitting US President posted the following on Easter Sunday.
> Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
There was a point in time when Trump would have been instantly impeached or sent to a hospital for observation for making that post. Today? It will fall out of the news cycle the next time he says something insane.
Maybe the world was fed up with puppets who are controlled by PR agencies so that they (at least in US) welcomed someone who just speaks to them without middlemen...
Can you imagine what past presidents would have typed if twitter existed 100 years ago? we had 2 world wars roughly that time, trump is only insane by modern standards, but modern time is if anything unusually sane, not unusually stupid, we are not living in the most special time.
As I said, if a previous President started saying things like "Praised be to Allah!" on Easter Sunday, they would have been removed from office instantly. We are watching one of the most immoral people on the planet have a full-on mental breakdown. And Trump supporters don't care.
Tweets are low effort and short, you can even do it while taking a dump, there is a lot more friction to being unhinged when you are writing a book or taking an interview, for reference trumps most unhinged stuff is tweets, not interviews and not books. Not all forms of writing are equal.
Trump's tweets are low effort. Just like most of his rally speeches, which are also unhinged. Other presidents, especially e.g. FDR, put effort into all of their communications. Including speeches and, when available, tweets.
I cant reply to jacquesm for some reason, cap on reply chain length maybe? anyway
>There are multiple years of archives of presidential tweets and Trump's stand out, and not in a good way.
When I refer to modern times I mean multiple dozens of years, not mere "multiple years", I already stated these times are unusually sane by historical standards.
Not being able to reply is to stop people coming here, making new accounts and then spouting lots of unhelpful messages, messages intended to downplay insane fascists evil portents of their war crimes, say.
What is wrong with eugenics, aside from the fact that it was used by the Nazis? Abortions for medical reasons are common in almost all countries, and that is a form of eugenics.
You may disagree with what this film shows, but the results of the last US election speak for themselves."
I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!" It was an early screener and I think that reaction was a surprise to the film team. I own a copy and watch it more than once a year. One of my favorite hard satires.
> They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry.
That is sort of the point of the movie. It is a satire, but it is also a documentary packaged as a satire and the wrapping paper isn't all that thick.
It's no longer satire it's really a documentary.
[delayed]
I feel Idiocracy is irresistible bait for 'not like the other girls'-types.
Everytime this movie comes up, droves of people mention how they get it, while others don't. It's becoming a trope in itself.
Agreed. It’s cited so often on Reddit by people who want to establish their superiority over the masses. “It’s a documentary!!” is a meme unto itself.
It’s also got a kind of weird eugenics-y vibe to it when you step back and examine it as a movie that’s making Serious Statements. But it isn’t. It’s not a bad movie. But it’s a comedy, the satirical elements are heavily over exaggerated by fans.
I like money
It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling truth from fiction.
I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political.
For instance, their famous 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens article they post all over their page whenever there is some high profile gun related crime. It's all over their page and no doubt they get a bump in traffic from smug people who feel it's clever. It's just so exhausting. It was a great headline, but by the time the joke gets its own Wikipedia, it might be time to retire it. You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Look at their trending article: Critics Outraged By Flippant School Shooting Plotline In ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’. Where's the joke? There is obviously no school shooting plotline. It's not clever or creative. I guess the joke is school shootings are a thing, and Mario is a popular movie?
It's basically South Parks criticism of Family Guy where they write jokes by having a seal put together random words from popular culture. School shootings + Mario = funny. And this stuff gets clicks because people think they're clever or subversive when it's just lazy and unoriginal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Sa...
https://theonion.com/critics-outraged-by-flippant-school-sho...
The outrageous "impossible/sarcastic" Onion stories from decades ago are hardly fiction these days.
I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
Wild.
Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate truth/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence.
If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
Have they edited stuff out because of the audience reaction? Do you own an unedited copy?
Indignant behavior may have been a result of a perceived attack on viewers belief system. Possibly combined with no 2nd order awareness of thought. Additionally, a subtle “critique” framing from the screening host or “open mic” framing may prime the participants to command attention. Outrage is the easiest when one has no conceptual lens to add interpretive value.
Satire really breaks when the target doesn't recognize itself as the target
I guess that explains the lack of promotion around this film?
Yep. The studio didn't know what the hell to do with it.
I'm guessing that we (those of us who have seen it despite the lack of promotion) are lucky that they didn't just can it completely, or demand it get cut to ribbons and reformed as something else.
[delayed]
imagine how it would hit today. I'd guess a vast majority would feel insulted by it...
How many felt insulted by Don't Look Up--I'm guessing that Venn is a circle.
I wasn't insulted, but it did feel a bit too on the nose to really work as satire.
Idiocracy got there just in time, before things became so stupid that satire wasn't possible any more. You have to exaggerate so hard that it lacks the feeling of cleverness required by satire.
The Onion struggles on. They've always been true masters of the form. I wrote my own news satire back in the 80s and quit when I saw The Onion; they were far better than I would ever be. Practically nobody else can still pull off satire here in the worst timeline.
"this so called planet killer doesn't matter to us, and we live in a free speech country! checkmate scientists"
like that?
Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness.
"Don't Look Up" captures a lot more of the actual dynamics. Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, the people are just normal humans made stupid by their cultural environment, incentives and suchlike.
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
Even if the creator specifically had eugenics in mind, I think he stumbled upon a greater truth.
Consider this. You can take anyone from any group in your nation, place them in a different nation, with a different culture, and they will adopt the mannerisms and accents of that culture.
We focus on race constantly, but it's clear that culture drives the norms that we see in any group. And culture may be persistent (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic.
With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.
Not claiming that Idiocracy is accurate, however IQ scores have been declining. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/
After a while of going up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
While genes must play a part in this (if they didn't, all non-humans would also share our IQ*), genetics shift on a much slower timescale than the entire history of IQ tests.
* This pattern matches to the Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical technique, ergo I am suspicious of people who try to tie genetics and IQ until they're clear they're not making a racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers.
I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convincing themselves that they are right.
Unfortunately I fear it's more like EQ than IQ. The driver is more about the people. They do not like the kind of people who are trying to prevent climate change, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
Yes, it's hard for some to believe, but there are people in my family who are otherwise very intelligent but will not change their opinions on some things. Like climate change.
Invoking IQ is not really a good way to dismiss pro-eugenics concerns.
Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best
> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence
You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.
Depends on the IQ test i guess?
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best
What do you propose as a replacement metric to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
Is there any strong relationship between IQ scores and innate intelligence, as opposed to mental agility gained through education?
In general the methodology for IQ is highly questionable
Yes. Which is why there are also IQ tests for pre-school kids.
Besides the declining groups have the same education with the earlier ones.
All of these effects are explained much better by social factors. If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
>If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
Which doesn't matter, since they measured rich and middle class, and poor and discriminated against both before and after.
Did you think the new measurements were done at some ghetto and the earlier higher ones at Martha's Vineyard?
There is no eugenics angle in Idiocracy. Nobody tries to achieve some "genetic ideal" by manipulating people.
The premise of the movie is that smart people stop having kids and dumb people have lots. It's "reverse eugenics"
But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
Why stop at eugenics? Spoil your environment enough and it will definitely have an effect on the individuals in that environment.
Every scrotum on this forum has microplastics and phthalates in them, things shown to have effects on the endocrine and reproductive systems.
Hold on. Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves. I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
https://theconversation.com/scientists-may-be-overestimating...
> It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.
No, they showed that the gloves could have introduced microplastic-like particles in some samples depending on how they are handled. It just feels like one of those studies secretly funded by an oil company to throw shade.
One group covering some cases. Others?
Fair point, but why jump to genetics instead of culture (upbringing)?
Because the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike
I think the intent of Mike Judge's joke was less so an outright promotion of eugenics and more so mocking the upper crust of American society's approach to family planning. (That of which Judge was intimately familiar with during his time in SV when he worked for a graphics card company.)
A lot of his work with KotH analyzed the same dynamics of educated and uneducated America and the interplay and I think Idiocracy is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
I mean yes but the point at the end of the day was that the people who were breeding in Idiocracy had genetically inferior intelligence.
Is Darwin natural selection eugenic? Was the rise of humans from chimps an eugenic like event?
It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions.
It is curious that there's no reported disgenic effect though - that seems counter to evolutionary theory? Perhaps it's only limiting the rate of growth of IQ/intelligence.
There's a classic sci-fi story in which we rely on computers, the population gets dumber to the point noone knows how to make/fix the computers. I think in that there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence - it says 'fertility' but I think it means fecundity/actual reproduction
>but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
Or centralized SOTA LLMs.
Are you talking about the one called "The Machine Stops", published like a hundred years ago?
I think there are lots of sci-fi stories on this topic, one I can think of is "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi (https://books.google.de/books?id=HoSXDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&sourc...), which is from this century...
That story is incredible, with insights into what technology would mean.
But is it true or false?
Nazis also thought smoking is bad. The problem is their applied genocidal eugenics. Not whether they thought IQ is hereditary.
That's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
All kinds of people voted for the Nazi party, including very intelligent and respectable professors, and there was no special split in intelligence between either side voters (or measure of that).
What's ironic is using nazi-like thinking (the idiot masses who vote far right vs the enlightened people who vote left), instead of treating it as a complex political matter, and accepting that perfectly intelligent people can just as well fall for that shit.
How is it unlikely? Several researchers has pointed to the Flynn effect reversing since the turn of the millennium.
> Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble,
I didn't read Idiocracy as eugenics/anti-eugenics. It wasn't saying that stupid people breeding made the population stupid, it was saying that the less educated breeding resulted in the more educated being pushed to the periphery and eventually fading out.
The people of the film's future were not stupid, just massively uninformed and misinformed. They were able to grasp the problem and solution in the end.
Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. It is a good few years since I last watched it. There is the title, of course, but educationally-disasavantaged-ocracy would not have been catchy enough!
I'm afraid you are misremembering. The movie is explicitly eugenicist. The people of the future are explicitly biologically stupid. The opening transcript is unambiguous:
[Man Narrating] As the 21st century began… human evolution was at a turning point.
Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest… the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest… a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man… now began to favor different traits.
[Reporter] The Joey Buttafuoco case-
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized… and more intelligent.
But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
A dumbing down.
How did this happen?
Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.
With no natural predators to thin the herd… it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most… and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
> Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it.
They literally show IQ numbers in that scene.
> Trevor: IQ 138, Carol: IQ 141
vs:
> Clevon: IQ 84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
i couldn't finish "Don't Look Up", it felt like sitting through a political lecture. all i wanted from a comedy was some laughs.
Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.
Thereby proving the point of the film.
Don't look!
Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.
I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up
Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore.
It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
But there is no need to disproof this because there is no evidence that it has any truth to it.
Can't remember in details that part of the film. Was it explicitly eugenics? Otherwise it could be seen as not getting the same education, depending on parental situation.
> If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?
> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)
I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?
>It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans
So it's a documentary?
Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".
>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true
No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.
>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?
I'm in the same category. The film is so awfully written and acted it isn't something that can be watched.
Don't Look Up feels closer to how things actually break in practice
while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment.
> I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy … Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!"
I watched this movie really late. Let's say within the past 2 years or so. After watching it, all I could think was, "This isn't a comedy, it's a tragedy."
It felt way too close to home.
Yeah, same. I also felt like this when watching Office Space and Sillicon Valley. Hits too close to home.
I know that through comedy you are supposed to get a sense of catharsis and a sort of relief, but to me it was just frustratingly sad.
I guess I just take life too seriously.
Mike Judge definitely has an ability to hit the comedy nail on the reality head. That’s for sure.
I know one guy who can't watch Silicon Valley because it triggers him. He had a tech startup himself in the valley back in the day.
I suspect it depends on how hopeful or hopeless you feel about the world.
If you already believe that humanity is doomed to self-destruction, then there's nothing left to do but make fun of it and laugh, enjoy the ride to hell. George Carlin is a perfect example of this, rooting for the disasters.
At least you have AI to fill out those TPS reports.
Can't help with the printer though...
I mean, Office Space and Silicon Valley are legit funny. I doubt how I can be "frustratingly sad" after watching either of the two because in Office Space, (spoilers ahead) but the ending is actually quite happy and more about realizing life's about what you want and it might not be a desk job and Silicon Valley is hilarious in terms of how it parodies the 2010s tech culture but its more about "look what tech has become" rather than "oh my god everything sucks, all idiots everywhere, we're doomed" type energy.
Also a lot of Silicon Valley stuff is kindda bs esp the arc where one single dude figures out such a massive leap in tech so quickly and then solves P=NP using freaking AI and then doesn't sell out to Hooli. You gotta suspend a lot of disblief for that but people don't talk about how unrealistic the main plot is
Also the episode where Jared has to explain scrum to vet developers like Dinesh and Gilfoyle. Like you seriously think they didn't know what scum was before meeting Jared?
Yes, Silicon Valley has some bits that don't quite match real life. But every now and then there's some true insight in it.
Like the bit where the crazy VC tells them that the last thing they need is revenue.
https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=fU3Y3-ucHqgoBDLU
Silicon Valley probably wouldn’t work as well today since they would vibe code everything and a lot of the drama would be removed that way.
That'd leave even more room for drama. I'm imagining Gavin hiring thousands of cheap, unskilled laborers ("Hooli's industry-leading AI research team") to mash keys until they rediscover the prompt that generated middle-out compression with a patent-free clean room process. He never reproduces it because Gilfoyle's self-hosted LLM improved its own memory efficiency when when Dinesh got upset and started unplugging GPUs.
I actually think it's ripe for an extra season because the stuff that happened in last few years is comedy goldmine.
I refuse to watch it. I really like most Mike Judge’s stuff, but this I just don’t want to see and think those thoughts. I know we live in a dystopic satire of existence, you don’t have to show me. Now please let me take these new cybernetic info drugs and let me crawl into a hole sleep shielded from the Neon-Tokyo’s toxic rain.
It's a documentary
It’s what happens when you let people get what they want.
Like children, adults need guidance. Kids would eat candy and drink OJ till their baby teeth rot off and they are riddled with onset of many diseases if left to their own devices. Adults have similar tendencies and if you remove the guardrails (perhaps to distract from other dysfunction), you get adults who seek short term pleasure whether that be food, perversion, laziness, etc. That’s why culture and taboos matter. They keep people from undermining themselves. Obviously things can go in the other direction too far like North Korea and Iran, etc.
I like to say "adults are children without teachers". It feels like this in many contexts, but I started to say it during covid. When people looked at statistics, made wrong conclusions (because they don't know how to read statistics), and genuinely believed they were right. When children do that, they have a figure of authority (the teacher) who can tell them that they actually did not understand it at all.
I was in highschool with a guy who absolutely sucked at maths. Everybody knew it, he knew it, nobody could deny it because he was clearly struggling in class. I have no problem with that and I was actually trying to help when I could. But years later when covid hit, he was one of those very vocal people claiming complete nonsense based on "the numbers". He did not have a teacher at this point to give him bad grades and telling him that he was completely wrong. Being an adult, he felt like he was right.
Not quite sure "Ow My Balls / Jackass" argument should count, the Jackass franchise is older than Idiocracy and was most likely an inspiration for that bit.
And also, just because crass shows exists, it does not mean they are the only or dominant thing.
People still enjoy quality, even for entertainment.
Sure, teenagers will rot their brain, but the most watched shows in the US are The Bridgerton, The Night Agent, and The Pitt - not exactly jackass.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h/charts/
Upgraydd was also the guy's name in the present. He traveled to the future to be there with them.
For some reason that also reminds me of the TV shows in Robocop.
e.g. Climbing for Dollars and It’s Not My Problem!
When I first saw Robocop these looked so crass it was obvious satire.
Now...? Well, I'd buy that for a dollar.
Verhoeven makes some extremely heavy handed satire.
A decent litmus test is whether someone understands that the Starship Troopers movie is satire or not.
And I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Returns (1986) graphic novel. There are grotesque parodies of talking head news anchors and even a caricature of then-president Ronald Regan. Situation all fracked up.
You're assuming we started at zero, we didn't (unfortunately)
That was my first thought too. The site is overall excellent, but that one was a pretty clear circular reasoning.
You missed the documentary angle. Getting rid of jackass would be a move in the right direction (and all of the jackass derivatives).
"A character is literally named 'Upgraydd' with creative spelling. In the future, names have become increasingly absurd — just random syllables, product names, and numbers."
Upgraydd was from our time wasn't he
There's a scene where Rita, in the future, tries to call Upgraydd, but there are 9726 listings for people called Upgraydd at that point.
Fun movie trivia: Maya Rudolph (Rita) is the daughter of Minnie Ripperton.
This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in the movie, wherein our protagonist is given his new identity credentials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAUcSb3PgeM
More at https://www.reddit.com/r/tragedeigh/
He was! Frito Pendejo (Joe's lawyer) and the cop Beef Supreme are better examples. Or of course the wrestler-president Camacho whose middle name is literally Mountain Dew.
I forget; did he receive anything in turn for taking that name? These folks did: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6157612.stm
I don't remember if it's ever explicitly stated, but I certainly took that to be the implication. Maybe it's actually funnier if they're doing it pro bono, now I am suddenly unsure.
Yes he was. Or maybe he was a Nick Landian AI from the future facilitating its own creation
The irony is that it only implies we have be in the proto-Idiocracy stage for a while, regardless of whether people who live in bubbles do not understand that “Upgraydd” type characters are not exactly a new or invented thing.
As I got older, I always wondered if everyone thought they were the smart one and everyone else must be the idiocracy.
I seem to remember Homer Simpson thinking something to that effect (“Boy, everyone is stupid except me”).
I can imagine that happening today, esp politically.
The tricky question is: how do you tell when you're actually right vs just doing the same thing Homer was
You've just described MAGA in a nutshell.
I just watched a new dinosaur cartoon made for kids and it has cartoon dinosaurs that farts a lot and I looked it up and in reddit people are saying "duh..farts are funny..why do you have a problem with it?"
I just finished up Pluribus S01; to me this could have been a take on AI.
The AI could have been The Joined; a population of beings who want only to make the remaining humans happy, by giving humans what they want, but they (The Joined) also acknowledge that in the long run their approach will result in an almost an Extinction-Level , mass starvation, etc.
Funny, just today I talked with a co-worker about how be both feel like we are approaching Idiocracy.
His nephew 'watered' their plants with Coke. Not quite Mountain Dew, but also not far off.
Why would he water plants with Coke? Coke doesn't have electrolytes, and that's what plants crave.
It's a liquid. It's fine. Plus it's colored, so it must be more than water. Water is transparent. What can it contain? d'uh.
But does it have e-lec-tro-lytes? That's what plants crave, you know.
Isn't this the point the OP was trying to make?
It's a quote from the movie.
Brawndo.
so you want us to reed furst? wat ar u dumb?
I saw a TikTok of someone recommending to put cut roses in Sprite instead of water. Apparently it keeps them fresh much longer.
Yeah that works and I remember learning that in the 90s so it's pretty old.
HAHAHA, so funny. Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot!
Love it. Although I'm not sure which is the darkest timeline given https://www.howclosetoblackmirror.com/
I always saw black mirror as explicitly a near-future satire of the present, not commentary on where humanity is headed. I think something like Children of Men would fill the british angle better.
Isn't it depressing that San Junipero, arguably the only happy episode, has the lowest progress score?
A handful of Black Mirror episodes land on a more optimistic (or at least not entirely bleak) note, though "happy" might be overstating it for any of them. Bittersweet, maybe.
Eulogy and Hotel Reverie from the newest season are at 70-75%, and I think they both end on a similarly bittersweet note like San Junipero. The one with Miley Cyrus is at 65% and is about as happy an ending as Black Mirror episodes get.
The music for that episode still takes me galaxies/dimensions away
https://youtu.be/IYpO3EbvMK4?si=n70N7hi8v29NiZvr
Demolition Man is the darkest timeline.
I always thought the comparison to real life falls a bit flat. In the movie there’s a scene where Camacho has a town hall and the audience yells something about everything bad. Camacho fires his gun in the air for silence and acknowledges things are bad and says he’s going to ask the smartest person in the world to help.
So in this scenario the people are allowed to voice real concerns directly to the president without fear of retribution. The president acknowledges things are bad. He describes a plan, with real actionable steps, to help the situation. And to wrap it all up follows through with it and is genuinely interested in making the country / world a better place. None of these things apply to America’s current situation.
At the core of it, in the movie everyone is dumb but well meaning, while in real life most of the idiots are also malicious. They keep voting for the same thing because it hurts their perceived enemies, not because they think their vote will make the country better.
The profusion of LLMs with secret weights and prompts will also give us the The Truman Show's false-friendships, product placement, and fraudulent recommendations.
Without also making us famous or taking care of our daily needs.
Idiocracy is an utopia - they voted for the smartest person.
I think in some ways we are past it; unfortunately not the funny ways. Some examples:
1. The presidents response to bombing of school girls was basically "stop hitting yourself"
2. Fox news host Dept. of Defense head and the "Dept. of War" name "change"
3. Building a grand ballroom while taking benefits away from hungry kids
4. Elon musk on stage with the chainsaw bragging about acts that save no money but did harm the poorest people on earth.
5. The fact that our media does not really care about any of this unless they get a ratings bump from it
Obviously we all could go on and on.. but the biggest loss IMO is objective truth. There are and will always be things that are true and I feel that we are losing a hold of that so that bad actors can just say to us: "no thats not what your seeing".
Its like in the movie, if they had looked at the plant growing and said: "Thats FAKE NEWS" then run to the field and claimed they did it all.
he claimed they did it to themselves
The tricky part is that once everything becomes "obviously absurd,"it gets harder to separate signal from noise
And he even missed crocs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSkqybtwBk
Only 78%? That can't be right.
I think it hasn't been updated in a while. Seems to me that the past few days alone would take us to 90%+.
Man, that font used for the individual attribute evaluation percentage badge is horrible.
I’m guessing based on the color coding that what could also be a slanted and italicized 1 is actually slanted and italicized 7, but talk about a horrible font, on top of what looks like about 10 different other fonts used on the site.
I guess that is in keeping with the theme; the Idiocracy status tracking site is also Idiocracy.
so, I'm not the only one who was scrolling it and thinking, "damn, it's so horrible and illegible, it must be on-brand with the topic." I even thought that the Dark Reader extension messed things up yet again.
I guess, as the meter is above 50%, you're not supposed to read it.
As a cultural mirror, it's pretty entertaining
- "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. They pay me every time i say it" vs "Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war"
- "Florida's in Georgia, dumbass" vs "We setled Aberbaijan and Albania"
- "Secretary of education is kinda stupid, but he 's president's brother" vs "Donald Trump's White House is a family affair"
I ve been watching Idiocracy over and over for years, as a documentary.
In many ways the movie is more merciful than reality. Frito , a really dumb man who purchased his "lawyer degree" in costco, could afford his own comfy apartment and car. He was not addicted on his phone all day , constantly worried about what others think of him. The govt would take care of your neglected kids. Employment by brawndo kept the world quiet. Leaders were too dumb to make wars. People too dumb to make culture wars. Their president was smarter.
The misspellings in signage though, is comedically reminiscent of AI image generators.
And the President in Idiocracy, for all his faults, actually wants to do the right thing, once he has the facts.
Every time Idiocracy comes up, I feel obligated to point out that it is WILDLY optimistic. The people are dumb, not evil. They struggle to adapt and learn, but are willing to try and willing to accept new information with evidence.
We are not so lucky in reality.
> willing to accept new information with evidence.
Comancho saw the green shoot at the end and changed his mind.
That to me is what makes it utopian
To be a proper prophecy, Idiocracy is also missing the entire society ON TOP of the one portrayed, which has infinite amount of wealth and is probably isolating with servants on some island for decades already...
/s
A series that hits even closer is BrainDead, about an alien that gets into politicians' heads and polarizes them completely. It's very fun, and each episode recap at the beginning is done via lyrics of a folky song. Worth a watch and laugh. And cry.
Such a shame that it was cancelled!
We've had this discourse happen again and again over the last... Christ, 20 years fuck me.
At some point people have to start realizing "oh wait, maybe the current situation isn't unique and people have felt like this since forever".
I don't think so. Trump is exceptional compared to political tradition for a very long time, as evidenced currently by most developed world leaders shunning his illegal war campaign. In fact, who else can be comparable?
I don’t share any of the pessimism.
If you are at least tiny bit curious about looking beyond your IT bubble you know that the majority of population has always been dumb. It’s just biological fact of life.
For better or worse hundreds years ago they didn’t get any power. Today they got internet, got exposure and got power. Nothing is changing on a fundamental human nature or statistical level.
>majority of population has always been dumb
But idiocracy is not about that majority. It is about the thought leaders becoming dumb. Internet, instead of elevating the majority to the level of intellectuals, dragged the intellectuals to the level of the dumb majority.
If you mix poison in milk, milk becomes poison and not the other way. Pretty obvious in hindsight..
I love this, thank you.
The one thing that still should give you hope is that the Idiocracy is reversible, unlike other things such as climate change or nuclear Armageddon.
Idiocracy looks more and more utopian
I just want the Carl's Jr. vending machines.
They might have been stupid but did they do anything truly bad/evil like the current US regime?
People keep saying this is the US as if anything about this regime is in any way legitimate, let alone abides by the Constitution, regardless of whether you like that or not. The founders of America tried to set up a system that would prevent the very thing that this thing still called America has become. Washington warned about foreign entanglements, now that’s basically all America is. It’s an extremely complicated story, but calling it America is basically “deadnaming” it. No founder of America would in any way agree with anything going on today and would be horrified of what it has become.
The repeated, systemic manner in which the Constitution is and long has been inherently violated in every possible way for many decades now, makes it self-evidently not a legitimate government; which would require having abide by the foundational supreme law that would confer actual legitimacy.
It’s like signing a contract and then not only not abiding by it, but committing all kinds of other offenses/crimes on top of that. The contract is clearly no longer valid.
Not only due to the duration of the violation of the Constitution, but the near impossibility of restoring and reversing all the violations at this point makes this thing we still call America something, but a legitimate USA based on the Constitution it is not, no matter how you look at it.
People may have a hard time accepting that because of various mental conditioning structures, but regardless of whether people are willing to accept that or not… this is simply not the USA. It’s basically identity theft, regardless of who the actual person behind the fake identity is.
Is Mexico still an Aztec empire? No. Would China still be China if Russia conquered China but still called it China? No. The closest analogue from history seems to be when Britain controlled India and still kept its name and used certain aspects of India’s culture for control to facilitate the exploitation.
Just because the hostile takeover by a kind of parasitic civilizational private equity firm through a leveraged buyout called the national debt has kept the branding of “USA”, does not mean it’s not been gutted.
Even the “right” is equally merely holding onto something that does not actually exist anymore, kind of like an old guy in an old steel mill that some private equity firm has taken over to financially plunder, vehemently defends the new management without understanding one bit of what’s going on, because all he has left after 50 years of working there is delusional hope.
I’m not sure what else to call it, but it sure is not the USA anymore than an ant infected with the “ zombie ant fungus”, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is still an ant from the second it is infected with the spore that then spreads and controls the ant in ways that are not yet fully understood.
It is like any abusive or parasitic relationship, you may not realize you’re in for abuse and parasitism, but the abusers and the parasites sure know that about you.
Sorry, but no. It is the USA. But now without the veneer, this rot was there for a long time, it's just that people no longer feel any need to pretend they're respectable. Other places have similar problems, where I live, in NL, there are a lot of things that would not have passed in public in the 80's or the 90's that people routinely engage in now because it has been normalized. The only difference though is that it is public rather than said behind closed doors. No country is immune from this. The only way to fix it is to own it.
The satire we need today is how we sort it out.
I'm afraid they're immune to it.
This epic comparison once again wins the internet for today, gentlesirs
Nah, Idiocracy wasn’t so blatantly evil as what the Americans are now
Trump isn’t just a bumbling fool. He is a vicious evil one
I mean, you could probably make these comparispns in 2006 when the movie came out. Perhaps it wasnt prophetic but rather just a sature of the general human condition
am i the only one that sees the irony in this website being made entirely with AI? Especially as it's so simple.
You never go full Idiocracy.
(But never say never).
I don't think it mentions the hot new sport we have in our reality where two men run full pelt into each other. Yeah boi
The Idiotic Republic of America. There is no god but the Dollar.
Let's not forget our worship of Death
In Idiocracy, president Camacho actually had the decent idea of trying listen to (somewhat) reasonable people with relevant abilities or skills rather than insisting that his failures are actually successes and just trying to force it until that worked. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
I'd like to bring your attention to the fact that society had deteriorated to the point of imminent famine before Camacho thought to try and listen to the smartest person around in an attempt to avert disaster. We are not quite there yet.
You haven’t internalized what “the fertilizer the world uses to grow food is missing, this spring, because of a needless war” actually means, have you?
Emphasis on the word "quite"
I'd argue that as soon as Camacho became aware of Not Sure's IQ test, he reached out. He didn't call on him before because he didn't know he existed (and/or he wasn't around), so he couldn't have helped prior.
If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job.
> If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job.
Isn't that a bit like a wooly mammoth? In theory it could exist but in practice you're not going to find anybody that is both mentally capable and at the same time stupid enough to eat his slop.
That leaves evil enough and there are plenty of those...
There are plenty of intelligent people that are willing to ride on the back of the Trump regime. That seems mostly to be the problem, in fact.
Whoever suggested that using Tariffs to provide a handle to move stocks that they could use to trade, I very much doubt it came from Trump. That was provided the means to keep all the greedy grubbers in the Republican party onside whilst they hid Trump's involvement with Epstein so the train could keep running.
Musk is evil. But he's clever, he knew to over pay for Twitter so he could use it to help swing elections and put himself in political power. He failed to get the response to his salute he expected, and knew enough to slink off into the background (or listen to his advisors telling him that). Amazingly he's still making money hand-over-fist from USA's regime. You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
They've absolutely destroyed USA, there is no Constitution now, there's not even lip service to war crime treaties. But there's a lot of intelligent people onboard that we underestimate at our peril.
I've generally held that Camacho is actually a model political leader. Despite growing up in a society that apparently didn't value education, he managed to rise to the top. He made legitimate, albeit ineffective attempts to address issues the country's problems. When someone showed up who had better ideas he promptly delegated both authority and responsibility.
and he hired the smartest of the smart
Because he was stupid, and not evil.
I think that’s where Idiocracy goes wrong; stupidity is indistinguishable from evil when deployed at scale. Living through 2026 I find the distinction meaningless -- Hanlon's razor needs refinement.
I can't take this seriously - blaming Trump but not Joe Biden, though latter had obvious symptoms of cognitive decline AND many "smart" people claimed otherwise. If you are literally tricked to doubt your own eyes, your natural judgements and being constantly gaslighted to think otherwise - then this should be called out as well. If this does not fullfil the criteria for "Idiocracy", then nothing does.
I watched the eugenicist trailer and decided that it wasn’t for me. I guess that makes me an idiot.
(Really—there are far more salient points that promot that conclusion about myself.)
is it just me learning that donald trump is a wwe hall of famer??!
I hear people make this comparison all the time, and while it is facially a bit funny I guess, I really don't think it holds up in any serious way.
What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
* The primary plot point of idiocracy is that poor (and thus, stupid - the film never explains why this correlation exists in that universe, though) people are the only ones who reproduce. For this reason, there is evolutionary pressure toward decreased intelligence. It's an odious premise on its face IMO, and certainly not what is happening in the USA: our birth rates are declining _because_ people are not economically stable.
* President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn. And he seems to be sincere and transparent. Trump's illusion runs precisely counter to this: he has every resource he can possibly need, but chooses to enrich himself and his friends instead of advancing the public interest.
Virtually every plot point of Idiocracy can be broken down this way. I see very, very little of the film universe that is consistent with our sociopolitical trajectory.
If you want a Mike Judge film that shines light on uncomfortable truths about 21st-century America, the obvious choice is Office Space.
This feels like nitpicking. Idiocracy was never supposed to be accurate; the important part is how it seems less ridiculous as time goes on.
The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time. The source of this is irrelevant. In reality, it turned out that the source of the stupidity was an increasingly poor education system, increasing inequality, and carefully designed injection of addictive technologies and medicines into the general populace.
Where idiocracy really failed in its predictions was in the development of AI, as that appears to increasingly substitute for lack of common understanding.
Also all of this only really holds for the US and maybe the UK.
> The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time.
...and in doing so, it depicts a world that is not at all reminiscent of the one in which we live.
The white house is not occupied by idiots, but by thieves and murders and sexual predators. The American landscape is not a Brawndo-dustbowl, but a highly profitable, productive, and delicious-but-toxic bounty of subsidized factory farms, stemming not from a misunderstanding of botany, but a misapplication of that understanding.
The same is true of the medical industry, the justice system - literally every institution portrayed in the entire film, with the possible exception of waste disposal / the trash avalanche.
> What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
The opposite direction?
Yes, the opposite direction. I pointed out two examples, but I think you can watch the film front to back and find them in every scene. The doctor, lawyer, judge, the storyline about the plants/electrolytes (which has a big opportunity to point to greed and factory farming and utterly whiffs), the Brawndo/unemployment subplot, the intensity of public interest in civic affairs - literally every major plot point runs in the opposite direction of today's realities.
Seems to me like two different paths to the same end. One stupid, the other more evil or at least rapacious, but the destination is ultimately the same.
Thanks for that. Good to see a well reasoned argument and another HN nod for Office Space you made me watch the trailer!
It's not about Trump, but society as a whole. The president was a symptom, as is Trump.
> It's an odious premise on its face IMO
It's estimated that 1/3 of your intelligence is hereditary. A modern problem is that classes separate more from each other than before: white collar doesn't really mingle with blue collar, ethnic boundaries galore, etc. Before, people were educated and put on the social ladder according to birth. That made that a lot of smart people stayed in their community. Nowadays, they tend to move away. That means there's a development towards stratification of intelligence. Add LLMs to education, and we're on the fast track.
For thousands of years people were unsure if they’d have food the next day and still had a lot of kids. This happens today in the poorest parts of the world.
People are not having kids because they don’t want them. Those that can use birth control and failing that access abortion, etc.
People stopped having kids precisely the moment they had the option to.
Birth rates are declining only among people who are smart enough to know and manage personal finances.
> President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn.
Camacho does so because he literally has no other option, there is an imminent famine he has to deal with. If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump, then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
> If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump,
That's exactly the point: the world of the film is, in every way that matters, the opposite of the reality in which we live. So how are these strained comparisons useful?
> then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
Obviously we can't know, because the universe of Idiocracy is on rails toward stupidity and poverty, and never even considers greed and abundance as features of its janky political lens. In the first few minutes of the film, it establishes that poor, stupid people are to blame for every societal ill, and then it depicts a future in which no character ever even grapples with any other antagonist than the poverty and stupidity of his ancestors.
Is that today's world?! For who? Are the poor people in Iran and Gaza and Yemen who are dealing with explosives raining down on them (rather than Brawndo) stupid? Do you think their fate is attributable to the proclivity of previous generations to breed in inverse proportion to their material wealth?
It's just such an asinine premise it's hard to even understand what would qualify as a sound comparison, but it's certainly not any of those listed on this website.
I think you could have done this in the 1980s and 1990s and found a lot of fits: MTV, reality shows, daytime TV, junk food everywhere, pop music becoming increasingly trite and simple, newspapers and commentary declining toward grade school level vocabulary.
In the 50s you would have had suburban conformity and doctors recommending cigarettes. In the 60s you had people trying to become enlightened by taking drugs and listening to con men claiming to be Eastern gurus. In the 70s you had dumb new age cults and a lot of very bad movies and ugly fashion.
Mass media and any culture dominated by mass media tends to race to the bottom. There are many forces that drive it. Dumb culture is loud and viral. Lies and bullshit cost zero to produce and are expensive to debunk. Quality takes time and cost to make and drowns in quantity.
Attempts to frantically fight these forces normally turn into their own dystopias, usually taking the form of authoritarian nightmares or moralistic crusades. These often end up looking deeply stupid in retrospect too.
Yet we are still here. So somehow quality finds a way.
As you look back in time things look less dumb because of survivorship bias. The dumb shit is forgotten.
Our age will be remembered as when we taught the sand to think, made rockets that land vertically, returned to the Moon, and developed quantum computers.
Nobody will remember that we used AI to make TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR, that the guy with the rocket company acted like a thirteen year old 4chan edgelord, or that our president during the return to the moon couldn’t speak complete sentences.
Then maybe we need to kill mass media once and for all. Keep the global communication network, but let it be all small-scale communities.
You can do that yourself. Turn off mass media. I’ve done that almost entirely.
The answer is to be your own survivorship bias. Go dig and find good stuff.
That's fine, if we only care about ourselves. I guess the harder part is convincing everyone else to unplug from mass media and not raise their kids on it.
Impossible without totalitarianism, which is its own somewhat different form of stupid.
Also for parents the game is keeping kids away from it, which is time consuming, and parents are often overworked and don’t have that time.
I present HTTP://TrumpCamacho.com without further comment.
Clickable link: https://trumpcamacho.com
That didn't end well, unfortunately.
Aren't you all proud that anywhere in the world you go there is a fridge with coca cola, so it's a sound and solid investment? Smart people of HN and reddit?
I wonder how long that will last? Can they weather the storm of anti-USA sentiment?
Have they changed their advertising to un-hitch from being a part of the "American Dream"?
You forgot of McDonalds.
Why do Redditors and tech people love comparing things to this weird, pro-eugenics movie so much?
This is just silly to portray idiocracy as a prediction of the future.
Yes the current president of America is a movie actor, this was not idiocracy predicting the future, Ronald Reagan was a movie actor president before idiocracy came out.
The movie satirised what was already happening, there is nothing special about nowadays.
In the sense of the word "prediction", it is certainly one. It was forecasting a future by painting a dotted line from the data they had, and they made a satire out of it.
They took Reagan being an actor and on their satirical dotted line they saw a president being a Wrestler. So not a 100% prediction but not that far off from a reality-show personality with "WWE experience" I'd say.
It isn't really the fact that the president is a movie actor that's damning there. It's the fact that the president uses wrestling catch phrases and behavior (Trump was even in WWE). Back when Idiocracy came out, the very idea of President Camacho seemed absurd. Nobody would bat an eye at that anymore.
Yes, the movie was a satire and took the current observations to their logical extreme. The point is that we're pretty darn close to the extreme right now.
> there is nothing special about nowadays.
Nothing special? A sitting US President posted the following on Easter Sunday.
> Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
There was a point in time when Trump would have been instantly impeached or sent to a hospital for observation for making that post. Today? It will fall out of the news cycle the next time he says something insane.
Maybe the world was fed up with puppets who are controlled by PR agencies so that they (at least in US) welcomed someone who just speaks to them without middlemen...
Can you imagine what past presidents would have typed if twitter existed 100 years ago? we had 2 world wars roughly that time, trump is only insane by modern standards, but modern time is if anything unusually sane, not unusually stupid, we are not living in the most special time.
As I said, if a previous President started saying things like "Praised be to Allah!" on Easter Sunday, they would have been removed from office instantly. We are watching one of the most immoral people on the planet have a full-on mental breakdown. And Trump supporters don't care.
I can remember what past presidents Tweeted, and it was civil. Were you born yesterday?
tweeted 100 years ago?
What is so special about tweets as though we don't have copious other writings to reference?
Tweets are low effort and short, you can even do it while taking a dump, there is a lot more friction to being unhinged when you are writing a book or taking an interview, for reference trumps most unhinged stuff is tweets, not interviews and not books. Not all forms of writing are equal.
Trump's tweets are low effort. Just like most of his rally speeches, which are also unhinged. Other presidents, especially e.g. FDR, put effort into all of their communications. Including speeches and, when available, tweets.
There are multiple years of archives of presidential tweets and Trump's stand out, and not in a good way.
I cant reply to jacquesm for some reason, cap on reply chain length maybe? anyway
>There are multiple years of archives of presidential tweets and Trump's stand out, and not in a good way.
When I refer to modern times I mean multiple dozens of years, not mere "multiple years", I already stated these times are unusually sane by historical standards.
Not being able to reply is to stop people coming here, making new accounts and then spouting lots of unhelpful messages, messages intended to downplay insane fascists evil portents of their war crimes, say.
Intelligence is watching Idiocracy and identifying with it profoundly when you're younger.
Wisdom is looking back at how much you liked Idiocracy and cringing at the fact that you gleefully and uncritically swallowed a eugenics tract.
Oops!
What is wrong with eugenics, aside from the fact that it was used by the Nazis? Abortions for medical reasons are common in almost all countries, and that is a form of eugenics.
You may disagree with what this film shows, but the results of the last US election speak for themselves."