☢ 'Fallout' and the persistence of techno-optimism
Even dystopian films and TV can inadvertently show the wonder-working power of technological progress
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The Essay
☢ 'Fallout' and the persistence of techno-optimism
“There’s no such thing as an anti-war film,” French director François Truffaut once claimed. Even the most brutal war movies end up glamorizing violence and killing through exciting action scenes, heroic sacrifice, and depictions of strong bonds between soldiers.
If only there were no such thing as an anti-technology film. There, it seems, Hollywood has been more successful in sending a clear and consistent message: better to be safe than really, really sorry when it comes to cutting-edge science and tech. The science-fictional aspect of the debate about AI safety since the debut of ChatGPT is testament to that. I also can’t help but wonder what today’s energy mix might look like if the nuclear-disaster thriller The China Syndrome hadn’t hit American theaters just twelve days before the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident in March 1979. And I suspect the 2000s glut of zombie films has contributed to the anti-vaccine movement. In the film I Am Legend, the undead plague comes from a cancer cure.
Still, there are some Down Wing films and television shows — even though darkly cynical about technology — where a pro-tech message still manages to shine through. My favorite example is The Peripheral, the 2014 book by William Gibson (turned into a 2021 Amazon Prime series) that depicts a future devastated by the "Jackpot," a series of catastrophic events, including climate change, pandemic, and limited nuclear war.
Yet in the middle of that rolling series of global disasters, science started "popping" with advancements in clean energy, nanotechnology, and advanced medicine. But, alas, these innovations arrived too late to prevent widespread destruction. If the breakthroughs had occurred a decade or two earlier, humanity might have possessed the powerful tools necessary to avert or significantly mitigate the Jackpot’s impact. As I write in The Conservative Futurist, it’s not hard to see how a story like The Peripheral could have cleverly emphasized the importance of prioritizing R&D investment to address global challenges before they escalate into existential crises while keeping intact the main plot.
Fallout, another Amazon Prime series that just finished its first season, also qualifies as an anti-tech film that inadvertently manages to undermine its doomster theme. Based on the popular video game series, Fallout shifts back and forth between retro-futuristic 2077 — it’s like the United States had a long, atomic-powered 1950s — and a nuclear-war-ravaged 2296. But 2077 America was no utopia, having fought numerous resources wars with Asia and the Middle East over oil and uranium. The federal government is broke and at the mercy of a corporate oligarchy. But, finally, a scientist cracks the code on cold fusion (“It’s limitless energy, and we can build our own world. It could be a better world … clean water and medicine and power, but for everyone”) only to have defense mega-company Vault-Tec purchase her company and bury the technology. A source of cheap, infinite energy would end the resource wars and hurt company profits.
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