Idiocracy

Was interested in seeing this film after coming across a wave of studies and news stories about technology and school performance: teachers and professors all across the US say that kids’ reading and math skills fall far below expectations, UChicago Law School has explicitly banned laptops and from being used in classes, and the City of New York is planning to institute an AI and technology policy for the upcoming school year soon . This moral panic about technology, GenAI, social media, and the infinite scroll does make me wonder, are all of those actually causing people to become less smart?

I don’t really know what the answer to that question is, but I know for certain that anytime I hear anyone say “X causes Y” I have a knee jerk negative reaction. Causality is extremely hard to prove for many reasons, but the most persuasive and relevant reason to me is because you have to show that no other potential omitted variables are influencing the effect. So, in order to say “social media causes people to become less smart”, it requires holding constant that nothing else is potentially influencing people to become less smart, which is absurd and ludicrous, because an infinite number of potential factors could be influencing people to become less smart that are completely unrelated to social media or technology use. But also, I have trouble with the idea of what it means to be “smart” in the first place. It’s a word with a definition that changes and shifts shape over time, such that what might be considered a “smart person” in the past is very different from what is considered a “smart person” in the present. So the question “social media causes people to be less smart” is a bit internally incoherent, precisely because it rests on a line of causal reasoning that is very difficult to prove and attempts to define the loaded term of art “smart”.

I think this film is logically dubious because it takes for granted that both of those are true — that (1) it is possible to cleanly isolate what causes people to be less smart, and (2) that there is a coherent, unarbitrary, simple binary division between “smart” and “not smart”.

The first flaw takes on a particularly disgusting character in the film because it draws on what my friends on this website have also noted—it rests on a eugenicist understanding of intellect. The film believes that if your parents are less smart, then you are going to be less smart, because intellect is a hereditary and genetic trait. The premise is straight up Nazi shit, first of all, but second of all, the argument is plain silly because it assumes that it is possible to cleanly isolate that genetic makeup causes smartness. Noting what I said above, this “X causes Y” logic is very suspicious because it has to hold constant that nothing else — say, how much money your parents make or what school you go to — influences your intellect. Which is completely ludicrous. If it is true, that there is a potential confounding factor involved, then it makes zero sense to buy the argument that genetic makeup causes smartness. Yet the film believes that there is a simple, clean, neat, and “intuitive” explanation for intellect that benefits from science’s very seductive veil of objectivity, a veil that’s been used to justify perspectives like social Darwinism, natural selection, and “survival of the fittest” in human societies for decades.

The second flaw — that it is possible to even derive an understanding of what it means to be “smart”— I think draws from an understanding of intelligence built upon the legacies of colonial race science that has privileged a particular notion of “smartness” defined as being “civilized”, “rational”, and “reasonable”, as opposed to being “barbaric”, “backwards”, “effeminate”, and “docile”. Notice that in the film, Private Joe Bauer takes on that particular notion of intelligence, whereas everyone else occupies its binary opposite. By resting on a simplified, binary, privileged understanding of intellect, the film attempts to naturalize human behavior into one of two ways when the world is just infinitely more complicated than either of those two options. To take it even further, one could take a note out of Derrida’s book and mechanically deconstruct the binary between “civilized” and “savage” where the “civilized” is the privileged term and the “savage” is the subordinated term, but I digress.
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I think in the midst of so much moral hysteria and confusion about technology and education these days, it might be very easy to turn to a movie like this in order to find an answer to our anxieties about what the future holds. To be clear, I think j there are certainly aspects of the film that I am afraid of happening — the way one corporation has a monopoly on the fluid that people drink, how this one employer has monopsony labor market power over 50% of the labor force, how everything is commercially tagged and labeled and optimized. It is a future I feel like characterizes a lot of what feels a bit odd about the present. But at the same time, the film believes in a future that relies on premises about the present that are all too simple to characterize the way the world works in the present. It’s the same tactic that many fascist regimes have cashed in on — assume that everyone is living in some simple shared context (perhaps where it is possible to cleanly derive causal relationships and the world is organized along simple either/or binary dichotomies), and then say that in order to preserve or protect the privileged and exceptional, it requires debilitating the surplus and the deficient. Insofar as that’s true, I think it’s becoming more and more important to develop a sensitivity about understanding what exactly is the future that is being imagined in these films, what that future consists of, why that future is either idealized or imbued with disgust. 

To reiterate it all one more time: the film inverts an idea of Hegel’s, that is, the idea that world history and the spirit will eventually arrive at freedom through a dialectical movement into the future— we see, rather, a world where world history and spirit arrives at something that is perhaps much different from Hegel’s freedom, and then tells us what we can do to prevent that world from occurring in the present, and it performs that inversion in order to provoke an anxiety in the audience. That’s an awfully attractive thing to perform on an audience, to frame race science or ableism “humor”, and I think it underscores the importance of developing an awareness, to step back and really understand how film and media like this seek to give us an answer to our questions, and what sort of premises or contexts and methods of persuasion that answer attempts to leverage and build off of.