What “Don’t Look Up” Really Is About
It’s neither climate change nor the Covid pandemic
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As most of us may have inferred, “Don’t Look Up” is a grim, satirical reflection of our ever-engaged society.
It presents us with a hyperbolically distracted population that couldn’t care less about an extinction-level event, except for when their favourite social media influencers talk about it.
At the same time, it takes a couple of jabs at the growing communities of science deniers, in a sort of prophetic way for the Covid pandemic. As a fun fact, the movie was written with climate change in mind, in 2019, and the pandemic was simply an overlapping coincidence. A fitting one, nonetheless.
However, in spite of the broader Internet arguing that the movie is either about climate change, the metaphorical comet hurtling towards Earth, or the Covid pandemic, I would argue that it is neither.
What I will discuss in this article is the underlying issue that jumpstarts the events of the movie, but also the catastrophic state of denial we find ourselves in today.
Personally, I think Don’t Look Up is about the decentralized dissemination of information. In other words, why today’s information market was bound to reach the apogees of stupidity we see today.
Technology and knowledge
Before the information revolution, there weren’t many places from which you could obtain information. You could read books, established media outlets, or listen to word-of-mouth information, but that was pretty much it.
As such, there were only a handful of institutions, some more credible than others, pushing biased narratives onto the public. Thus, one could only sigh in relief at the brink of the information revolution, when decentralization and the Internet vowed to eradicate these biased narratives for good.
However, the idealist outlook would not last for long. Sooner rather than later, information was everywhere on the web and on social media. Overnight, everyone could become a viral influencer with tens of…
