Fiction

This is how Blade Runner begins, the legendary film by Ridley Scott, shot in 1982. L.A. is a fragmented city with a “top” and a “bottom” world, and a key security issue is the seizure of “invaders” – biotechnological humanoids that “work” on other planets.

Did Scott fall out? As for the timing, yes, but not for the trends in the ongoing 4th industrial/capitalist revolution. Urban flying vehicles are very close… Very close are also, not the replicas, but the cyborg “transformation”/upgrade of the “volunteers” of our kind… And the completely anthropomorphic “sex robot”… The Voight-Kampff “humanity test” is not yet needed to distinguish what is what – it currently has a different form and purpose, and is here under another name: recording of “biometric” data and “identity recognition” through such data. (It is being tested against immigrants, besiegers, etc. etc. It will soon become universal…).

No, L.A. (and capitalist cities in general) does not have Scott’s aesthetics. Not yet…

But, here: cigarette smoking has been declared in 2019, it is considered a crime, in the largest and most massive ever experiment of planned “behavioral change”! Mass criminalization accompanied by mass applause: this nightmarish development could not have been foreseen even by the most imaginative screenwriter of science fiction in 1982…