Is utopia creepy?
Videos put out by tech companies to outline their view of the future are creepy. At least that's the view of one person:
The productions are intended to present us with visions of technological Edens, but they end up doing the exact opposite: portraying a future world that feels cold, mechanical, and repellent. And the creepiness is only intensified by the similarities between the future they conjure up and the present that we live in.
Here's a Microsoft example that he links to (and he also links to a few more examples that I haven't had time to view):
What do you think? I don't think that I can really agree with the direction of is criticism. What would seem to me to be a more valid critique is that of advertising as a whole - it's rather shallow and focused on how specifically the products the organization is trying to produce fit with that. This seems to fit in that category. He talks of it all existing in a post-sexual world, but is the "here's a scantily-clad woman; therefore buy our product" model of advertising really something to aim for?
(The futuristic ads also seem basically like a movie encoding of use cases, which don't generally make for particularly compelling reading.)