More than a decade ago, Pixar launched in 2008. wall e. The film served as a cautionary tale for millions of viewers. after what wall e (a robotic garbage compactor) finds a plant, travels to space, and embarks on a mission to protect it and return humans to an Earth that has been turned into a giant landfill. wall e painted a bleak picture of our future, but how accurate was it?

A few.

In broad strokes: autonomous cars, people glued to the screens of their devices, garbage everywhere, a company that rules the entire world. Sounds familiar, right? You’ve either just watched an animated movie or just observed the world around us. Exit at a time when the economy hits lowest point Since the Great Depression, the dystopian society surrounding the working robot has frightened many with its premonitions.

The film depicts an Earth rendered uninhabitable by climate change, with obese space tourists who only communicate with the last humans, via video calls, and rely on meal replacement drinks for their livelihoods. With increasing frequency of extreme weather events, skyrocketing obesity rates, Zoom calls taking over our lives, and the rise of meal replacement companies like Soylent and Huel, there are similarities to much of our current reality.

The characters’ ship is called Axiom, and that’s where Elon Musk’s space project SpaceX comes into play. The company’s launch on April 8 last year transported three tourists to the International Space Station for a 12-day voyage and was dubbed “Axiom Mission 1,” something that was definitely not by chance.

wall e The story of two robots who apparently fall in love. But it’s also a fable about consumption traps and technology addiction. “I usually like to be right, but not in this case. I didn’t want to be right about a lot of things in this movie,” Andrew Stanton, writer-director of WALL-E, said in this Bloomberg article a while back.

The movie opens with the garbage cleaning robot navigating an abandoned, post-apocalyptic Earth. Intermittently, you need to seek shelter when storms hit. This reflects a more true reality than it seems: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned two years ago that extreme weather events that used to occur only once every ten years are now occurring every three years.

One company to rule them all

In the film’s narrative, climate change is caused by widespread overconsumption. The blame lies directly with one company, the monopolist Buy’N’Large. bears more than resemblance AmazonWith annual sales fluctuating around $500,000 million and controlling about 40% of the e-commerce market in Western countries. The Seattle-based company inspired Stanton more than 15 years ago.

There are more parallels with Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. Buy’N’Large also operates the spaceship in the movie; Meanwhile, Bezos owns Blue Origin, a rocket company that also offers tours for space tourists.

But it was another tech billionaire who helped Stanton and his writing team develop their vision of the direction of humanity’s journey: Steve Jobs. Apple’s co-founder was also the CEO of Pixar and spent half his workweek at the company’s headquarters in Emeryville, on the edge of Silicon Valley. This meant that Stanton saw the iPhone a year before it was released in 2007. He was at a party where Jobs involuntarily showed off the device. “I think his ego got the better of him,” he commented.

overconsumption

In the film, skyscrapers are replaced by distinctive mountains of garbage that rise higher than the clouds. Insects are considered rare as almost all of the natural resources needed to feed them have disappeared. Wall-E spends its days contributing to the growing mountains of waste as it intensifies the garbage heap. Garbage disposal is already a huge problem in our world, with Americans alone producing more than 1,500 pounds of garbage per person per year.

It’s no secret that handwritten letters and phone calls are almost over, replacing abbreviated text messages. in the movie, electric and autonomous cars drive obese populationis equipped with a screen that obscures the passenger’s field of vision. Addicted travelers sit and stroll the streets sipping large Buy’N’Large bottles. The people in the movie are at the company’s disposal as they spend their days watching Buy’N’Large ads and consuming Buy’N’Large products.

In the real world, the smartphone era has become the norm for a decade, pushing users’ eyes back into the visors of their devices. Social networks, Internet browsing and everything else people want is at their fingertips in a matter of seconds. Sounds like a great thing, but in the meantime, the fine line between reality and technological fiction It continues to blur. And movies like Wall-E start to predict everything that’s going on.

Image | Pixar

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