I see we're still being optimistic in the last panel. Why isn't everything on fire?

Accurate

(1953) The War of the Worlds

(1966) Fahrenheit 451

(1973) Soylent Green

(1984) 1984

(1999) Matrix

(2004) Children of Men

(2012) The Hunger Games

Terminator (1984), Terminator 2 (1991), and The Matrix (1999) have entered the chat...

Elder millennial here. I knew I was in an earth destroying dystopia the entire time.

I think I'd cum if I stepped into that 2000's future. Place looks hella cool. 1950's future just looks like car dependent AI slop and 1980's future looks really bright and light polluting

Educated people saw the 2020 vision as far back as 1950s. They warned us many times, but we never listened.

I do miss feeling optimistic about the future

lol ignoring the entire Cold War

Well, if we had risen up against the rich, instead of letting them rule the world at least the last image would have been avoided.

i mean, this mostly applies to american mindset. "work hard" is a function of progress; in the absence of progress, it stops making sense. and people who only knew how to work hard their entire life suddenly see that way of life ending.

there's a lot of americans who think that way. "work hard and you can make it". nah

The 1970s and 80s sadly was the start of the apocalyptic shithole future. Look up cyberpunk. The 90s economic computer boom really lead to a lot of optimism, but that is long gone now.

That last example is from the original Fallout game, which came out in the late 90s, not the 2020s.

I mean the rich are building bunkers so the bottom Fallout 1 death screen is appropriate if you know the lore of the vaults/bunkers.

I'm reminded of the futurama time lapse when Fry is first frozen. Destroy, rebuild, destroy, rebuild, and so on...

This is exactly what those who are broadly portrayed as visionaries want.

Unfortunately, it never seems to have dawned on the general public that those who market themselves this way were never the visionaries.

Take Dennis Ritchie, for example, one of the original creators of C, who died just days before Steve Jobs: The media went out of their way to emphasize what a loss humanity had suffered, while failing to acknowledge that someone had died to whom humanity owes a great deal. They celebrated only the greedy capitalist who knew how to market a technology, but not at all the rather humble man who made a tremendous contribution without enriching himself at the expense of the common good.

That was a long time ago, but today’s world is still exactly the same - it even got way worse from there: no recognition for those who actually achieve great things, but only for those who step into the spotlight and thus appear to be the ones to whom humanity owes something.

In my view, this encapsulates everything one needs to know about our time—the absurdity of charlatans desperately wanting to be billionaires or even trillionaires.

This attitude has nothing to do with the real world, and it is a hubris that no halfway decent person would ever presume to have—yet humanity is ruled by exactly these megalomaniacal monsters because it collectively allows it.

So we are ruled by the worst that humanity has to offer—by unscrupulous opportunists who live only for themselves, have no sense of community, and have set up a system of undeserved triumph in such a way that only their own despicable kind can follow them.

It is a system that is directed against humanity itself.

Last time the wealth disparity before rich and poor was anywhere close to current one, we call it "medieval dark ages".

Understandable, but ysk that it is an illusion. You always think the past was better than it is now.

I guess there’s some solace or hope to be found in the fact that all the previous predictions weren’t accurate?