Are We Idiocracy Yet? | Hacker News Reader

Are We Idiocracy Yet?

idiocracy.wtf

638 pointsjdiiufccuskal548 comments

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.

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 (like establishing “stupid people breeding makes stupid people” as incontrovertible fact) 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's kind of funny when you say the movie isn't making serious statements when the highest of our publicly elected officials isn't a serious person. We elect people that are actively harmful to our well being. These people say things so incredibly stupid it can be painful. And then you wonder why people look at the movie like it's a documentary?

It's not a eugenics-y vibe. The inciting incident is dysgenics, and the in-narrative apocalypse would have been prevented by eugenics.

It doesn't preclude the movie from being enjoyed or appreciated. The movie also came out at a time when test scores, literacy rates, and whatnot were all _increasing_, so that was the more salient lens to criticize it by.

That trend has reversed now, though. I don't agree with the dysgenic narrative, but I have often found myself thinking, "Gotta hand it to the movie Idiocracy, it's feeling familiar".

For all its flaws, I was a child at the time saturated in post-Y2K optimism that tomorrow would always be better than the day before. It was one of the first things that made me seriously consider, "What if humanity is not on a linear path of improvement"?

This thread is a sort of extension to that, eh? Hacker News knowing the truth of a matter while observing Reddit down the barrel of a nose.

I never understood that eugenics criticism of the movie. They make zero references to genetics in that opening sequence, and the nurture side of that argument is readily trotted out as a truism even here on HN: "people from affluent parents have easier access to education".

"Stupid people raise stupid people" is probably a better way to put it.

but even then thats entirely too simplistic as well.

> It’s not a bad movie.

I hadn't seen it since it came out, but had a that kind of general movie recollection that it was as funny as it was prescient. Watched it again with my wife who had not seen it before: it's not funny. Maybe I'm getting too old.

(I do still laugh at the "Ow! My balls!")

> like establishing “stupid people breeding makes stupid people” as incontrovertible fact

That’s based on environment and not on genes. You might not be born “stupid”, but if you’re surrounded by retards (like in the movie), chances are you won’t be splitting atoms.

It definitely activates something within people. Maybe I'm just terminally online, but there is always _always_ someone who will say "Idiocracy isn't satire, its a documentary."

And they're mostly correct.

Not just 'other girls'. That happens, but also, it's a theme that has been around a long time. The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992

Was also in Snow Crash.

"All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice…With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.

The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.

But as long as you have that fourwheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream.

Snow Crash Chapter 39 (Hiro's observation as he drives along the Alaska Highway)

> The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992

Anti-intellectualism has a long and storied in the US (and other countries):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#In_the_Un...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...

Snow Crash came to mind, but so did several other Neal Stephenson books!

for the uninitiated: the message is that serious pimping requires two D's, for a double-dose of that pimpin'

chortle i know that reference

I like money

I can't believe you like money too!

(For anyone that has not seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHCVyllnck)

> I like money

I'm sorry, I might be a bit stupid but I haven't understood your comment.

> 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.

Eh. I don't really see anything wrong with that. Every industry flubs things because the people creating the product aren't the same demographics consuming it. No big deal IMO. I think it's just a product of your typical Hollywood filter bubble. The Average American(TM) isn't so stupid as to not see the glaring "left to it's own devices middle america would turn the whole country into white trash, also with literal trash everywhere" undertone even if they can't quite put their finger on it.

You could make essentially the same movie about how impenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracy and abstraction of responsibility away to 3rd parties is going to make society grind to a halt (e.g. trash piling up because all disposal methods have been declared not environmentally friendly enough, etc, etc) and someone who just doesn't give enough shits to ask permission can be the hero of the story and frame it to offend all the people who specifically identify as the opposite of the dumb people in idiocracy.

That said I think it's a great movie and they struck a good balance.

It's no longer satire it's really a documentary.

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.

The outrageous "impossible/sarcastic" Onion stories from decades ago are hardly fiction these days.

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 whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proofs anyone could invent your life ordering fiction.

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.

There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate fact/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. On the Right they really could not differentiate Fact/Fiction.. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are living in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence.

If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.

Many US citizens didn't get that Starship Troopers was a black comedy. There are serious video reviews taking it seriously as an action movie where the characters are true US heroes.

I have a feeling these people are the same as the ones you're talking about.

As a fan of Heinlein's book, the movie flattened the exploration of the political themes from the book and turned it into said black comedy. It would be like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy.

I read the book, was very interested by the points he made, but I completely understand and support Verhoeven's take on it as a naive utopia that will get completely derailed. Just look at how the "veterans" of the "forever war" are foaming at the mouth at the idea of war-criming and sending others to die in Iran. Heinlein's central idea that people who offered their service to the rest of society are better qualified to vote doesn't survive the slightest encounter with reality.

> like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy

Animal Farm, probably ?

I agree. RoboCop also belongs to the not-obvious-to-some-satire club.

In the words of Barry Humphries:

If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.

Or the Prince.

Same goes with Starship Troopers - Clearly biting satire, but at the time was considered to be a dumb action movie by most.

I watched this movie as a teenager and I did miss the satire (although I could see something was off and there was a message beyond the action).

It's a bit the opposite of "don't look up" in that sense that the message isn't in your face. But in the current times, this movie really resonates.

it was a dumb action movie, with a bit of satire and some non-trivial nudity.

the book is a political science treatise about the role of the citizen in government and draws heavily from Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber, basically invented the "space marine" concept that we see in 40k or Starcraft or Doom, and touched on things like haptic feedback and non-traditional UI and how it could be C2.

I thought it was just the opposite: people recognized it as satire but what they really wanted was the dumb action movie. Spare us the social commentary and show us some power armor with jump jets.

Satire really breaks when the target doesn't recognize itself as the target

The Boys is a modern example of this.

Have they edited stuff out because of the audience reaction? Do you own an unedited copy?

I own the official release, and upon first viewing I do remember slight changes from that screener version, but nothing material. I half expected all or at least some of the brand names to be replaced because the film was so insulting towards them, but that all remained. Starbucks whores were okay, I guess, with Starbucks.

I tried to (re)watch it on Disney+ and the "militaristic ads" were cut.

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.

I’m sure they did demand that

I think director's in that era can avoid this by not doing extra takes for scenes that would never make it anyways. Mike Judge did not have the budget for that anyways.

Nowadays they just change the scenes in post anyways, leading to some of the worst and most atrocious continuity errors.

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.

I did feel that the use of an open mic encouraged the negative opinions to cascade. Once one of them voiced negativity, it really turned into a "me too! I was insulted by..."

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.

Read through this comment section to get a glimpse.

I guess I see why, though. Taken from the perspective of tropes of middle Americans, it's pretty condescending and claims everything they are is idiotic and responsible for the state of the world, when it is more complicated than that and the ivory tower has its own culpability

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/

This to me is one of the most apparent failures of modern taboo infecting people's ability to communicate, or even reason.

Eugenics is not ethical, for a variety of very good reasons; that does not mean that it's unscientific.

We know that intelligence is heritable; we have observed epigenetic group trends like the Flynn effect to the point where they plateau...

The biggest unknown in my opinion is how stable the gains we have made are. If we have our education systems disrupted, or some nutrition crunch, does the population average drop to the point where the complex systems we depend on are not maintained?

There is no eugenics angle in Idiocracy. Nobody tries to achieve some "genetic ideal" by manipulating people.

Why stop at eugenics? Spoil your environment enough and it will definitely have an effect on the individuals in that environment.

Fair point, but why jump to genetics instead of culture (upbringing)?

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!

> 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

> Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it.

You are misremembering; they had a scene of an intelligence test that had adults matching shapes (stars -. tars, squares -> squares) and getting it wrong.

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.

Don't Look Up feels closer to how things actually break in practice

It’s a less extreme satire for sure.

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.

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

To be honest, I think it's about whether someone feels like they are making fun or being made fun of.

Thereby proving the point of the film.

Don't look!

I'm in the same category. The film is so awfully written and acted it isn't something that can be watched.

Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.

How about the British "Till Death Do Us Part" from the 1960s/70s?

That had a similar irony in that people complained about the racist character of Alf Garnett, but the series very much used his bigotism/racism as the butt of the jokes.

> Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.

Yes. It was nice when corporate taxes were high, xenophobia was seen as something bad, and movies could focus on smaller problems satire.

I hope that we go back to the socialist era of the USA with unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires. Movies could just be silly again.

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.

That's like being angry at Star wars because the very first title text says "long time ago", and we know humans didn't go into space long time ago duh.

> 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"?

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

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?

DLU captured the decisions better, but Idiocracy explained how we got there.

Eugenics, you mean? Letting the stupid people breed?

Haven't watched it so I wouldn't know, but from what I hear of it that sounds like a pretty serious strike against it.

tbf its not "letting the stupid people breed" and more that smart ppl stop breeding. still wrong and like other comments said, Dont Look Up is more practical bc its people with money, power, influence dooming us with greed

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 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

At least you have AI to fill out those TPS reports.

Can't help with the printer though...

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 was never in a startup and I found the show incredibly stressful to watch.

Krazam is starting to have this effect on me.

I couldn't watch Silicon Valley when I was working in tech. It constantly triggered rage as it was way too close to my actual experience. After I left tech, I found it to be amazing.

i wouldnt say it triggers me but its not fun to watch after a long day of stupid IT bs

same with mr robot. like i'm going crazy because of cybersec issues, i dont want to spend my free time watching a guy go crazy because of cybersec issues

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.

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.

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.

There's obviously some truth to the premis, but no need to take it any more seriously than Beavis and Butthead.

It's a documentary

It really isn't.

"Poor, dumb people outbreed rich, smart people and make the whole world dumb" is not real. And the mechanism by which our world harms people is not because everybody involved is an idiot. Executives of corporations that are destroying the environment aren't just doing it because they don't know better. Leaders within the Trump admin and the GOP more broadly are often extremely well educated at top universities. Ignorance does not drive our politics. Resentment does.

I agree it isn't a documentary.

However, modern politics of the right absolutely prey upon, and encourage, ignorance. Ridicule of intelligentsia and advanced education (often by Ivy League graduates!) is a key part of the strategy.

That smart people are cultivating an ignorant voting bloc doesn't negate the fact that ignorance is fundamental to the plan.

"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

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.

More at https://www.reddit.com/r/tragedeigh/

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.

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.

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.

Climbing for Dollars is from The Running Man[0], the Arnie version from 1987 - same year as Robocop.

Then in 2001 was "Series 7"[1] (which I got flashbacks of from the 2013 White Bear[2] episode of Black Mirror).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(1987_film)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_7:_The_Contenders

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Bear_(Black_Mirror)

Trivia for music nerds like me: Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa are in The Running Man.

Very good point. My brain is just one big 80s mashup at this point.

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.

Based.

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/

Reality TV shows are a HUGE HUGE HUGE segment; most of them aren't too far off. (Reality TV as a concept precedes Idiocracy but was refined in the 2010s.)

"Ow! My Balls" was less about the Jackass part of it but more about the "numbing your brain and consuming mindless entertainment" commentary. Reality TV fits this category extremely well. See also: Housewives of _x_.

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.

Upgraydd was also the guy's name in the present. He traveled to the future to be there with them.

probably 1/4 of tiktok is now Ow My Balls

You missed the documentary angle. Getting rid of jackass would be a move in the right direction (and all of the jackass derivatives).

There are quite a lot of dubious matches.

Brawndo is considered a match with "Nestlé CEO says water isn't a human right". Beyond that it has nothing to do with agricultural malpractice, the Nestlé guy is just correct. It doesn't make sense to talk about human rights that way.

"Ow my balls" is considered a match because "YouTube's most popular content is often people hurting themselves", which is just wrong. It's stuff like music videos, children's songs and MrBeast. All quite wholesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...

"Costco law degree" is considered a match because ... there are companies that offer credentials which aren't universities. That isn't evidence of stupidity.

"Trash piles are massive" is considered a match because third world countries have giant trash piles. But they always did. Idiocracy was a film about America.

Even the first match is a giant stretch. Elizondo was only a TV star, and he did that work whilst in office. Trump wasn't (just) a reality TV star, he was first and foremost pre-politics a real estate developer. Quite different levels of challenge and respectability. And I don't think the show he did could be described as reality TV anyway.

I always looked at the Costco law degree as more of a commentary on Costco/price clubs than of degree mills.

Like Costco sells everything and eventually that includes education.

The apprentice is literally reality tv competition though.

It's a TV show. It's not reality TV as the term was originally used.

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.

There are studies where 93% of drivers believe they are better than average drivers...

There's no inherent contradiction with a majority of drivers rating themselves above average: each driver is free to prioritize "good driver"-traits differently; e.g. if I value road safety and my neighbour values total travel time, we are probably both objectively better drivers according to our own metrics.

That said, 93% of car drivers are worse than me. Obviously.

The tricky question is: how do you tell when you're actually right vs just doing the same thing Homer was

Not a guarantee of course, but I think if you can't steelman your opponents, have never gone into something with some hypothesis or bias and ultimately proved it wrong/insufficiently supported and accepted that, or wouldn't be willing to specify what evidence would be sufficient for you to change your mind (however unlikely you believe that to be), you're more likely to be Homer.

I feel like there are clear signs, but either people have cognitive blind spots or are just obstinate. For example, you hear people complain that they've been for a bajillion interviews and still don't get hired (hint: the problem is you), or they're always single even though they go on countless dates (hint: the problem is you) or they're overweight and can't lose weight no matter what they try (hint: the problem is you). Maybe an inability to introspect yourself in an objective way? Maybe a deep seated belief that the problem cannot actually be _you_, it must be an external factor, so you seek that. Maybe you're not being gaslit, maybe the ever-present smell of shit really does emanate from under your shoe.

You've just described MAGA in a nutshell.

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.

I bought some actual Brawndo back in the day. An energy drink company had licensed the brand. Did not share with my plants, having learned better from the movie.

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.

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?

The music for that episode still takes me galaxies/dimensions away

https://youtu.be/IYpO3EbvMK4?si=n70N7hi8v29NiZvr

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 don't read San Junipero as happy.

Black Mirror likes to show us the most-important thing as a kind of punctuation or statement of message even when it's not what the episode has encouraged us to believe is the most important thing (see also: the focus of the camera in the very first episode during A Certain Event—we've been primed for a grand, disgusting spectacle, and the camera chooses to show us none of that, and instead shows us something much more disgusting: the faces of people watching it, which is the actual show, and the point of the "artist" in the episode).

San Junipero ends by showing us the entirety of what is actually happening, for-real, which is an automated computer-maintenance system keeping itself running. It's highlighting the unreality of the virtual world, I think suggesting that even the apparent experiences we've been watching aren't happening in any real sense.

What's really happening? 100% of what's really happening? As you see. A computer system maintaining itself, to keep electricity flowing through its various circuits. Doing what? Doesn't matter, could be endlessly calculating digits of pi, that'd be just as much a "real" experience as what you've been so invested in. This is all that's really going on.

Demolition Man is the darkest timeline.

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.

“You cannot give me anything, because all that you have is stolen.”

Shocking that the show predates AI.

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...

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.

And he even missed crocs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSkqybtwBk

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...

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.

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.

and he hired the smartest of the smart

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?"

Unpopular framing: it's less about "dumb masses" than incentive systems that make spectacle cheaper than competence—and we keep mistaking engagement metrics for neutral feedback.

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

I don't think Starbucks offering happy endings is a 55% match to their current offerings.

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%+.

President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho tried to find smart people to get their input, I wish we had President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho…

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.

I've watched Idiocracy more than once, but only just realized that Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead) was the director! Ow my balls!

Don't forget Silicon Valley!

Awesome show, but didn't realize Mike Judge was behind that too!

The real score should be around 50% or less. The scoring system is done as a joke without much thought and compares a lot of apples to oranges. Like “aw my balls” equals Jackass, even describing what’s different about them it counts them as equal. Costco degree is not equal to Microsoft degree, etc.

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.

Thanks for that. Good to see a well reasoned argument and another HN nod for Office Space you made me watch the trailer!

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.

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.

> 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.

- "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.

The movie was made before handheld devices were a plague. Though you get a similar sense of it in the way that Frito is addicted to TV surrounded by ads.

Public education is important. Without it, it’s harder to stay above average. But there are those who say “it is not my duty to fund the education of anyone else.” Hence, here we are.

"Public education" is exactly the thing that will guarantee Idiocracy, that was practically the whole point of the movie

What are you talking about? The opening framing is a pseudo eugenic critique of class reproduction. Did you even watch the movie?

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.

Idiocracy is an utopia - they voted for the smartest person.

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.

Scary. I'm not familiar with the work. Though, it strikes me as a lot like a Neal Stephenson novel unfolding in our faces.

If you think watching Idiocracy feels too on point for current events, try giving a (re)watch to The Hunger Games movies, too.

The satire we need today is how we sort it out.

I'm afraid they're immune to it.

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

Sumo?

Lol no that new sport in new Zealand and Australia. Its mental.

Mike owes us a second docu.

I don't know of anyone else changing everything to gold by touch.

He deserves credit fot South Park too if only by osmosis.

People from the future will find Idiocracy and think it was some sort of instructional video on how to build a society.

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!

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.

Idiocracy looks more and more utopian

I just want the Carl's Jr. vending machines.

I've seen a White Castle vending machine at the airport!

I love Idiocracy, but I have come to sympathize with criticism that it's a bit pro-eugenics.

More than "a bit" - it's the entire premise of the film.

Idiocracy had the better US president.

When they found the smartest man in the US, they gave him a job to solve their problems.

Trump & Co. wouldn’t do that, quite the opposite

In Idiocracy, they didn't ask if they're in Idiocracy or not, so no.

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.

I think all we need to close the gap is for Starbucks to become brothels.

As a cultural mirror, it's pretty entertaining

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.)

You never go full Idiocracy.

(But never say never).

I love this, thank you.

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..

> It is about the thought leaders becoming dumb

As i said “they are getting power”. Through exposure, normalization, through all the dumb people getting vote rights (and voting guess how) etc.

Nothing is poisoned in tge human nature. It just plays out differently in this age.

I feel this won't necessarily be a popular take here but I really don't like things like Idiocracy. To me it comes across as deeply misanthropic, and kind of ignorant of what human nature actually looks like outside of our very specific cultural window. It's the same deep misanthropy that makes me really dislike most post-apocalyptic fiction, look at actual how actual humanity behaves in disaster conditions for five minutes and you'd see most of it is just misanthropic nonsense. We haven't let go of this Victorian idea all that separates man (particularly working-class man) and beast is a thin veneer of civilisation that can collapse at any minute. To me Idiocracy is a product of that mentality, it's a satire of Western consumer culture but this idea is not presented satirically, Idiocracy seems to believe this earnestly.

You can look at skeletons of prehistoric man and see bone healing which can only have occurred if the group decided to look after someone who couldn't work at that point. Humans are inherently stupid and selfish, but they're also inherently clever and cooperative; it's all so dependent on material and cultural context. It's true in my view that the general culture of late capitalism makes people inclined towards stupid and selfish ideas, but the idea this could actually do serious long-term damage to humanity's actual nature until everyone is a bumbling moron is absurd. Not just absurd either, but fundamentally insulting to all of us in my view.

Culture is often a product of material conditions, if Idiocracy's premise that it's possible to make humanity dumber on a lasting basis had the slightest merit then it would have happened already a hundred times over. Not least from the amount of lead we were pouring into the environment from the 1930s onwards! In reality if humanity did get dumber for cultural reasons, the material conditions associated with that culture would soon collapse and there'd be a new selection pressure to avoid the same kind of stupidity.

This epic comparison once again wins the internet for today, gentlesirs

"Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot!"

Haha, so funny. Best joke ever.

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?

Today it's Trump, yesterday it was something else. Tomorrow it'll be a third thing.

A good movie makes you love the people more. Such moves are rare. "Idiocracy" or "Don't Look Up" are not like that. (Satire is a low genre in general.)

Hot take: if you think LLMs could be or will become AGI, have some more Brawndo

Yes

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

Eh. While I do believe that most people are really stupid and this is the core problem with democracy, this website is too sensational. Example:

> Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.

Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Imagine:

1. Medieval times -> literally zero deaths attributed to medical errors because there's no medical practice in the first place

2. We can cure all diseases and eliminated all traffic accidents using autonomous cars -> obviously 90% of deaths will be medical errors because that's literally the only thing you can realistically die from

Most of these comparisons do not make sense. Dare I say--AI slop?

am i the only one that sees the irony in this website being made entirely with AI? Especially as it's so simple.

is it just me learning that donald trump is a wwe hall of famer??!

Look at who the Secretary of Education is in the US.

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

All is now about Trump - watch this thread devolve...

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.

The thing about Biden was that the bureaucracy was still intact, so most government functionality carried on just fine regardless what Biden himself was doing. Trump gutted the bureaucracy in favor of autocracy, replacing the domain experts with sycophantic yes-men. So when Biden got a terrible idea that would unquestionably harm the country, the response would have been something like "We'll look into that" or even an outright "no". Whereas when Trump gets a terrible idea (which lets be honest is a few times a week), the only answer is "yes sir".

If you're comparing dementia styles, Biden was effectively the type that is happy to sit on the couch and stare off into space while his family does things around him. Trump is the combative kind that is always trying to find the keys to the car to drive away and assert his own independence, and violently rejects help and concern.

As for your larger comment, you're probably closer to right in that bureaucratic authoritarians were much more like Idiocracy. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho had better leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism than the piece of pig shit currently staining our White House could ever hope for. He also didn't rape trafficked underage girls or pardon Upgrayedd for a bribe. The movie makes me long for simpler times.

I don't know what you are talking about. I said - "Biden had problems unrightfully covered up" - and obviously we can't agree on that. So this is Idiocracy already - independent of Trump. If you are unable to speak truth independent of your own attitudes, wishes, ideas, etc. - that's idiocracy.

I present HTTP://TrumpCamacho.com without further comment.

Clickable link: https://trumpcamacho.com

That didn't end well, unfortunately.

The Idiotic Republic of America. There is no god but the Dollar.

Let's not forget our worship of Death

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

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!

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