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Related: About this forumStaggering DOD Video: Dystopian Megacities Will Be Battlefields Of The Future By 2030
The year is 2030. Forget about the flying cars, robot maids, and moving sidewalks we were promised. Theyre not happening. But that doesnt mean the future is a total unknown. According to a startling Pentagon video obtained by The Intercept, the future of global cities will be an amalgam of the settings of Escape from New York and Robocop with dashes of the Warriors and Divergent thrown in. It will be a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers.
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As the film unfolds, were bombarded with an apocalyptic list of ills endemic to this new urban environment: criminal networks, substandard infrastructure, religious and ethnic tensions, impoverishment, slums, open landfills, over-burdened sewers, and a growing mass of unemployed. The list, as long as it is grim, accompanies photos of garbage-choked streets, masked rock throwers, and riot cops battling protesters in the developing world. Growth will magnify the increasing separation between rich and poor, the narrator warns as the scene shifts to New York City. Looking down from a high vantage point on Third Avenue, were left to ponder if the Army will one day find itself defending the lunchtime crowd dining on $57 NY Cut Sirloin steaks at (the plainly visible) Smith and Wollensky.
Lacking opening and closing credits, the provenance of Megacities was initially unclear, with SOCOM claiming the video was produced by JSOU, before indicating it was actually created by the Army. It was made for an internal military audience to illuminate the challenges of operating in megacity environments, Army spokesperson William Layer told The Intercept in an email. The video was privately produced pro-bono in spring of 2014 based on Megacities and the United States Army. The producer of the film wishes to remain anonymous.
According to the video, tomorrows vast urban jungles will be replete with subterranean labyrinths governed by their own social code and rule of law. Theyll also enable a proliferation of digital domains that facilitate sophisticated illicit economies and decentralized syndicates of crime to give adversaries global reach at an unprecedented level. If the photo montage in the video is to be believed, hackers will use outdoor electrical outlets to do grave digital damage, such as donning Guy Fawkes masks and filming segments of Anonymous News. This, were told, will somehow add to the complexities of human targeting as a proportionally smaller number of adversaries intermingle with the larger and increasing number of citizens.
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https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/pentagon-video-warns-of-unavoidable-dystopian-future-for-worlds-biggest-cities/
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Staggering DOD Video: Dystopian Megacities Will Be Battlefields Of The Future By 2030 (Original Post)
hatrack
Nov 2016
OP
kristopher
(29,798 posts)1. Talk about a f*%&ed up and lying headline