• outer_spec@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 months ago

      they will ensure their offspring won’t all become total idiots.

      I’m not sure about that. Billionaire oil executives don’t care about the damage they do to the environment because it benefits them short term, and they‘ll die before the long term.

    • mlg@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      That’s because they also went extinct. It shows the fallout where everything is owned by Brawndo and how commercialization took over everything, but the ultra rich class is missing because they died out and all their assets were probably redistributed automatically by some computer.

    • Igloojoe@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Billionaires aren’t idiots?? Elon Musk is so high on adderall that his brain is fried.

  • Riskable
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    10 months ago

    We are currently living in an age of literacy. More people (as a percentage of the population) are literate than at any point in human history. Even if people get dumber over time I don’t think overall literacy will change much.

    In Idiocracy it seemed like most people could still read but only extremely simplified language. What I expect will happen instead–if we do indeed get dumber–is people will just become more easily manipulated. Basically, there will be a lot more suckers as a percentage of the population.

    This means that as long as a political party or ideology is willing to adapt to current trends (e.g. accepting gay marriage or at least pretending to) it would become easier and easier to sucker people into voting for their candidates regardless of their actual plans or historical (voting) records. Basically, populism will take over but the specific kind where the candidates just say whatever TF gets people to vote for them and then they go do the exact opposite because the (dumb) voting base that elects them doesn’t really pay any attention to their actions, only what the candidate says.

    When a voting base becomes made up of extremely dumb suckers we’re likely to see “populist” candidates that don’t actually give a damn about what they say as long as they get elected and if they do get elected they’ll go on a “government shopping spree” enriching themselves and their allies and doing things like appointing their family members to positions of power. The suckers will praise them for actions like this not because they like the results of these policies but because it’s easy for them to understand that it hurts the people they’ve been suckered into hating the most.

    • littleblue✨@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Please explain how “their worst nightmares” have already been surpassed?

      “As the world teeters on the brink of nuclear anarchy, London-based scientific genius… discovers that the microfilm formula for a self-replicating human being is missing… must race through a wasteland of murder and madness to recover ‘The Final Programme,’ which may very well trigger the creation of a new messiah!”

  • Toes♀@ani.social
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    10 months ago

    Pretty much everything that’s occurring now, were headed towards an idiocracy 2077 dystopia.