A popular theme to explore in science fiction media is the apocalypse, or surviving in a world that has been ravaged or otherwise destroyed. While the appeal of this scenario is to imagine one’s own self surviving in such a desolate world or watching someone else do it for them, not many films delve deep into the reasoning of why the world ended to begin with.

Noam Chomsky, in the 284th episode of Jung and Naiv, spoke at length about the state of the world and how humans are driving each other and the planet towards an unfortunate fate — and how the most powerful country in the world’s leaders do nothing to stop it, even going as far as saying that nothing is happening. Chomsky brings up excellent points about how refugees and people in lesser developed countries struggle to survive and how the rest of the world wouldn’t understand or care, and later goes into how the president of the United States is a terrorist along with those that support him. All of these scenarios, left unchecked, could easily lead into something like a nuclear war; even if not, because of the lack of action taken by anyone in a position of power, humans also will be the cause of the planet becoming uninhabitable as well. Things such as the massive consumption of fossil fuel and other nonrenewable resources – they harm the planet and there’s not enough being done to stop it.

All of these lead into apocalyptic scenarios, but more importantly, they lead into apocalyptic scenarios as a cause of human action (or inaction, for the environmental disaster route). In the movie Soylent Green, the setting is a post-apocalyptic world after the effects of overpopulation and pollution have taken hold, and only the richest of people can afford decent housing. There is only one company that controls the food supply of most of the world, which is Soylent Industries, and that gives them all the power even as starving people riot and are shot down. At the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Soylent Green, the newest product from Soylent Industries that claims to be healthy and made of ocean plankton, yet was in incredibly short supply, is actually instead made from human corpses. The ocean is revealed to no longer be able to produce plankton, and as such the only possible source of protein is other humans.

In a scenario like that, the world has been thoroughly ruined by humans, yet is still continued to be controlled by large corporations. It’s similar to what Noam Chomsky said in the interview – in today’s world, the government ignores environmental issues and actively seeks to destroy those who disagree with them, telling its citizens that those who disagree are the enemy… and people agree. It’s a scary thought, because having an “us vs them” mentality leads to more strife and conflict, but not enough people are doing anything to stop it. Maybe it’s due to lack of awareness, but that’s why Chomsky writes books and goes around giving speeches on activism – so that more people will think critically of the world.

And if more people do that, then perhaps we can avoid living in a situation like Soylent Green and won’t have to resort to eating protein harvested from human corpses.

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Fleischer, Richard, director. Soylent Green. 1973.

Tilo Jung. “Noam Chomsky: The Alien perspective on humanity – Jung & Naiv: Episode 284.” YouTube, 23 Oct. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0qdbsE3Jqo.

The movie Videodrome is about a man who becomes entangled in something far larger than himself and begins to see and experience hallucinations — as the film progresses, he becomes unable to discern what’s fake and what’s real, and the viewer is unable to tell as well. The reasoning behind “Videodrome” in the narrative is that it’s a broadcast designed to essentially brainwash viewers and make them extremely susceptible to dangerous suggestions. While Max, the protagonist, falls victim to this and struggles with it for the entire duration of the film up until he is manipulated into committing mass murder and suicide, there are themes in the movie that mirror concerns in real life as well; mainly, the concern of fiction affecting reality.

The article Simulacra and Simulations, written by Jean Baudrillard, delves deep into the idea of “simulations” and how different they are than actually feigning something. The first example written is that of feigning an illness versus simulating it. One who feigns an illness simply pretends he is ill, while one who simulates an illness brings forth actual symptoms of the illness from within – does this mean, then, that simulating an illness means one actually has it? Baudrillard says he neither does nor doesn’t.

Later examples are much of the same. If you were to simulate an event with no intent of actually harming someone or doing collateral damage, other people would not be able to see it in the same way. To them, it’s very real, and the consequences of your actions would be just as real as if the event were actually happening — because for all they know, they really are happening. In cases like these, there is no discernible difference between a “simulation” and the real thing; they’re one in the same, even if props in a situation are fake. People will react just as genuinely, and at some point you may not even be able to call it a simulation anymore.

Also mentioned in the article is how the government or army can use it to their advantage. Making people believe in a simulation can be a form of torture; it can be used to make people believe they’re something they aren’t, believe they’re in a dangerous situation despite it just being a simulation, etc. To them, everything is true, so is it really still just a simulation?

In Videodrome, it’s the same thing. Max struggles with his hallucinations as he becomes unable to tell what’s real and what’s not, and even when he finds out that he is just being manipulated into doing whatever the person behind Videodrome wants him to do, Max still is unable to fight back in any real way – and eventually, he gives in to the simulation. He ends up killing real people and then himself, and by then, it doesn’t even matter that it’s all a simulation: people have died, and that in itself is not a simulation or false reality.

In Videodrome, nonsensical and even dangerous hallucinations begin to combine with reality until it’s impossible for the character and audience to tell what’s real and what isn’t. In Baudrillard’s article, it’s argued that simulations make people believe in them and can induce real effects — while it can’t be classified as real or not real by then, the effects of them are still very much real.

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Baudrillard, J. (n.d.). Simulacra and Simulations. http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

Cronenberg, D. (Director). (2010). Videodrome [Motion picture]. S.l.: Criterion Collection.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychology study into societal roles and how they affect people. More specifically, it involved a group of volunteers being placed in a fictional prison where they would act as prisoners, while another group acted as the guards tasked with keeping said prisoners in line. There were no rules or guidance as to what the guards could do to exert their power. Because of that, it didn’t take long for them to realize that because there were no consequences for their actions, they could do whatever they wanted to the “prisoners.” As a result, those with the “prisoner” role were abused mentally and sexually by the “guards” to the point where it was no longer a lighthearted experiment.

It’s an infamous experiment that was called off only six days in (despite being planned to run for two weeks) due to the horrific abuse and psychological effects it inflicted on everyone involved. On the YouTube channel “HeroicImaginationTV,” there is a video describing the events that had some of those involved in the experiment talking about their experience – none of those who had volunteered to take part in the experiment took it seriously in the beginning. In fact, those with the role of “guard” felt awkward exerting any force over the “prisoners” as they were all aware that none of it was real; when the prisoners started to revolt, however, the guards realized that they were the ones with the power as deemed by society, and so they enacted harsh punishments in retaliation. Those in the video who had participated in the experiment described it as being hard to believe that they were capable of doing such things; no one expected it to get as bad as it did.

When it comes to the film RoboCop, the main character, Alex, is killed in action and is revived as the titular RoboCop. Most people don’t recognize him – the only one who does who isn’t initially aware of his past life is Lewis, Alex’s partner. Lewis catches on fairly quickly to the fact that RoboCop is Alex, though he’s completely different in both appearance and personality. The only part of Alex’s old body that still remains is his face, which is obscured by RoboCop’s helmet for most of the film. RoboCop struggles with his identity as Alex throughout the movie as his primary objective is to follow the orders of the company that created him and question nothing else, but eventually he goes on to seek more information about his past life anyway. Once he confirms that he did indeed use to be Alex, while he is unable to return to being the person he once was, he accepts his identity and continues to live on, satisfied with his findings.

In the episode The Entire History of You from Black Mirror, the main character, Liam, begins as a simple man attending an evaluation meeting. He later shows up at a party his wife is at, and throughout the night realizes that she may have a deeper relationship with another man at the party that Liam doesn’t recognize. The episode follows Liam’s descent into paranoia and frustration at being unable to get a clear or even consistent answer from his wife, and by the end of the episode even attacks the man he suspects his wife cheated on him with and threatens him with a weapon. Liam by the end of the episode has completely changed from how he was in the beginning, and the episode only took the span of a few nights at most.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a real occurrence involving real people who all completely changed in just a few days under severe stress and trauma. While RoboCop and Black Mirror are fictional pieces of media, they also feature characters that undergo drastic changes due to the situations that surrounded them. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that people can change so quickly, but the Stanford Prison Experiment, with all its horrific abuse, happened in just six days. None of the participants thought it would, or even could, get that bad. Though the films mentioned take a more cyberpunk approach to the concept of character development due to technology and sci-fi settings, the way the characters react to their situations, whether they adapt or not, are still very human.

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“Black Mirror.” Welsh, Brian, director. The Entire History of You, Season 1, episode 3.

HeroicImaginationTV. “The Stanford Prison Experiment.” YouTube, 20 Aug. 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZwfNs1pqG0.

Verhoeven, Paul, director. Robocop. Orion, 1987.

A major theme in Cyberpunk is artificial intelligence, or the sentience of a human-created machine. It’s not enough to create a robot and have it move due to code and lines of command, but instead to act on its own free will to solve problems or create its own decisions: that is artificial intelligence.

We see this theme pop up occasionally in many different films: Metropolis, Blade Runner, and RoboCop, to name a few. Metropolis and RoboCop‘s depiction of artificial intelligence is similar: the main robots of each respective film are modeled after a specific character. In Metropolis’ case, it’s Maria; in RoboCop, it’s Alex. However, both of the robotic versions of these characters don’t act like the people they’re based off of; instead, the robot Maria is a villainous character determined to get the underground city to revolt and destroy everything, while RoboCop himself only serves to enact the law before realizing who he is and going on a journey to find out more about himself (and later go against his own creators).

Blade Runner takes a bit of a different approach to artificial intelligence from the other two films, however. In Blade Runner, replicants aren’t robots. While they aren’t robots, they are still bioengineered creations, and they have their own free wills and thoughts. The plot of the film has these replicants being the antagonists – while they’re known for their destructive behavior and general threat to society, they only have a lifespan of four years; the film begins with them realizing the ends of their lives are approaching, and later goes into what they’re doing in order to prevent that from happening.

In the Introduction segment of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, written by Manuel de Landa, the author writes about how in modern times, technology has evolved to the point where we can start thinking seriously about creating things such as pilotless aircraft and unmanned tanks — the purpose, of course, being to seek out enemies and destroy them. While not the humanized androids portrayed in science fiction, the purpose is generally overall the same (obey the commands of the creator, take out the competition/anyone that opposes said creator), though the actual execution is clunky and certainly not yet perfected. Manuel de Landa writes that the ones that exist or have existed currently, such as the PROWLER, has only been deployed for very simple tasks like patrolling a military base via a predefined path. Machines of this caliber cannot possibly be able to tell the difference between an enemy or an ally, and thus cannot be relied on in an actual war/combat scenario.

It’s because of the currently-imperfect nature of this machine that all it can do is simple tasks, but the fact that it exists and had a more dangerous motive in mind during its conception implies that as technology continues to advance, so will development on killer-machines. In Blade Runner, replicants were only banned from Earth after an off-planet mutiny occurred that was led by them – they no longer wished to be controlled by their masters. Once that mutiny occurred, the replicants were discarded and thrown away, thus they wished to seek revenge.

In RoboCop, while the titular character isn’t a war machine designed to kill as many people as possible (although he is capable of it), the film climaxes with RoboCop realizing his true identity and past self, and ends up revolting against his owners, much like the replicants in Blade Runner. While the real-life machine PROWLER is not capable of complex thought, real-life machines in the future may. Sentient robots going rogue and turning on its creators is a concept explored over and over again in science fiction, but if it were to happen in real life, maybe a designated kill switch should be factored into the design.

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Landa, Manuel De. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Swerve Editions, 2003.

Lang, Fritz, director. Metropolis. Ufa, 1926.

Scott, Ridley, director. Blade Runner. 1982.

Verhoeven, Paul, director. Robocop. Orion, 1987.

For a long time, humans have toyed with the idea of eugenics, or genetically modifying humans to enhance physical or mental traits. The idea of modifying genetics to create a “better” human being has been a trope of sci-fi media for a long time as well, with parents being able to pick and choose what traits they’d like their children to have before they’re born, for example.

The movie Gattaca is based around the idea of eugenics. In that film, society has long since embraced eugenics and newborns are created with all the “negative” traits like physical or mental disease eradicated; even if the parents were to wish otherwise, they would be pressured into keeping the baby “perfect.” While genetic discrimination is illegal in that film’s world, society is still split into “valid” and “invalid” people; those born with modified, perfect genes are the former, and those born more naturally without human intervention are the latter. The film follows a man, who was born as an invalid, whose dream is to go to space, a feat reserved for valids. He accomplishes this by altering his body to match that of a valid individual, modifying his own physical features and using blood and urine samples from the valid person to pass genetic tests he couldn’t pass on his own. With this, he transforms himself into a more superior human.

While this feat isn’t yet possible in real life, scientists are always working closely with genetics. In The Corporation, by Mark Achbar, in the segment Advancing the Front, it’s mentioned that the United States Supreme Court ruled it legal for anything alive (short of an actual human being) can be patented. What this means is that companies are now allowed to do research on bacteria, genes, DNA; anything inside of a living being, and legally own it. When a company commercializes genetics, it’s just short of owning an entire animal species by law – and this, of course, includes animal species closely related to humans. If a breakthrough is discovered in the genes of these animals closely related to humans that can also be applied to actual humans, the legality of what can be done may be questionable at best.

In Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, & New Eugenic Consciousness is a chapter titled The Coming of the Age of the Flesh Machine. It describes the flesh machine in comparison to the war machine and the sight machine, both of which are concepts revolving around history (or rather, how violence has evolved throughout history and how we now have the power to destroy all life with ease) and how we view it. The flesh machine is described as lacking in development compared to the other two, with the reasoning being cultural lag, or the lack of connection or purpose compared to the other two machines.

What’s explored in Flesh Machine is the idea of how the flesh machine can develop, namely: eugenics. As mentioned in The Corporation, humans are already researching and inventing new things using bacteria and living organisms already. While they aren’t allowed to patent actual human beings, they can come very close to it. These discoveries and inventions are designed to improve humans, not unlike what’s explored in science fiction media. Gattaca‘s in-universe society revolves around it, but films like RoboCop are similar as well – namely, the reconstruction of an entire deceased human into an android that is not quite alive, but still resembling that of a living being. With the deceased person being a former police officer who was killed on duty, the purpose of RoboCop‘s creation was to rebuild him from the ground up as a better, superior being – not unlike what eugenics research today is striving towards.

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Achbar, Mark and Jennifer Abbott, directors. The Corporation. 2004.

Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, & New Eugenic Consciousness. Autonomedia, 1998.

Niccol, Andrew, director. Gattaca. Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, 1997.

Verhoeven, Paul, director. Robocop. Orion, 1987.

Social media is an interesting concept that has only existed in its current form for a relatively short time. It allows people to write about or take snapshots of moments from their lives and broadcast it online for the entire world to see, and anyone, whether they are friends, family, or complete strangers, is able to see and judge them. While it can be empowering, having strangers comment on those posts and leaving whatever feedback they will can also be damaging. Thus, a term called “Facebook depression” was coined.

The article Exploring Facebook Depression, written by Romeo Vitelli, goes in depth about how people use social media and the damages it can cause. It talks about how people prone to Facebook depression are this way due to multiple factors, such as their (lack of) social life outside of social media, how obsessed they are with reading others’ posts and life updates, the content from other people that they read, etc. It makes sense; people can curate what others see of themselves online, and most people want to make themselves look good. If someone susceptible to jealousy sees a lot of posts by people talking about how good their lives are, that person will become jealous – and possibly even depressed if they feel their own life isn’t going as well as others.

The two Black Mirror episodes The Entire History of You and Nosedive, especially the latter, go into the aspects of social media and the negative influence it can have on people.The Entire History of You specifically goes into how positive social media can be, with the characters in that episode able to record memories and broadcast them to other people. It’s exactly like social media in our world in a way; by broadcasting their own memories to other people, they can show others what their lives are like and the things they’ve experienced. While most people seem to be happy with their ability, there is a character in the episode who no longer is able to do the same, and she talks about her life being better without it. This also ties into Nosedive where the characters in that episode are obsessed with social media and everything about it, but as the main character Lacie finds out, life is much more freeing when one is free from the shackles of judgement from everyone around them.

The Entire History of You is reminiscent of social media in an interesting way. It helps people connect to each other, and people are able to filter individuals in their memories and find every memory they have that includes that person (not unlike “tagging” in actual social media sites). However, it has the negative aspect of becoming obsessed with it, as others can see each others’ memories, and the episode culminates with the main character seeing definite proof that his wife cheated on him. If it weren’t for the technology in that world, he would never have been the wiser – the episode ends with him removing the implant (that lets him record his memories) from his neck, effectively “logging out” of social media.

Nosedive is a more straightforward example: the characters are openly obsessed with social media, taking snapshots of their lives and writing blog posts for other people to read, and they base their worth and status off of their reputation. From what we see of the main character Lacie’s life, how she acts on social media and how she actually acts at home are very different from each other, no matter how much she wishes that her social media self is actually her. All Lacie wants to do is raise her reputation up to a certain amount so that she is able to afford a luxurious apartment, even if it means using other people to do so. When an old friend asks her to be her maid of honor, she quickly agrees; we find out right after from Lacie’s brother that the old “friend” was actually an old “bully,” which Lacie tries to deny. Social media changes all aspects of people when they want to look good, and because Lacie wants to uses Naomi, the old friend/bully, to boost her own status, she’s willing to look past everything and get the rep boost she needs.

Social media works exactly like that. As mentioned in the Facebook Depression article, the most susceptible people are the ones that are overly obsessed with how they look to others on social media, or how much better off other people seem compared to them. The episode Nosedive runs with that concept: the characters are so obsessed with social media that their entire lives revolve around it, though because their privileges are based off their social score, they have no other option. They have no other choice than to be glued to their screens, because if they upset just one person, their reputation can tank and the next day, they won’t even be able to get into work. It’s a trap designed to make people forcibly likable and sociable with each other no matter how they are, and it’s similar to real life in that actual social media just makes it so constricting and fake.

The article suggests that the best way to combat Facebook depression is to limit your time online, at least on social media. One of the factors of Facebook depression is spending too much time reading others’ status updates, so it would make sense that in order to avoid it, one should stop doing so. The ending of The Entire History of You suggests that by unplugging himself from the technology that ruined his life, the main character will be able to live more freely without obsessing over and rewatching his own bad memories over and over. The ending of Nosedive is similar: the main character is sent to prison and her ability to see others’ social scores is removed, and she and her cellmate are able to freely insult each other without worrying about their status any longer. It’s shown as liberating, and the main character is clearly happier that way.

While social media is a powerful tool, it’s also incredibly damaging if used in an obsessive way. People would do better to log off from time to time and enjoy their lives without the scrutiny of strangers online.

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“Exploring Facebook Depression.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201505/exploring-facebook-depression.

“Black Mirror.” Welsh, Brian, director. The Entire History of You, Season 1, episode 3.

“Black Mirror.” Wright, Joe, director. Nosedive, Season 3, episode 1.

Robocop and Minority Report are two films with similar premises when stripped to their barest forms – a police officer working for a privately owned corporation for the greater good eventually is turned on by the company they work for and must prove himself by taking down the owner or president of said privately owned corporation. Both films take place in a not-so-distant future: distant enough to have technology far more advanced than the norm today, yet close enough so that society is still recognizable.

The plot of Minority Report revolves around stopping criminals from committing murder before they do it, which is a cyberpunk trope known as pre-crime. While precogs don’t exist in real life, the article “AI is sending people to jail – and getting it wrong” written by Karen Hao talks about an algorithm designed to predict the likelihood that any one convict will commit a crime or reoffend, with that knowledge being used to either convict the person or decide their sentence. The problem with that algorithm, as stated in the article, is that it bases its predictions off of historical crime data, which creates patterns based off statistical correlations and not causations. This means that if a certain community historically has more crime attached to it, such as low income or minority communities, the algorithm looks to see if a person would be considered as part of that community and judge the likelihood of them breaking the law based off of that.

A similar issue arises in Minority Report when the main character, John Anderton, realizes that pre-crime isn’t a perfect system and that his convicts all have the option to change their minds before committing their crime. This puts him at a realization that he had definitely put away innocent people, which is the same as what this AI algorithm in real life is doing. In the end, it’s not so different. In Robocop, this issue is not so prevalent. There’s no predicting what people will do before they do it – instead, the titular character sees people already in the process of committing the crime and immediately puts a stop to it.

The privatized corporation in Robocop, OCP, aims to create a police state where they have total control over the city. In a way, this is similar to what the corporation in Minority Report strives for as well: the idea of pre-crime was invented by one person, the president of the company, who hid his own murder crime to prove to everyone that his idea was flawless. When the truth started to reveal itself, he aimed to get rid of the character that would be his downfall: Anderton. In Robocop, once Robocop started to become an actual threat to OCP by learning the truth of his origin, the president of OCP started giving out orders to destroy Robocop and make sure that his own secret (that he was working with the criminals of the city) wouldn’t be revealed. The two films are similar in this aspect.

As mentioned in the article AI is sending people to jail, the ultimate goal of the algorithm is to reduce prison numbers and establish a system where convicts can easily be processed through the system. Robocop aims to do the same by having the titular character be the convenient tool and Minority Report with the precogs, though both films seem to end up with more people locked up than before. In real life, with the AI relying on historical statistics more than anything, innocent people get locked up just like in the movies.

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Orejel, Keith. “What Robocop Tells Us about the Neoliberal City, Then and Now.” Tropics of Meta, 24 Mar. 2014, tropicsofmeta.com/2014/03/24/what-robocop-tells-us-about-the-neoliberal-city-then-and-now/.

Spielberg, Steven, director. Minority Report. 2003.

Verhoeven, Paul, director. Robocop. Orion, 1987.

Something that Metropolis, Sleep Dealer, and the second episode of Black Mirror‘s first season (Fifteen Million Merits) all have something in common: the rise of machinery that end up working against the common person, and how they all live in a society that doesn’t value them individually.

This is referenced in Causes of Alienation in this excerpt: “Under capitalism not only does the wage earner lose possession of the product of his labor, but these products can function in a hostile and injurious manner against him… [they] become a source of tyranny against the worker when the worker serves as an appendage of the machine and is forced to adapt the cadence of his life and work to the operation of the machine” (Mandel & Novak, 1979). Metropolis shows this with the workers in the underground city – they work ten hour work days and have little time to do much else except sleep. They’ve become slaves to the machine and are threatened by the thought that terrible things will happen if they don’t do their job (for example, when Georgi is relieved of his duty of taking care of the clock when Freder arrives to do it for him). These workers all are used for their labor and are seen as useful for nothing more – this is a concept known as alienation.

In Sleep Dealer, the concept of alienation is explored with by the titular sleep dealers. It’s explained in the film that the name is derived from the workers who remotely connect to robots across the world to do manual labor – and that they collapse often when working long enough. The film’s protagonist, Memo, begins to lose himself over the course of the movie as he works more and more, doing plenty of overnight shifts to earn money to support his family. By that point, he’d become little more than another cog in the machine.

In Fifteen Million Merits, the protagonist, Bing, is bound by the rules of his society as he does the same routine every day: wake up, eat, exercise, and not much more. The rules of this society (as in why they’re there, what the purpose of their being there is) isn’t explored much in this standalone episode, but even with a small glimpse we’re able to see that the people in this place have little control over what happens. They’re forced to watch advertisements they don’t care to see (which happens in real life too, but for the most part we don’t have to pay just to skip them), the implication that everything they do is watched or surveyed, and the fact that it seems there isn’t much they can really do with their lives there. They’re stuck in the machine. Causes of Alienation has this line: “Work is just a means to attain a goal. And that goal is to get money, some income to be able to buy the consumer goods necessary to satisfy your needs” (Mandel & Novak, 1979). This is true in Fifteen Million Merits as all the people in this society do is exercise to earn money (merits) and spend those credits on small things, and one of the more expensive items is just a pass into a talent show (which winning, from what we’ve seen, doesn’t seem to be much better than living as normal).

All of these films explore similar concepts: workers in a society that don’t care about their personal being in order to create some kind of product – commodity form. Fifteen Million Merits especially explores the concept of “commodity fetishism,” or value of items being their worth instead of what they actually are or what they’re used for. The talent show entry ticket can only be bought by months of hard work and spending as little as possible – otherwise, it can be nearly impossible to achieve on its own. And all that work that can amount to either devastating results or absolutely nothing isn’t worth much at all, but as it’s decided by those at the top of that social pyramid to be next to priceless, everyone strives to reach for it.

In the end, in the societies shown by these films, none of the individual workers matter – instead, it’s only about how useful they are and what they’re able to produce.

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“Black Mirror.” Lyn, Euros, director. Fifteen Million Merits, season 1, episode 2.

Lang, Fritz, director. Metropolis. Ufa, 1926.

Novack, George, and Ernest Mandel. The Marxist Theory of Alienation Three Essays. Pathfinder Press, 1979.

Rivera, Alex, director. Sleep Dealer. Maya Entertainment, 2008.