(an update on my 2009 version, based on some conversations last weekend at #emfcamp)

Venus Syndrome – mass extinction
Mad Max – resource-hoarding autocracy
Brazil – Kafkaesque bureaucratic totalitarianism
The Prisoner – paternalistic panopticon
Blade Runner – corporate hegemony
A.I. – consumerist surrogacy
WALL-E – hedonic sedation
Brave New World – engineered caste stability
Star Trek – post-scarcity luxury federalism

Venus Syndrome: not a movie, just a possible outcome of runaway climate change.

Mad Max: depicts the absence of any state. It’s a post-collapse resource anarchy or ‘warlord survivalism’ and Fury Road, specifically, is resource-hoarding autocracy (Immortan Joe controls water).

Brazil: war economy is a background pretext, core is the machinery of administration itself. It’s a Kafkaesque bureaucratic totalitarianism, or more simply, a ‘consumerist police state’.

The Prisoner: it’s a cheerful village, comfortable, and anonymous in its authority, a ‘velvet-glove surveillance state’, or ‘paternalistic panopticon’. We never learn who Number One is, do we ever?

Blade Runner: more of a corporate hegemony (there’s little democracy visible) or techno-capitalist stratification (with commodified personhood as its ‘moral core’).

A.I.: the world has climate collapse, licensed reproduction, and robots built up to absorb human emotional demand…it’s commodified affection under a scarcity banner, or perhaps ‘consumerist surrogacy’.

WALL-E: nobody planned it and nobody enforces it, we just reclined into it, with consumption is automated, effort obsolete, a ‘hedonic sedation’ so complete the captain has to rediscover walking.

Brave New World: the inverse of WALL-E in that everything is deliberate, castes decanted to spec, discontent chemically pre-empted, and ‘stability’ as the highest civic virtue. It is ‘engineered caste stability’ as a dystopia whose citizens would vote to keep it (if voting was allowed).

Star Trek: it’s a multiverse of post-scarcity federalism, or meritocratic utopianism. The Federation is arguably more a benevolent technocratic commons than a democracy that we rarely see actually functioning (I’m sure many people will help me correct this!).