{"id":8406,"date":"2026-07-21T01:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T01:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/?p=8406"},"modified":"2026-07-23T11:30:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T11:30:43","slug":"speculative-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/2026\/07\/21\/speculative-futures\/","title":{"rendered":"Speculative futures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(an update on my 2009 version<\/a>, based on some conversations last weekend at #emfcamp<\/strong>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Venus Syndrome<\/a><\/strong>: not a movie, just a possible outcome of runaway climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mad Max<\/a><\/strong>: 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brazil<\/a><\/strong>: 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’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Prisoner<\/a><\/strong>: 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

A.I.<\/a><\/strong>: 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’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALL-E<\/a><\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brave New World<\/a><\/strong>: 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Star Trek<\/a><\/strong>: 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!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(an update on my 2009 version, based on some conversations last weekend at #emfcamp) Venus Syndrome – mass extinctionMad Max – resource-hoarding autocracyBrazil – Kafkaesque […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8407,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stuff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/speculative_futures.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfJFK3-2bA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8406"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8411,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406\/revisions\/8411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}