Sci-Fi And The Dangers of Technological Overreach
Yesterday I released a new sci-fi dystopia comic, AI Wars #1. Below is an in-depth look behind the setting which will make the read far more enjoyable!
Technology’s imminent danger to technology has been a sci-fi theme dating back to the earliest of stories. Bradbury, Asmiov, Ellison, and more all had stories warning us of what happens when humanity becomes overly-reliant on technology, but it’s also gone through comics as well.
OMAC by Jack Kirby stands for “One Man Army Corps” and is about a man who’s imbued with technology from a satellite. he’s needed because he has to fight even greater technological threats on behalf of freedom for mankind. Later in DC, the OMAC satellites become a big brother which starts to take over the DCU. The scariest of sci-fi dystopias often start with good intentions and warp into something completely different.
Spider-Man even touched on a virtual reality dystopia in the 90s when it relaunched with ‘The Scarlet Spider’. In this series, reality became overwhelmed with the virtual world and virtual battles threatened New York. The whole world became trapped in a game, which was far more prophetic than they knew they were writing at the time.
Of course, when one thinks Spider-Man and technological dystopia, one can’t help but think of Spider-Man 2099, a corporate-controlled world where every corporation owns its own little fiefdom and humanity’s really enslaved. Only a few rebels fight back, like Spider-Man himself, as the corporations do awful experiments on their populations. Unfortunately, we didn’t have to wait until 2099 for this to happen in reality.
With AI Wars #1, I’ve taken the idea of a dystopian future and extrapolated it from our current reality. We have big tech dominating everything. You can’t get posts, books, content seen at all without the algorithm picking up your work. It forces you to talk about certain topics. It forces you to have certain opinions on certain topics. Corporations have us enslaved now. So where do we go with this?
Even though I believe robots will be working factories in the future, with humans relegated to misery and staying at home (which we are being prepped for now by the government), I wanted to show humans slaving doing meaningless work in a factory because it shows the condition they want to inflict upon us — meaningless work, meaningless lives, stay in your lane.
This is aided by “Happy Vitamins” which get injected into workers daily. This is an obvious allegory of the overabundance of vaccines being pumped into us (many such cases!) and also all of the anti-anxiety medication getting prescribed to the population in crazy amounts. These are administered by the creepiest of robots, with unique designs never before seen.
One part familiar, one part innovation, and you get sci-fi dystopia with the starkest of warnings for the way our society is going.
Naturally, there is a resistance to fight back, and that’s you. Right now you’re resisting corporate comics by paying attention to independent alternatives, and the more of us who buck the algorithm now, the easier it will be in the future for us to avoid the corporate-robot hegemony being foisted upon us.
