Why So Much New Technology Feels Inspired by Dystopian Sci-Fi Movies
By Casey Michael Henry
November 5, 2025 | The New York Times
In recent years, a strange trend has emerged in the world of technology: many new innovations and designs seem to draw heavily from dystopian science fiction and cyberpunk media—genres known for their bleak, cautionary visions of the future. Far from offering hopeful or utopian futures, contemporary tech often appears to embody the dark, satirical warnings depicted in these stories, sometimes in ways that feel uncomfortably close to those grim imaginings.
A striking example can be found in OpenAI’s new video-generation platform, Sora 2, which allows users to create short AI-generated videos based on almost any prompt. While such technology might be expected to inspire creativity and imagination, much of Sora’s output instead resembles the crude, sensationalist media of reality TV, daytime talk shows, and viral internet fare—often combining historical figures in bizarre and violent scenarios. For instance, users have generated clips of Gandhi wrestling Hitler, or Stephen Hawking performing wrestling moves, mixed with unsettling caricatures and prank-show styles.
Such content evokes the dystopian media satirized in films like Idiocracy and Robocop, which imagined societies numbed by tasteless entertainment and absurd spectacles. These fictional depictions of cultural decay now seem to be echoed in actual digital platforms, blurring the line between satire and reality.
This phenomenon is not confined to content generation. The aesthetic and conceptual influences of dystopian sci-fi are pervasive across tech design and innovation. The cyberpunk genre, with its "high tech, low life" ethos, has left a clear mark on Silicon Valley’s vision of the future. Novels by William Gibson and movies like The Matrix introduced audiences to neon-lit urban ruins, omnipresent megacorporations, advanced body modifications, and the dark side of virtual reality and artificial intelligence—elements that reverberate in today’s tech culture and its products.
One prominent case is Tesla’s Cybertruck, whose sharp, militaristic design has been openly inspired by 1980s and 1990s dystopian sci-fi. Elon Musk referenced Blade Runner when discussing the Cybertruck, describing it as the kind of vehicle “Bladerunner would have driven” — a nod to the iconic film’s grimy, utilitarian aesthetic. The Cybertruck’s angular, armored look conjures fears of apocalyptic social collapse, as though its driver prepares for chaos in everyday life.
What makes this trend troubling rather than merely stylistic is the seeming lack of awareness or reflection within the tech industry about the warnings embedded in the dystopian works they reference. Many of these narratives were intended as critiques of dangerous societal tendencies—unchecked corporate power, erosion of privacy, dehumanization through technology—not blueprints to emulate.
The enthusiasm for reproducing dystopian tropes in technology risks normalizing or glamorizing dystopia itself. This is apparent in platforms like Sora 2, where history and culture are trivialized through AI-driven contests of violence and spectacle, echoing the very social decay depicted as a nightmare in dystopian media.
As technology continues to evolve rapidly, it remains an open question whether the industry will harness inspiration from the future imaginings of sci-fi constructively—or continue to blur the line between dark satire and real-world design, moving closer to the bleak futures it was meant to warn against.
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