Having been raised by a sci-fi nerd, I have a very cultivated affection for science fiction. My parents even went to see the first Star Wars right after getting married in Zilker Park in 1977. However, as I grew older, I noticed something that most films failed to truly address, which was the almost absence of Black people. These days, there is fortunately more Afrofuturism, and more authors are gaining traction, but there is still a penchant to paint Black people out of the majority of science fiction. A lot of the people who call themselves “nerds” are obsessed with all the sci-fi movies and shows, to the point of being hypercritical when someone dares to present interest without being a complete expert. To this end, it becomes clear why there has been such a wild rush for artificial intelligence and non-fungible tokens: the kooky, robot future with aliens was taking too long, and people were getting fed up with the narcissism of sci-fi nerds with nothing to show for their obsession.
Upfront and center, there is a completely unjustified belief about how “smart” sci-fi people were and how tech was the future, regardless of all of the evidence to the contrary. Most of the famous nerds were white men who were atheists, so there was a rampant effort to portray intelligence as atheistic, and anyone else was “stupid.” The only thing that seemed to matter to sci-fi nerds was STEM, so naturally, the only type of intelligence with any economic traction was anything related to math–unfortunately, including finance. What all of these delusions failed to acknowledge was 1) much of the technology in the West (specifically, the imperial United States) was created with stolen resources from everywhere else; and 2) the finite resources on the planet would make impossible even the built environment of The Fifth Element. Moreover, there is still a belief that abusive, antisocial personalities can be excused with “intelligence,” despite the existence of social intelligence. At some point, bragging without producing anything would make even the most devout followers skeptical.
The imperial United States is now a fascist oligarchy because of two people: Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The first one never cared about his reputation or his intelligence because he believes–as is borne out by evidence–that money will excuse just about anything. Musk was so worried about his personality at one point that he bought an appearance on SNL, attempting to garner sympathy for his chaotic actions. The truth is that there have been far too many terrible personalities who were justified with pursuing science, and “elite” society has just now realized that “scientists” can be money-grubbing, power-hungry bigots just like anyone else. Reality has finally shown that a lot of stupid people can make money and create problematic conditions when given more resources.
Emotionally immature people do not like to be called out on their behavior or told “no” in any way, but instead of coming up with something that benefited the public, sci-fi nerds needed a way to destroy opposition to their obviously dysfunctional behavior. Enter bitcoin, AI customer service and creative producers, and comment bots to fight with people online. Since no one could lie about the terrible personalities being deluded with fantasies anymore, there was a rush to attack everyone who had social intelligence and saw them for what they were. Now, the main comeback was that a computer could write the “drivel” a long-term author produced, and “no one cared” about how long is actually takes for human beings to produce art. While I myself was entertained by AI for a time, I realized that formula and repetition only work when people lack connection, because people with connections are usually unmoved by robots doing the same things in the same way without much variation.
As I write this, I consider the reason why Constantine 2 was never made: Papa Midnight is an irreplaceable character, and too many bigots within Hollywood refuse to accept a Black man–even as beautiful as Djimon Hounsou is–as a central role to a sci-fi movie. The truth is that while stupid people make money, smart people solve problems, and there was actually no problem that AI, bots, robots, bitcoin, etc. needed to fix. Such paraphernalia was created to look “cool,” and to satisfy the quells of people tired of hearing an obnoxious blowhard who needed attention bellowing about how his fantasies were “the future.” So when people keep trying to push AI or other useless tech that does little more than remove income from humans, inform them that their interest in starving humanity for something that looks “cool” is disturbing.
Chasing A Dying Empire 