Humanity may have patched futuristic science fiction's biggest shared plot hole.

Science fiction that takes place in the future is often incredibly diverse in the world it creates. Even things like Star Trek: the Next Generation and Firefly, despite being semi-political shows that take place with a close crew in space, are incredibly different in their world and execution. But there's a thing that pops up in a lot of them that for years have plagued not just me but countless others. In world media. Hear me out.

You're watching the aforementioned Star Trek: TNG and a character goes back to their room to relax and listen to music. It'll be something, usually, between 1920 and 1960 sometimes dipping into the 1800s or earlier.

Or maybe they go to the holodeck to engage in a story, it's something like the Three Musketeers or some sort of old mob story.

The Orville crew often listens to 20th century music. Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (for the real OGs out there) features a plot that deals with a man's obsession with Casablanca. Hell, I can't tell you how many futuristic movies contain a clip or to of Metropolis on a screen somewhere.

In the excellent Midnight Burger podcast most of the galaxy is obsessed with American television from the 1980s. In Ready Player One (and the subsequently more problematic Ready Player Two) everyone was obsessed with old arcade games, movies, and music.

No matter how far in the future something is the music, shows, movies, they all watch are incredibly outdated. Why?

Well, there is an obvious answer that leads to lore problems. Cost. It is way cheaper to use songs and media in the public domain than it is to create new media or use something that they'd have to pay for. Or, as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew sang to the tone of Amazing Grace while watching "A Touch of Satan": This song, is in, public, domain. That's why, we used, it twice.

So from a cost stand point we can understand but this creates a lot of unexplained lore. We never see anyone talk about new celebrities. No one talks about a new show they're watching or a new movie they've recently seen. No one goes to concerts. It's a major unexplained problem.

But I think I solved it. Lets break it down.

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MANIFESTO TIME

(come on grab your friends)

Feel free to insert this into the lore of almost any science fiction that takes place in the future (save the Jetsons which actually had new media pop up all the time because they worked their ass off on that cartoon)

For about one hundred years, physical media was king. We had VHS, Beta, DVD, Blu-rays, etc for movies. For music we had LPs, cassettes, 8-tracks, CD. For video games we had cartridges and discs.

This lasted until early in the 21st century when, suddenly, a huge push towards digital media and exclusive rights started happening. Things being released on physical media became rarer and rarer. Shows like "Voltron: The Legendary Defender" or the sequel to Willow would just entirely disappear from the world one day with no way to enjoy it ever again.

I'll always miss the crew of Voltron: Legendary Defender. Rest in peace.

The need for new media was every growing. Movies were getting TV show spin offs, shows were dropping entire seasons at a time and sometimes two seasons in a year. People were ingesting and demanding more and more entertainment. Video games became less about a single player story and more about an online streaming live-service feature with multiple people in a large open setting. It was expensive.

Then, around two decades into the 21st century came the introduction of AI (artificial intelligence) as a perceived "practical" tool to solve this. Suddenly shows, music, and more could be produced for free without having to pay anyone. The cost of creating something for free, to companies that were all about numbers, were a far better alternative to paying talented members of humanity and over time more and more AI stuff was shoveled out as thousands of creative individuals were laid off and let go.

The AI stuff was terrible and, over time, people started to lose interest in going to movies and playing the games because they lacked a lot of what drew them in. The companies wanted to start hiring again and bringing in people who could create better media. But they never adjust for the results they want and no one wanted to take these jobs that put them in as "independent contractors" that were easily replaceable and infinitely affordable so it became really hard to put out fresh quality content.

Enough time went by and some exec heard some kid say "What's a Diehard?" and realized that a lot of the newer generation has thousands of movies that they haven't seen yet and a lot of these were entering the public domain so companies tripped over themselves finding, aquiring, and remastering the older stuff.

Sony reintroduced the Walkman. LPs made a return. Retro gaming systems suddenly became trendy. Physical media came back.

And during this time the cost and ease to just rerelease quality content became far more lucrative than releasing new stuff and streaming services, like the Oroborus, slowly ate itself away into nothing leaving the new media behind and never to be seen again.

So now it's the future where we travel the galaxies, many times out of range of communication arrays, and unable to take in anything new even if it DID come out, so the crew on the ship brings their physical media with them for entertainment. Old games, music, movies, books, etc.

And this is why we have this issue in shows! The business sector killed it. For real, I didn't make up anything until maybe a paragraph ago.

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So that's my insane quick fix for the biggest plot hole that gets shared by all future sci-fi properties.

For real, I didn't really start making stuff up until about two or three paragraphs ago.

I wish I could tell you that this Sony Walkman Cassette Player (don't worry, WITH AM/FM tuning) wasn't selling for about $250 on Amazing. I really wish I could.

This really feels like the perfect plot point to explain why yet another spaceship captain is reading Moby Dick or watching some Errol Flynn film.

Unfortunately, while most of the things science fiction predicts (like smartphones) can be kinda cool. This one feels like a problem we can absolutely get ahead of but we won't.