This 12-Year-Old Sci-Fi Film Eerily Predicted Life in 2025. We Can Still Learn a Lot From It Today.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I was 21 when I first watched Spike Jonze's 2013 sci-fi romance Her in theaters in New York City--a then–fresh college graduate teeming with the potent and deluded optimism that came with being a very broke and online millennial hoping to change the world. Her sparked some of my first reflections about whether tech innovation is inherently good or bad for society, and helped validate my early moral quandaries and panic at the time. I was graduating at the first turn of a recovering recession (mainly due to big tech investments in digital and social media) and securing my first full-time role as an online reporter. Though I was eager and rosy, a quiet, worried voice also began growing inside of me. Me, my job, my realities, were entirely dependent on tech--mainly Facebook content dissemination and programmatic turnkey digital ads--and I was not sure these huge tech investments by our broligarchical founding fathers would lead us anywhere good.