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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 decohered when Dinesh got upset and started unplugging components.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
- "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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everytime this movie comes up, droves of people mention how they get it, while others don't. It's becoming a trope in itself.
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.
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.
like that?
"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 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.
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.
Besides the declining groups have the same education with the earlier ones.
You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.
What do you propose as a replacement metric to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
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 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
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.
Don't look!
> 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!"
It felt way 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.
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?
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.
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.
Upgraydd was from our time wasn't he
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAUcSb3PgeM
https://youtu.be/IYpO3EbvMK4?si=n70N7hi8v29NiZvr
His nephew 'watered' their plants with Coke. Not quite Mountain Dew, but also not far off.
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.
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".
Without also making us famous or taking care of our daily needs.
- "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.
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.
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.
We are not so lucky in reality.
Comancho saw the green shoot at the end and changed his mind.
That to me is what makes it utopian
/s
(But never say never).
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.
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...
(Really—there are far more salient points that promot that conclusion about myself.)
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.
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.
...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.
The opposite direction?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The answer is to be your own survivorship bias. Go dig and find good stuff.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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!