Even a famously ‘dystopian’ sci-fi film seems better than our Woke present.

Blade Runner (1982) is one of my all time favourite films. Basically inventing the Cyberpunk genre, it continues to present one of the most aesthetically unique depictions of a futuristic society in cinematic history.

The story and themes of the film are of course fantastic, with it asking profound questions about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human; topics that will become more and more topical as AI continues to develop.

However, the story of Blade Runner is not what I’m going to be talking about, as good as it is. I am instead going to be focusing on the setting.

The original 1982 Blade Runner was set in Los Angeles in a fictional ‘2019’. As that year is now in the past, I want to compare the future imagined in Blade Runner to the one we actually got, because whilst the film is widely seen as a dystopian future, one must ask ourselves: is the alternate Los Angeles of 2019 perhaps better than the Western world we inhabit today?

I was originally going to call this article ‘Is Blade Runner’s 2019 Better Than the One We Got?’, however I think that the Covid lockdowns were so utterly dystopian, and such a stark contrast to a Blade Runner-esque society, that comparing the ‘2019s’ would miss out many crucial points. However, by simply extending the date by a few years we can make a more stark comparison, so I decided on the more broad ‘early 21st century’ question.

Of course, it all depends on your personal values. To the Woke left, the world of Blade Runner would naturally be dystopian. It is hyper-commercialist, expansionist, conformist, anti-egalitarian, no concern for ‘health and safety’, ‘human rights’, or ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) whatsoever, and where the ‘White heteronormative patriarchy’ rules supreme. Ethno-nationalists would also dislike it because it shows a future of mass immigration and ‘White flight’.

But compared to our current world of mandatory DEI seminars, constant promotion of White male guilt, the mutilation of children being celebrated as ‘trans liberation’, the entire society at the mercy of Woke activists who police people’s behaviour and manipulate every establishment institution into doing their bidding, and where nothing can be done without endless litigation and legal appeals on behalf of the ‘rights of minorities’, the spectre of a society with no concern whatsoever for ‘diversity’, ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’, instead emphasizing an aggressively masculine Faustian and frontier spirit, seems refreshing.

In this article I’m going to be exploring the society of Blade Runner, specifically Los Angeles where the film is set. I will refer to the settling of the film as ATL (alternate timeline) Los Angeles, and refer to the present as OTL (original timeline), as the film can now accurately be described as a work of alternate history.

Video: Deckard meets Rachel scene.

Blade Runner’s aesthetics are beautiful. The electronic score by Vangelis gives a sense of otherworldliness and techno-mysticism that make the world presented in the film seem far more futuristic than today, despite far more primitive computer interfaces.

Indeed, this soundscape was very similar to the early Microsoft Windows sounds, so as a member of Gen Z, the film’s score reminds me of the early years of the internet. With it, comes a feeling of lost promise, that the futuristic society we were promised in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the sounds, the flying cars, the space exploration; never came into fruition, replaced with the demoralising ugliness of Wokeism.

Peter Thiel has made the same point; we live in a disappointing future where technological progress has stagnated. Whilst the combined intelligence of society has been spent on developing super-addictive, harmful social media platforms and endless bureaucratic regulations, the majority of science fiction from the 20th century imagined the early 21st century as far more technologically advanced in a meaningful, substantive sense than what we got. Indeed, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’s’ depiction of human space exploration in 2001 is far more advanced than OTL 2024, where there is a struggle even to return to the Moon, let alone build bases.

Blade Runner is imagined as a dystopian future. That was clearly the intention of Ridley Scott, and he does a good job at presenting the dystopian aspects of the society.

However, whilst it makes the film look far better, if we’re doing a political analysis of the kind of society that exists in its world, the film definitely has a ‘night-time and rain bias’. We never see ATL Los Angeles during a bright summer’s day, only when it is at night, raining, sunset, dawn, or very misty. This presents the world in a very dystopian light; which is of course the intention and a good aesthetic choice, but it paints our view of this world Scott has created in a more negative light than is perhaps justified.

As fans of the film will know, in the original theatrical release, the final scene is Deckard and Rachel driving across a forest, very much showing us ‘another side’ of this world. Mandated by the studio, this scene is very out of place in the context of the aesthetics of the rest of the film, hence why it was removed in the directors cut, as Ridley Scott doesn’t consider the theatrical release as true to his vision.

But what if we really are being shown the world of Blade Runner in the most dystopian light? Perhaps we just see the underworld of a city in dark colours, and nature hasn’t been completely destroyed, like we see in the theatrical release?

There are certain clues throughout the film that suggest this wouldn’t fit, for instance, Rachel says ‘of course it is’ when Deckard asks if the owl is artificial, and Zhora says ‘do you think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?’ However, for the sake of my argument, these could be interpreted differently, Rachel could be saying the owl is ‘of course’ artificial because she works for a genetic engineering/technology company, and Zhora’s line about real snakes being expensive could be because snakes really are expensive.

I say ‘Anglo-Saxon’ because even though the film is set in America and is an American film, Ridley Scott himself is British, so no doubt there is a ‘British touch’ to the vision which shouldn’t be discounted. Indeed, Hollywood has always been a cross-Anglo-Saxon enterprise, with British actors and directors always having made their mark, as well as Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders.

Seeing depictions of the present day from science fiction made in previous decades is always fascinating. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see what they got right and what they got wrong. But on the stuff they got wrong, it is also a fascinating insight into WHY they got it wrong. It is a snapshot into the social and political anxieties of that era, and how they compare to their own.

One political concern at this time included mass overpopulation, particularly in Asia. Alarmed by sky-high Chinese birthrates, many Western commentators doubted that the ‘One Child Policy’ was ever going to be be enforced. Books like Paul R. Elrich’s 1968 book ‘The Population Bomb’, and the Club of Rome’s 1972 report ‘The Limits to Growth’ assumed high Asian birthrates were here to stay, coming to the terrible conclusion that population growth would outstrip agricultural productivity and cause mass famine.

A related concern to overpopulation was environmental destruction, though the specific issues of focus were different to today, more focused on pollution by hazardous chemicals than climate change. Acid rain and the destruction of the Ozone layer were examples of environmental challenges in the late-20th century that were later thankfully resolved.

Blade Runner is not the only work of science fiction that explores these themes of overpopulation and environmental destruction; another example is the novel ‘Make Room, Make Room’ (1966) and its loosely based film adaptation ‘Soylent Green’ (1973).

On the economic and political front, there was widespread anxiety in America during the 1980s that, due to its breakneck economic growth and superior work ethic, Japan was going to become an economic superpower and overtake the United States. Agreements like the Plaza Accord and Ronald Reagan’s import restrictions of Japanese cars were a desperate attempt to try and secure American domestic industry against superior Japanese products, though it seemed a foregone conclusion that Japan would become a larger economy than the US with a much smaller population.

The Reagan/Thatcher years were a period where corporate power rose and trade union power declined. Wokeism was not something that was a present threat, as it seemed, particularly from the perspective of the liberal, that the 1960s counterculture had in fact been utterly crushed, and its advocates ‘sold out’. There was an increasing acceptance that capitalism was the only game in town, ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) was the mantra of Thatcher that would become even more pronounced in the following decade after the collapse of the USSR.

Whilst presenting liberal critiques and anxieties in many respects, the film also presents a ‘Moral Majority’ anxiety around the increasing delinquency and hedonism that characterised youth culture. Prostitution and drug use are seen throughout the film. This was the primary issue the religious right had: the very individualistic, pleasure-focused culture that facilitated family breakdown that took off during the 1960s. Such trends have actually very much declined since then, being replaced with a far more sanctimonious, equality-focused, and reality-denying form of cultural leftism.

This is related to the period’s fears about urban decay. New York had not experienced the revival it would go onto have later on in the 1980s, so ATL Los Angeles has similarities with Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976) in presenting the logical conclusion of decaying urban landscapes and ‘White flight’, with the contemporary economic and social trends assumed to continue.

So all in all, the concerns that a liberal Hollywood filmmaker would have, aka Ridley Scott, would have in the 1980s about the future, are radically different to our own as Dissident Rightists in the 2020s.

But it is interesting how none of the social anxieties presented in the film came true; almost their opposites did. The world is not in danger of mass overpopulation, but rather the opposite, mass underpopulation, causing a collapse in the welfare state as the elderly take up an ever greater share of the population. Lack of housing development, not an excess of it destroying the countryside, has reduced people’s quality of life. Gentrification, not ghettoization and urban decay, became the key problem of urban centres. Corporate power did grow, but not in the Fordist, manufacturing-dominated way presented in the film, but instead corporations were captured by ultra-feminised social forces within bureaucracies, management, HR departments, and outside third-parties, to sap vitality from the productive elements of society.

I will discuss the various areas where I believe that the alternate 21st century presented in Blade Runner is better than what these years have ended up being in the West.

In the world of Blade Runner, humans have developed advanced technology to be able to colonise space, enabling the traditional American frontier spirit and quest for expansion to continue, though we never see these space colonies on-screen.

The fact that ATL Los Angeles is majority non-White suggests that it is primarily Whites that have gone on to colonise space. In an era where talk of space colonisation is immediately prefixed by talk of DEI, with NASA making sure, as an absolute first principle, that its next moon landings put the first ‘woman and person of colour’ on the Moon, as well as the development of SpaceX’s Starship being held back by endless ‘environmental impact assessments’ and legal reviews, Blade Runner’s presentation of such an unapologetic quest of colonisation and extension of homesteading into space seems a vastly superior future. It’s clear that the ruling class of the Blade Runner universe has no guilt-ridden urge to engage in utterly hypocritical yet societally toxic ‘virtue signalling’.

It’s incredibly refreshing to see how shameless the ruling class of Blade Runner are about being pro-White, patriarchal, and heteronormative. I can imagine that when faced with the cries from spoiled female student activists that Whites disproportionately benefit, they would calmly say ‘yes…. and so what?’

That is the characteristic of a people that have self-respect and group honour, not the shameful, pathetic disgrace of straight White men taking the knee and ‘checking their privilege’, which a people with any sense of self-worth would see as the ‘lowest of the low’. A self-respecting society would not constantly be trying to prove it is not racist, because it would not care less if it was, and it perhaps would even see it as good. It would not allow manipulative appeals for social justice, from those who will always hate them and always radicalise their demands, hold them back from the pursuit of virtuous self-interest, for themselves, their families, and their ethnic group.

Genetic engineering is freely used in the world of Blade Runner, and all of the replicants are White, suggesting adherence to ‘Eurocentric beauty standards’.

This is a vast improvement our timeline, where the advancement of genetic engineering has been repressed by draconian ‘health and safety’ and ethics regulators, created by the emotional cries of parasite activists, who have done so much to stunt the growth of technological progress through endless red tape around ‘ethics’, and conveniently prevent research that might break the hegemony of the Woke worldview. In the world of Blade Runner, Western men freely embrace their Faustian drive, instead of it being miserably repressed by the Longhouse.

You won’t see #MeToo being celebrated in the news media in ATL Los Angeles. The Longhouse does not seem to exist in the world of Blade Runner. Men are in charge of the public sphere, and the world feels very ‘masculine’. Women are forced to adapt to masculine standards of behaviour and expectations; being promiscuous and sexual without any moral policing, and prostitution is rampant. The women on advertising billboards in Blade Runner are all attractive, rather than deliberately made to be fat and ugly to appease the finger wagging and screeching of a lazy, dysgenic, fat, low-IQ black woman in a position of influence due to affirmative action, which self-loathing straight White male elites have always, over the last 60 years, allowed a seat at the decision-making table out of misplaced moral guilt.

ATL Los Angeles has vast, magnificent skyscrapers and high rise buildings. There has been no NIMBY stranglehold on planning development, and the emigration of Whites to off-world colonies has made property very cheap. We can see this with Rick Deckard’s home. He has a spacious apartment which he earns on a single income, even able to retire in middle age before being called back into service whilst still being able to keep his apartment.

YIMBY policies, even when it isn’t public housing and is entirely private sector, are a good thing, as prices will decline as more dwellings are built (though perhaps not as quickly as one would like).

Tokyo, which the ATL Los Angeles is in large part based on, has had an easy and flexible planning system that has stopped the chronic rise in housing costs present in cities of other developed nations. Therefore, despite modern Japan’s many problems, like an ageing population and economic stagnation, housing costs aren’t one of them. To give another example, despite its magnificent skyscrapers and luxury feel, Dubai’s housing is comparatively cheap due to its liberalised planning laws. Whilst Singapore-style state construction of housing is probably the best way to maintain affordable housing, and still is crucial if private developers create a cartel to artificially reduce supply, incentivising private sector development is a good thing in and of itself.

High rise buildings are a good thing for society. You can house people with less land. This shows why the giant skyscrapers of ATL Los Angeles are a good thing. In addition to liberal, standardised planning laws, perhaps the city has been incentivised to build high density housing with a high Land Value Tax (LVT), something Estonia has.

Multiculturalism has been the target of much hate on the right, and justifiably so, as the term in the modern west means anti-White. It should more accurately be described by Eric Kaufmann’s term ‘Asymmetric Multiculturalism’.

However, there are other societies that have made multiculturalism work and large-scale benefit the native population. For instance, Dubai’s population is majority immigrant, with native Emirate citizens consisting of only around 12% of the population. But far from competing for jobs, the Emirates have become a ‘master class’. The immigrants are all non-citizens, with no long-term claim to Dubai being their home, and only there to be used as a source of cheap labour, with Dubai’s valuable currency sent home for remittances.

With the entire West suffering from low birthrates, the economic incentives for immigration makes sense, but only if it benefits the native population. Constant concerns about ‘equality’ prevent this and turn it into ethnic-spoil politics. But a nation like Dubai does not need to worry about birthrates, because it can always rely on the supply of cheap immigrant labour. In fact, lower birthrates may make people better off as there is more wealth-per-person belonging to the native high caste.

The key issues with multiculturalism is that it is incompatible with notions of egalitarianism and democracy. If you make a claim to egalitarianism, non-White groups will constantly cry ‘racism’ for the smallest ‘microaggressions’ and any unequal group outcomes in which Whites perform better. In a democracy they will be able to create ethnic blocs for their interests, like we saw in the Rochdale by-election.

However, a multiculturalism that is meritocratic and authoritarian can work, and indeed, much as it has become a buzzword for the left, there ‘is’ something to be gained from diversity, for instance with food choice. The key issue however is that it can only work if ethnic grievances, not just Whites towards other groups in our self-loathing ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’, but ALL ethnic grievances, including those crying ‘racism’, are repressed. It is important that the ruling elite does not care about racism, only not causing mass revolts, getting the most capable people for jobs and granting them entry into the elite so they don’t revolt instead, and retaining power.

Some famous multicultural societies include the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that operated under a monarchic system of government. This system operated quite well, Jews were not mass murdered like they would be in the age of ‘liberal national republics’, because the aristocratic elite had an interest in not murdering their taxpayers, and therefore kept majoritarian ethnic grievances under control (though not due to a true belief in ‘equity’ like the modern West).

ATL Los Angeles’ immigrant population is composed overwhelmingly of Asians, that tend to be the most law-abiding American citizens, even more than Whites. Asian-Americans, despite their physical distinction from Whites making assimilation more difficult compared to other Whites, have thrived when it comes to contributing to the state and society. There is only a problem when they are recruited by left-wing activists to hurt White interests and stir up ethnic grievances, for which their physical distinction poses a risk, and is why most Asian Americans still vote Democrat. However, in an authoritarian state like a monarchy, that is not an issue.

ATL Los Angeles has a more Chinese and South East Asian feel in its underbelly than its elite circles, that seem to be composed mostly of Whites (probably disproportionately Jews) and joined by some Japanese. Naturally gifted individuals, disproportionately from high IQ ethnic groups, are able to utilise their talents to further human progress without barrier, whereas lower IQ groups are on average lower in status, though no doubt some individuals rise to the top ranks, and they accept this, because they don’t have a choice if they want to stay. This is a meritocratic society, what Academic Agent would call the ‘Rufo Reich’, except I see it as an unironically good thing, something I will discuss in a later article.

In Blade Runner, Japan has fulfilled its promise of superpower status, something that was believed to be around the corner in the 1980s, until the ‘Lost Decades’ and plummeting fertility rates brought that to a halt.

In the world of Blade Runner, it is clear that Japan has outpaced America as the cultural hegemon. The clothes Rachel wears are an interesting mixture between mid-20th century Western female dress and tradit