Yeah, Idiocracy isn't wrong on the facts about our current day scenario. The issue is where it takes that: poor, lower educated people will inevitably have poor, lowered educated children who will in fact get less and less educated as time goes on, and they will take over, leading to... idiocracy.

There's a whole conversation to have about the assumptions in that. Is the implication it's genetic? The children of lower educated people aren't capable of moving to greater things? Or is it societal, that our education system fails the poor and doesn't give them the tools they need to thrive?

The movie isn't really interested in interrogating any of that and I don't think it needs to. Like I said, I see it as a fun movie that isn't that deep. But there's a common thread of opinion on the movie that holds it up as a biting satire ("Idiocracy is a documentary!" is essentially a meme at this point) and those folks don't seem to engage with the topic either. A worrying number of people seem to have a takeaway of "poor people shouldn't procreate as much".

Anyway, to bring it back to the actual topic at hand (and why I originally replied): I think something like VAST goes directly against what Idiocracy implies. We're all potential victims to distractions that reduce our capacity for executive function. A more accurate movie might show people of all financial and educational achievement glued to endless social media feeds.

Idiocracy's mechanism isn't as solid as it seems though even if high educated people do tend to have have less kid. The movie basically suggests "smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids, repeat forever." But you'd expect kids of very high or very low IQ parents to land closer to average in general. The "compounding" thing the movie relies on isn't really how it works in life.

And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.

Education is not a proxy for intelligence. There are plenty of smart people who don’t have formal education (including many in this forum).

Yes, higher education rates lead to lower birth rates. The movie still has eugenics vibes, by implying that the “wrong kind of people” are reproducing.

Yeah I don't hate the movie by any means I just think it isn't as deep as people often credit it as being.

…and if you do credit it with incisive societal commentary you kind of have to engage with the weird implications of what it's saying rather than just come away feeling superior about not being one of the dumb underclass.

It would be interesting to remake it, replacing the premise that people are genetically stupid with just the idea that they're habitually stupid from generations of reliance on AI and social media.

There is an even darker, older story with a similar premise. And it also has undertones of today with the billionaires' promise of space colonization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

Sure, my last sentence was a bit of a broad brush. But anything more substantive that focuses on direct sources of rot usually attracts partisans who don't like the messages.