So in recent times I have had a lot of thoughts about the Terminator films, and the broader themes of good science fiction. There’s a common misunderstanding about science fiction, people have it in their minds that it’s a franchise intended for people who like technology. It isn’t. Only bad sci fi celebrates technology.
Science fiction began in its true form with the advent of the Manhattan Project. It began with humanity’s many creative types asking a deep and important question, namely “Is technological advancement an intrinsically good thing?” And ever since then, every sci-fi masterpiece, whether book, film, video game or radio drama has been those who stick to the format of responding to the question with a resounding HELL NO!
Science fiction is all about humanity’s conflict with its own twisted imagination. The tagline of science fiction is “Careful what you wish for.” And the allegory of science fiction is that utopia and dystopia are synonyms.
Even Utopian science fiction like Star Trek is rife with dangerous and miserable contradiction to technology, from totalitarian foreigners like the Cardassians, to the autocratic and predatory technology of the borg. All of which draws themes from the well that gave water to science fiction, namely, the cold war.
All science fiction has cold war allegories. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a film about the red scare, and how even though your neighbor might be a perfectly normal looking and friendly human being, you can’t know for sure if they’re not actually listening in on you and telling the Kremlin all about your secret pecan pie recipe.
Terminator is about the late stage cold war, and the uncertain relationship that the US had to the outside world. Skynet represents everything from the Perestroika to Sony DVD players, and how these things would undermine America’s monopoly on global power. The Terminators are rogue electric appliances vying for world domination. The same appliances that once were a steeple of western suburban luxury were today hostile and foreign, and had ominous text written on them such as “Made in China.”
People say that Terminator didn’t predict the future successfully, but thematically speaking, it absolutely did. The Terminator did not serve as an allegory for the end of the world, it served as an allegory for the end of Wall Street. But since that’s not as interesting they made the robots try to exterminate all of humanity instead of making Nokia shares worthless.
In other words, it’s a dramatisation of reality.
The US stock market has been hooked up to federal life support for at least a decade by now. With bailout after bailout and stimulus after stimulus keeping the lights on. All the actual economic assets are slowly disappearing due to outsourcing. No one is manufacturing anything, nothing is being made, most natural resources have been rapaciously exhausted, and all in all, the US economy is getting very long in the tooth.
If you want to see the warnings of Terminator, then don’t look at nuclear weapons, look at the perversion of technology. From desperate economic measures like fracking, all the way to literally anything that Facebook does. As the East thrives under technological advancement, creating new and powerful and sustainable infrastructure, exploring space and deep sea, fighting poverty, and god knows what else, so does the West struggle to maintain an empire that’s beginning to collapse under its own burden.
As more and more Asian countries are kicking out western sweatshop investors, and Latin America is doing the same to the CIA-backed banana republic dictators, the US finds itself desperate for labour and trading partners who aren’t just other wealthy first world countries where people don’t want to send their kids into a coal mine.
(Admittedly, people in the third world don’t really want that either, but they can’t fight back.)
China is moving in on Africa, using the cunning and sneaky tactic known as “actual diplomacy”, and in doing so, starve the 1% of cheap minerals for even cheaper computers sold at extortionate markups.
All in all, Terminator was right, and sci-fi had a point. In 1991, capitalism was winning. But most capitalists didn’t understand how capitalism is capitalism’s worst enemy. It wasn’t the reds, or the body snatchers, or ancient Japanese business management techniques that was a threat to the western hegemony.
It was the west itself. Wasn’t the enemy who destroyed the ecosystem, or outsourced all the jobs, or alienated foreign markets through puppet dictatorships and senseless resource wars. It wasn’t Marxism that put lead into people’s petrol, or budget cuts to schools and libraries.
While the US was panicking over how any day now, the Spetsnaz was going to land on Washington with parachutes, they didn’t realise how there was already a far more dangerous enemy in Washington, namely, the people who work there.
It wasn’t Josef Stalin who was going to kill millions of people, turns out it was fentanyl, and Jim Crow, and asbestos, and heart disease.
Terminator shows how the real end to western civilisation won’t be a foreign threat, but rather its own driving force towards decadence, consumption and short-term gains.
The most destructive act the Soviet Union ever performed towards the US was to dissolve. Without the USSR, there’s no space race. Without the space race, the US had no motivation towards transcendental scientific pursuits.
Suddenly NASA becomes Space Force, suddenly MTV stops playing music and starts broadcasting Storage Wars. Suddenly history documentaries are replaced with UFO conspiracies. Suddenly schools are replaced with charter schools as students are more and more frequently putting down their pencils and picking up their guns.
Driven mad by an insular and vapid culture that forces them to perform inhuman and menial exercises in a heartless system that makes people feel unrewarded and insignificant. People forget how this all started in post offices.
Suddenly the modernist tradition of classical values and the inherent inquiry into civics and democracy is replaced with vapid and PR-driven NGOs and “causes.”
Suddenly politicians went from meeting at the UN to discuss universal declarations of human rights, to meeting in Epstein’s private island to discuss suspiciously overpriced massages.
The Terminator films can be summed up as a suicide letter by a civilisation who first proceeded to invent a new gun, kill their neighbor, and then shoot themselves in the face for good measure.
The US was so preoccupied with the triumph of American values, that they forgot to ask themselves what those values are. And turns out they mostly revolve around the whims of clueless rich people and their endless sense of entitlement.
