So clever, so depressing: the English town of Clifton, having dwindled in economic strength over the years, has responded to the loss of its last place to shop with a giant vending machine. The so-called Speedy Shop—really, an over-sized, building-shaped machine standing alone in a dreary parking lot—is meant to help bring some economic life back to the town.
The dystopia created in this animation by Simon Russell is a world I hope to never be a part of: drones littered across the sky, surveillance cameras pointing every which way and for some reason, dubstep. It doesn’t all make sense but Russell’s imaginative take on the look of futuristic drones and cameras are perfectly chaotic and crazy. Some floating orb drones look like mini Death Stars while other cameras are like machine guns.
Touring around California, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re living in the future, and not just because of the Silicon Valley wizardry that surrounds us all. We also have to thank Hollywood’s movie magic, which has turned the state into a backdrop for countless science fiction films presenting futures both terrible and wondrous. It’s not just that so many are filmed here—writers and filmmakers have been exploring the future through California sets for decades.
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This new RoboCop movie does not care that anyone might compare it unfavorably to the original 1987 RoboCop movie. It has been programmed not to care about these things. The most readily available metaphor, which is also true, is that the new movie has killed the human mind and guts of its predecessor and kept the cold mechanical body. The whole thing is flat and obvious; even its musical cues land with the clanking unsubtlety of its protagonist’s metallic footsteps.
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Edward Snowden—the former NSA contractor who revealed
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As more and more ozone depleting humans start crowding together, we’re going to eventually stain the entire world with concrete streets and flickering street lights. Mountains are going to glow like man-made volcanoes, rivers are going to become brown sludge and new urban cities will be carved into whatever is left of nature. This digitally created art piece by Yang Yongliang shows what that bleak future will look like. It’s mesmerizing. More »
There’s nothing like staring at the onset of a new year and making predictions on what the next 150 years will look like. Silly predictions are the best! BBC cooked up some ideas and gave odds on what they think will happen in the next 150 years ranging from most likely to least likely and if it’ll lead to utopia or dystopia. More »
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