Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today
Science fiction films unpacked to explore the impact of technology on workers and society today.
Episodes
This week*, Duncan and Mark review 2002's Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise along with Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow (a regular on this podcast) and Neal McDonough. This is a film loosely based on Isaac Asimov's short story The Minority Report. Seriously, by loosely we mean that the film's treatment of problems with techno-authoritarianism in the hands of the police competes for s...
US military imperialism, meet your biggest threat: a full-scale Soviet invasion force on your Latin-American doorstep. This film also features a highly advanced extra-terrestrial lifeform hunting humans for sport. Only one man, and his crack special forces team of muslce-bound misogynists, can put an end to both.
Yesterday's Tomorrow Today is sponsored by the Carmichael Centre within the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Inst...
What happens when your pet dog has a disagreement with your laptop? You can't publish this week's episode last week like you were supposed to!
Despite the delay (we're very sorry, comrades), it's Wall-E time! And what perfect timing given recent events - Wall-E depicts an idiotic future that only someone like Elon Musk could genius us into, and which only solidarity can get us out of. I still can't believe Musk bought Twitter just ...
Episode 7 saw a rejuvenated post-Euro vacation Duncan, and a nascently emerging-from-Melbourne-winter Mark rejoin their forces to tackle 1984's Terminator, James Cameron's (and Arnold Schwarzenegger's) breakout film, which featured light commentary on the narrative of technological determinism and humanity's - at this point almost boring - belief that robots are going to murder us all.
We're joined by our special guest, Dr Jim Stan...
If a tree falls in space, can anyone hear you scream when it falls on you? Trick question - there's no trees in space, not to mention that space is technically flat so you're on the same plane as the tree and who knows which did the falling? With that whole facehugger-and-egg analogy in mind, we're joined in this episode by The Australia Institute's Senior Economist, Matt Grudnoff to talk about Matt's favourite film, Alien, the 197...
In Episode 4, Duncan and Mark are forced into watching and talking about the 1995 film Judge Dredd, starring Sylvester Stallone and sadly, also Rob Schneider, who steals the show and not in a good way. But there's good news too: we're joined by the Centre for Future Work's resident industrial relations law expert, Lily Raynes! Lily walks us through the jurisprudence (law philosophy) issues that arise from a future shaped by the emb...
In our third episode, Duncan and Mark dive into the 1997 sci-fi noir, Gattaca. Duncan skips out on the squirmy bits, but both our podcasters ultimately complete the viewing of this underrated film with a sense that the eugenicist strive to perfection that so often infiltrates the thinking of tech companies is perhaps not a good thing.
Yesterday's Tomorrow Today is sponsored by the Carmichael Centre within the Centre for Future Work...
In Episode 2, Duncan and Mark review Starship Troopers, the 1997 Paul Verhoeven and Ed Nieumeyer film that is part tragedy, part comedy, all comment on the farce that is a future in which Nazis have been normalised and the cast of Melrose Place do humanity's shooting, spaceship driving and brain-bug hunting.
Yesterday's Tomorrow Today is sponsored by the Carmichael Centre within the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute...
In the Pilot episode of Yesterday's Tomorrow Today, Duncan and Mark talk about Robocop, police union strikes, privatisation, gentrification, deindustrialisation and all the other fun things that late-stage capitalism has gifted the world.
Yesterday's Tomorrow Today is produced with the support of the Carmichael Centre within the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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