2026 is the distant future by any reasonable standard, so this seems like a good time to check in on exactly what kind of dystopia we ended up with. Skynet remains a possibility but the rest of The Terminator’s nuclear-strike-followed-by-stop-motion-cyborg-war timeline seems out of the question. Obviously we’ve got a bit of an Octavia Butler “Parable of the Talents” thing going, with all the Making America Great Again, but Butler’s solution was basically “SpaceX: The Religion” and it turns out that sucks too. For a few weeks in the spring of 2020 we flirted with 12 Monkeys but SARS‑CoV‑2 couldn’t get the job done. This isn’t a comprehensive survey of the literature, but I think what we’ve landed on is Idiocracy with The Matrix rising, a hybrid I’m calling “The Dumb Matrix.”

As Matt Novak correctly pointed out more than a decade ago, Idiocracy is a work of eugenic propaganda whose “underlying premise is a fundamentally dangerous and backwards way to understand the world.” In the twenty years since the movie came out, however, it’s increasingly clear that Mike Judge accurately captured the direction of American culture, if not its causes. I remember in 2006 thinking that Idiocracy felt like very extreme satire, but how implausible does this scenario feel today:

They’re doing dirt bike jumps on the South Lawn. A U.S. Congressman has been straight-up missing for more than 100 days and no one knows what to do about it, if anything. The feeling that the dumbest people are in charge and nobody has any idea what they’re doing is inescapable. Garbage Ryan went to the White House UFC weekend and reported that not only was it repulsive, it was also poorly organized and deeply boring.

Idiocracy’s major mistake wasn’t the future it predicted, which would arrive a lot quicker than 500 years as it turned out, but who the movie blamed for it. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, a Black former pornographic actor and wrestler, doesn’t look like much anyone in power today, or anyone who got us here. I mean President Camacho identified a national crisis, found someone qualified to solve it, and charged him with finding a solution. Can you imagine?

With twenty years of evidence I think I can say conclusively that the people at fault aren’t “the cretins cloning and feeding” as Harvey Danger called them. It’s the car dealers, the power boaters, the racist nepo landlords, the fake-folksy Yale alumni, the billionaire failsons with an unslakable thirst for cultural power even if Daddy has to buy it for them, and all the “heterodox” fascist remoras attached to their obscene flanks. Idiocracy got the aesthetics right but the eugenics wrong.

I saw The Matrix shortly after it came out in 1999, at The Uptown theatre in Washington, D.C. I vividly remember the entire crowded auditorium laughing when Agent Smith describes a simulated 1999 as “the peak of your civilization.”

That line doesn’t seem so funny anymore, does it. “At some point early in the 21st century,” Morpheus tells Neo, “all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.” Ok “united in celebration” is putting it a little too strongly, but if Anthropic owns the future that’s surely how this moment will be described in what few samizdat history books remain. “Agentic” A.I. hype is everywhere. I recently rewatched The Matrix with my 13 year old, and warned them that they were going to have to swallow the extremely dumb premise that endless caverns full of human bodies in pods was a power source, somehow. They thought about it for a minute and then said “yeah that’s silly, but it is an idea A.I. would come up with.” Oh no.

The unsettling fact is that while the movie never really seemed like it was trying to be predictive, we’re still locked in on The Matrix timeline twenty seven years later. What’s really gonna bake our noodles in the future is: would Claude Pro Max 2030 “Excalibur Prime” have decided to enact the events of The Matrix if we’d never made The Matrix in the first place?