4 Evil Movie Technologies That the World Needs Right Now
Movies are far too fond of blaming the technology for being evil instead of the asshole using it. If someone invents a robot that can morph its body, precisely monitor the human form, and use those abilities tirelessly? Then it's the inventor's fault if they built a killbot to terminate us instead of a sexbot to bring about World Peace. During the World Nap. After the twice-hourly World Orgasm.
Come with them and you won't care if you live.
Technology is a tool. Any tool can be misused. For example, the Internet was built to share important information, but it can also show us the stupidest censorship of video games ever. And baseball bats can be misused by drug-users to take money from people who earned it honestly. (They can also be used by muggers in the street.)
Those low-balling fools.
We've already seen some evil technologies that could be much better employed. Here are four more amazing tools that we could use for good, instead of exploding them and assuming that will somehow make everything work out.
Paid Immortality
In Time is set in a world where the rich steal the lives of the poor even more obviously than they do in reality. And since reality has cubicle farms, that's horrifying.
"If I was a real lab rat, at least I'd know I was helping humanity."
Immortal ultra-capitalists are the ultimate conspiracy terror. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is credited as the most tragic six-word tale possible, but I can kick the shit out of all horror with only two words: "Trump eternal."
A screaming windbag bulldozing the world into shitty golf casinos, forever.
Endless Koch brothers would kick the shit out of every Illumitemplar symbol on every dollar bill in the world, because those dollars are theirs. The only real limitation we have on rich people is that DNA stops working after a while. We claim to have government regulation too, but in the rock-paper-scissors between money and legality, the winning hand is always "rock full of money for their re-election campaign."
And "paper" is usually "is this the bill you wanted lobbied to death?"
How It Could Save the World
If rich people become immortal, they'll give a shit about the planet. They'll be stuck here! The instant a billionaire understands that they're going to be around long enough for their factories to fuck things up for them personally is the instant that stops being a problem.
"Stop that! From now on our factories will emit only oxygen and gold-plated puppies."
*urgent whispering* "Regular puppies."
All those people paid to argue against the blatant existence of climate change, water poisoning, and the host of other horrible things we're doing to our life-support systems? Every single one will be given heavy gloves and told to start cleaning shit up instead of spewing it.
Bonus
Space funding! The same egocentricity that puts someone in charge of a measurable fraction of this world won't be able to resist finding another one. Tell an immortal billionaire that they'll be able to have their own world utterly free of regulation, and they won't care how long it takes. A few billion a year will be nothing for their expanding empires. Trump can have his own entire low-g planet of golf courses, Orbital Par 4, and the rest of us can use it as a planetary landfill.
Fertility Switches
Preventing people from having children is how movies announce a government as utterly evil when they don't trust their costume designer to pull off something cool enough with black, white, and red.
"We just don't think the eugenikilt is menacing enough. Though we admit the bagpipes of breeding are terrifying."
It's the ultimate oppression, a removal of all hope for the future. It's how you tell the people that they're a resource to be managed and that they can't even go fuck themselves.
How It Could Save the World
Make it free and easily available. Everyone starts switched off, but you can get a pill that pumps you back up to breedability in a month. Both genders have to take their pills, so there's no problem with accidentally helping make a baby, and because putting the responsibility for contraception on only one gender is, oh holy shit, have you seen some of the bullshit going on in our world? And while we're down there, the pills color-code your pee. So that nobody can be anti-poisoned to create more life instead of dying.
BONUS: Those pad ads will finally be telling the truth
The only change we need is to make the treatment free. There must be absolutely no test for getting this pill. None! They should be in vending machines at every crosswalk. There should be flavors like Coke Freedom and Fanta Babymaker. The instant you start screening people for any reason you're on a slip-n-slide straight to your least favorite fascist future. I used to think that there were a few simple and obvious things we should check for, because I was a first-year university moron just like millions of other people, but the instant there's any testing framework we've started Government Eugenics 101. They'll be gene-mandering within a generation.
How is babby formed? With a Voting Tendency Confirmation form (in triplicate).
Bollocks (and ovaries) to the idea of "suitable parents." If we enforced that, the human race would be about 20 people. But eliminate accidental pregnancies and every parent will be a happier parent, and we'll neatly sidestep the psychopaths who think women have a holy duty to host unwanted parasites.
The Matrix
I touched on this in the first article, but it's an important one that deserves more detail. It's the most famous futuristic dystopia we have, where terrorists continually murder innocent civilians on the grounds that they once had an involuntary connection with the opposition. And those were the good guys.
"I believe that I look cool as hell, and I killed at least 40 families during that awesome freeway scene."
The other slight flaw? The Matrix couldn't be more scientifically unsound if it was powered by perpetual phlogiston. Using humans as an energy source is like using a petrol fire as an oxygen supply. That's not hyperbole! It is exactly like that. "Provide energy" is the opposite of what our cells do. The machines would have been better off building an arboretum, and those inmates would have been much less likely to engage in murderous action sequences.
And the entire simulation would have been a desktop.
How It Could Save the World
Every entertainment advance we've made in the last 20 years has been a shallow attempt at the Matrix. When we get that working, you won't be able to plug people in fast enough. Silicon Valley would upload itself the second that became possible, which would make them and the locals who can no longer afford the lease on a pot to piss in very happy. It's win-win.
"We've been trying to insert computers between ourselves and other humans for years!"
The only problem is the "humanity needs suffering" angle, which is some hot buttered bullshit. There's no way a simulated world would be a shitty modern New York. You'll notice that when you plug batteries into your keyboard, it's designed so that they can't stab each other. And they're made of metal and violent chemical reactions. At the very least it would be a disease-free world of health. Because letting your users pretend to be sick to death would be an insane inversion of Munchausen by Internet.
"This is weird, it says you have Hepatitis 011. And that you never called."
Half our gadget fantasies are about eliminating physical problems like objects and distance. We increase connectivity, transmit signal, and imagine a world of easy 3D-making where the only important thing is information. Get us into a simulated world and that'll be it. We'll be able to Minecraft our own existence, modding our bodies, and every interaction will be between consenting parties. At that point we won't care if it's giant ants with dripping mandibles keeping the machines running as long as they don't tell us when they touch us. And, because we'll still technically be on an Internet, some people will still enjoy that.
"Aw yeah baby, you know I love those tibial spurs."
Of course, there will still be some assholes trying to ruin things for everyone. But when your entire life is online, you'll be able to block and mute people out of your existence. They'll quickly find themselves in a subset of the world populated only by other assholes. We'll have built a technology that lets trolls generate their own hell.
Death Star
It's hard to imagine a less likely world-saving device than the Death Star. World-saving is the exact opposite of its function. On a world-saving scale of 1 to 10, the scale is exploded in a blast of plasma.
Unless you mean "saving us the bother of having worlds," in which case you're dead on. That world.
It seems like the Death Star's only world-improving potential would be identifying and eliminating pedants who go on about how it really should be a Death Moon, not a Death Star. But maybe its energy output is equivalent to a star? Maybe it's powered by fusion? Maybe the radiance of its world-destroying beam would look like a star to the people on the doomed planet, meaning that to them it is literally a Death Star?
I bring the biggest guns to the nerd battle.
It's not like they can just throw it into reverse and collapse atomized dust into an inhabitable planet. If only because gravity already does that, as the the true force that penetrates us and binds the galaxy together.
But yeah, making a trash can float was real impressive too.
How It Could Save the World
Things that come from space to annihilate life on a planet? We've already got hundreds of thousands of those. They're called asteroids, and they are constantly fired into our orbit from an interplanetary ammo belt between Mars and Jupiter. Our biosphere is at the bottom of an interplanetary pachinko machine. An asteroid is absolutely going to exterminate the majority of all life on Earth. That's definitely going to happen. It's only a matter of when, and our current strategy seems to be "wipe ourselves out first."
A final cigarette for the entire planet.
The Death Star would be the ultimate defense against asteroid threats. Spin it around and it can atomize any incoming death-rocks. Since it has no problems moving between planets, it can do it far enough away to make sure it hasn't just shotgunned the surface with exploded asteroid buckshot.
The Death Star would also make us much less vulnerable to the threat of the universe scoring an extinction-in-one. We've talked before about the problems of settling another world, like the radiation exposure of traveling through space and the resources required to establish a functioning colony. But the Death Star is tens of kilometers of radiation shielding and an interplanetary U-Haul. It can commute back and forth between planets, shuttling all the supplies we need. It can even make grocery runs to the gas and water stations orbiting Jupiter.
Though parking can be an issue.
We've said it before, and we'll say it again, and we'll keep on saying it until the governments of the world see sense. The survival of the species depends on us building a Death Star.
For a brighter future. A much, much, much brighter future.
Watch as we hotwire 5 Dystopian Movie Technologies That Would Improve the World, or learn about 9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along.
For more real-world evil, check out The Friendzone: Where His Cowardice Is Her Fault, or The Most Ridiculous Examples of Video Game Censorship.
Luke has a much better idea for the Matrix machines, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.
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