If you haven't seen this movie, you might want to stop reading as this will contain spoilers. Suffice to say that if you want to see an extreme example of dystopia created by the monetary system, you should watch it. In the film, we see extreme examples of what commercialism could turn into. TV screens, clothes, and even courtrooms are plastered with advertisements. The population is dumbed down to the extreme with puerile products and services. And all of society revolves around advertising and making money. We see a satirical take on the corporations' incentive to destroy anything that stands in their path. Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator replaces water in our pipelines, ruining the world's crops. This could be paralleled with the destruction of a lot of the public transport infrastructure in the US by the large automobile companies, and other infrastructure takeovers such as the television and electricity networks. In this dystopian future, if you don't have any money, you are put into prison. We're not far off that already. Try telling the tax office that you didn't earn anything this year. They will want to know how you've been able to live without money. Self sufficiency does not exist in their eyes.We must be hiding something. And of course, if we don't pay tax, we are not on their system. We must all be subject to the government databases in some way. The film also looks at the implementation of barcoding everyone. If you have no barcode tattooed onto your forearm, you are deemed "unscannable", and arrested. Then, this barcode is needed for pretty much everything. It stores a record of your monetary worth so you are unable to spend money without it. You will find it impossible to use public facilities, as they all require this barcode for participation. This allows all your activities to be recorded. We see that this barcode can be spotted by various scanners around the city, completely obliterating your privacy. I'm sure in reality, RFID would be used instead of barcodes, removing the need for scanners and allowing your location to be tracked no matter how hard you tried to hide your arm. The film also explores what happens when automation goes wrong, and demonstrates the danger of relying too much on it. We should take notice of this speculation, because while under the influence of the monetary system, all motives and incentives are corrupted, stopping any system working how it should. Automation in the monetary system is to save money. In a Resource Based Economy, it would be to save labour. We must think about the implications of this carefully, and ensure it doesn't fall into the same problems as it does in this film. While promoted as a comedy, the dystopian future set out in Idiocracy is too frighteningly real to ignore. Crossposted from http://resourcebasedliving.blogspot.com/2009/05/idiocracy-future-of-monetary-system.html