I read a couple of those seminal dystopian future books, you know, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. I wonder if they’ll get banned in Florida. If Orwell is banned, what are right-wingers going to call it when they get called out for being racist on Twitter? Oh, who am I kidding, they’ve read as much of 1984 as they did the Word of Christ (little to none).
I asked myself as I watched the NYPD unveil the robot dog that will be patrolling Times Square: are we in the cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic dystopia now? If it was dark and misty, one could mistake Times Square for a scene from Blade Runner, with all of the digital LED screen advertising and submachine gun-toting anti-terror police presence. We had an apocalyptic global plague that changed everything. I was in the empty streets of New York City in the spring of 2020 when COVID was at its peak, and it was very much like a scene from a ’90s sci-fi disaster flick, minus the flesh-eating zombies, although some of the crazies that were out were pretty scary. There were army Humvees at the hospitals and mobile morgue trucks for the piling-up corpses. Everything you saw on CNN was true — I was there.
So, if 2020 was the apocalypse, then we are now technically in the post-apocalypse if you think about it.
Authorities are banning books, artificial intelligence is on the cusp of taking over everything, we are inundated with propaganda disguised as news on multiple screens all the time, and we are under constant surveillance so that advertising can be surgically accurate in targeting the things we think we need (even before we know it). Privacy is extinct.
Think of how common it is for unmanned drones to be carrying out bombing runs all over the world in the name of US interests. It’s more common than we’d ever be allowed to know. How long until AI is in command of the drones? I’ve watched the good Terminator movies a million times; I know what happens when the machines are in charge of national defense.
Plus, just wait until the global warming shit hits the fan, and the street I live on is underwater, and essentials start getting scarce. Fuck, look what happened with toilet paper three years ago.
I’m not trying to be alarmist, but there is a lot of dystopian post-apocalyptic shit going on… just saying, read this and get back to me in five years. We’ll see how Terminator and Demolition Man the world gets.
Hey now, the miracles of technology make it possible for you to buy me a coffee! https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
