One of the things Blade Runner (1982) got partially right about the future was the multiculturalism. You'll see bikers go by Shinto pillars, and a club that radiates the vibes of a Middle Eastern bazaar. (This is what we're already used to in Canada.) It's assumed that Los Angeles has become one giant anthill, thanks to the overpopulation of the Earth, with blimps advertising a way to escape off-world.

But the multiculturalism compared with today is just a superficial resemblance. Instead of people migrating to cities because they happen to be culturally energetic hotbeds, you have Western governments, who artificially inflate the numbers as they import "diversity" from hosts of third-world countries -- leaving their own native populace vulnerable to inflation, infrastructure stress, and feelings of modern anomie. Not to mention crime and impending civil war.

Also, giant corporations who tower over people? Blade Runner has pyramid skyscrapers and oppressive industrial pollution as a way of showing just how far corporatism has reached, in the manner of nothing natural being left, not even animals or landscapes. Here, the corporatism is more insidious.. I take daily walks around my neighbourhood, and see Amazon packages left outside the doorstep. I'm in someone's house, and their Alexa chirps up at 4pm on the dot, announcing "It's time to relax now" like a busybody nursery teacher. There is so much ugly modern architecture, looming over you with misshapen glass facades and intentionally misaligned windows, that people would call their office space.

Everyone has grown hopelessly dependent upon taking Pfizer and Moderna's nonsense, whose ideal of preventing transmission has been warped into "Oh, imagine how my heart inflammation, skin lesions and aphasia could have been much worse if it weren't for being jabbed. Now get vaccinated, bitch."

Oh, you wanted to call developed Asia the future? You thought we'd be lagging behind the Japanese in terms of technological development, as the old Cyberpunk stories have foretold? No, we're lagging behind the Chinese in terms of how to subjugate and condition people to being controlled.

In Shanghai, whose adult populace is 80% fully vaccinated.. today, they endure a city-wide lockdown, in pursuit of their zero COVID goal. Nobody is allowed to go out, not for food or exercise. Ambulances ignore a lady on the street, whose loved one's heart has stopped beating. Young kids are separated from their mothers. Pets are unwillingly euthanized. People are pushed to their breaking point there as only now, do they muster the gall to protest for human freedom and dignity. The rest of the world had just foolishly copied the Chinese way of locking people down, starting with Italy.

The essential thing Blade Runner got right: in the modern world, so full of conveniences and unwitting compromises, your individual freedom and dignity is much more fragile than you'd realise.