Dig a little deeper into the LOTR backstory. It was not so much a conflict between men but between supernatural forces, angels. It is a biblical metaphor, a story of higher powers settling bets by sending agents to earth to promote various agendas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(Middle-earth)

>When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.

No, the late 70s-80s gave us Terminator, Alien, The Day After, War Games, RoboCop, Cyberpunk, and on and on. There was definitely a palpable distrust and fear of technology even back then. Under the shadow of the bomb, you had people coming to terms with more and more of their world being run by big mainframes in far-away office buildings, whose arcane workings you could maybe get a glimpse of through text on a abyssal screen. I actually wrote a short essay exploring this and the notion that people haven't actually become any more comfortable with technology as it really is, only the increasingly friendly interfaces we interact with. I'd post it, but a few months after I wrote it, I realized that the file had become corrupt and that the first weekly back up of it had come a couple days after when that corruption was likely to have happened.

There are always counter examples but what sticks most? Terminator 2 in 1992 was way more successful maybe because in 1984 it was the soviets who were supposed to drop the bomb but in 1991 there were no more soviets so it's was more plausible to fear from the machines?

Robocop did question the technology but also the good guy was a half robot.

Blade Runner is a good example about a tech dystopia but the story is ultimately about the machines quest to be humans, not to destroy them.

Well, Terminator 2 was 1991, and obviously filmed before that.

If we're being honest, there's a small confluence in that Soviets were often portrayed as robotic, and anxieties about Communism were often pushed onto various movie monsters: robots, aliens, zombies. I think the common denominator is "Future Shock," fear of radical changes in society (that book was 1970).

I think the reception of the work by the public gives it away, not the work itself.

There are people who do work of all kind all the time but when the public is ready to take it it becomes iconic, that is, it represents the psyche of the popular culture. Sometimes when the public is ripe and there's no current work of art to match the public, you can see old movies, books and music that went mostly unnoticed for years suddenly become popular.

So, it's not like movies/books/music push public opinion but they can become icons of an idea. A materialisation of a thought that people were trying to put into words but they couldn't until they read a book, watch a movie, listen to music.

Sometimes the creators of the art hate it when their work becomes an icon of something they do not support.

I'm not sure where you're going with that, as all of the mentioned works still represent a time before people in general were forced to reckon with a post-Soviet world. Even with it on the horizon, it would be several years before we would fall into the thought and habits of what that "means."

One other thing to note of the pre/post-Soviet dissolution sci-fi media: the contrast of dominance over the enemy vs surviving within a status quo that is unlikely to change. That may be part of why you see protagonists "befriending" AI; it's more a reflection of hope than expectation. Once you get to post-9/11 media, relationships with AI become more complex and nuanced: I, Robot, Ex Machina, Her, Transcendence. (Perhaps a reflection of our decidedly mixed, toward the negative side, experiences in the Middle East; as well as the multiple crises that threatened the "end of society" and the subsequent recoveries, all within a generation.)

> When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.

Really depends who's in power. By the 2000s, film people were obsessed with litigating 9/11, the Iraq war, etc. Avatar comes to mind. Looking at ultra big name top budget stuff, it's going to be a product of its time because that's what's marketable.

M.I.A. has some cuckoo beliefs, but her performance aesthetics and her harping on giant Internet and media companies was wildly ahead of its time. Was that anti-technology?

YouTube is the populist agenda, it is the #1 Internet time sink, did people want technology or did they want free music and TV? How are you supposed to advance an anti-audience agenda?

Rocky 4 is 100% propaganda. But it's not really the Russians have better science. But rocky movies are about the underdog. You can't have 3 time world champ rocky be an underdog unless it's one dude vs a country. AKA rocky 4. That at the constant american beef at the time w the olympics that the Russians were using unholy science like doping and roids in their state run sports programs, while the Americans were all 'real scrapy amateurs'. Then of course the dream team.

I do find it funny you reference movies almost entirely from the 90s in you conclusion, movies over 20 years old.

Wait, Sauron or Suman supported meritocracy? Or opposed racism? How, why, what, wat?

Maybe in the movie, but as far as I know LOTR movies did no changes related to that.

The orcs were deeply meritocratic, born as equals from the mud and distinguishing themselves through tooth-and-claw. The same can also be said of Saruman at a different level.

All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical. Even Frodo and Samwise, who ought to be equals, immediately fall into “gentleman with his valet” patterns: “Please, Mr. Frodo, sir.”

Anyway, I’m not totally convinced, but with just 5 minutes of remembering I’m finding plenty of material, so you could probably find a counter-narrative with study.

LOTR goes into enough detail about Orc society about as much as knowing the tax policy of Aragorn as King of Gondor.

But even then, this analogy falls apart immediately. The uruk-hai were designer soldiers that were the best troops in the army because, you know, they were designed to be the best class of troops.

I do not know of any details in LOTR that goes into the promotion policies of the officers of Sarumans military.

Insofar as there is any hierarchy in among the orcs, it must have come from certain individuals showing themselves to be more capable, brutal, commandeering, or whatever else, than others.

I have not read LOTR and got about 10 pages into the Silmarillion before giving up, but my understanding is that Tolkien designed his world meticulously. If he didn't go into detail on this matter I have to assume that it was for a purpose, possibly either of avoiding unfortunate implications by comparison or of enhancing the dehumanized characterization of the, er, foreign hordes.

Outside of the fandom, LOTR is commonly understood to be problematic in its treatment of "race" and social structure, at least wrt contemporary society and its necessities for peace, order, and dignity. I don't know that this is a controversial take at all.

I do not remember anything that would indicate that orcs selected leaders or anything else based on merit.

Parts that were shown included plenty of violence, treachery, oppression including slavery and other mistreatment (all included also orcs as victims).

With basically no reward for merit.

> All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical.

Yes, but the same is true for evil ones.

And if anything, good guys have less extreme hierarchies. Especially hobbits.

Seems to be a reference to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

If it is a reference to The Last Ringbearer then it is quite weird as depicted world in that book takes some names from LOTR. With nothing else matching between this books.

And in LOTR Sauron was neither promoting meritocracy nor against racism.

While in TLR more industrialised side was not depicted negatively.

So even if it is referring to TLR then it still makes no sense.

Supporting meritocracy and opposing racism are incompatible.

> It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to their spirit and courage.

I don't recall the USSR being portrayed as a more technologically advanced nation in Top Gun, and they absolutely weren't in Rocky (in Rocky IV they were portrayed as more committed to using the power of the state without ethical boundaries in sport)

> When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.

Maybe the Matrix; Fight Club focussed on consumerism and blind capitalism, not technology (and even then, the attack on it was literally a manifestation of mental illness.)

Rocky IV absolutely did have a theme of technology in it, but I would agree that it doesn't align cleanly with a simple "Soviet superiority" narrative. The usage of technology - with a robot wishing Pauli happy birthday, the Vince DeCola synthesizer score(which is excellent) backgrounding every scene, and Ivan Drago portrayed as a Terminator-esque technological superman through contrasting training montages, rather characterized Rocky and his peers as ordinary people trying to keep up and adapt during a time of complex change, with the narrative effect of humbling Rocky so that he can remain an underdog against the odds.

But since I mentioned Terminator, it bears more discussion here too. Terminator plays on the apocalyptic fears of that era with an technological antagonist who is literally from the future, and greatly predates the Matrix in that respect: as "dangers of technology" stories go, it's one of the most influential of our time. But even before Terminator there was a cultural moment in the USA that precipitated this fear. It happened, as a lot of things, between the late 60's and early 70's, through a culmination of events: The civil rights and gay liberation movements, the moon landings, the birth of UNIX and modern telecommunications, the shift away from the post-war economy towards the neoliberal regime, the Vietnam war, and yet more.

One of the reasons why the 70's feel less clearly articulated in outlook is because the reactions to all these events were still forming. The conservative and anti-technological backlash to this era's progressive breakthroughs found a voice through a mix of vigilante narratives like Death Wish and Dirty Harry, and slasher horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then as time went on, in post-apocalyptic fiction as well, like the Turner Diaries(explicitly white supremacist and championing a death-cult outlook).

A common thread in this is that the Soviets are just one more shape of the Other, often never even appearing onscreen, but playing a role in the pantheon of threats to society regardless. And so by the time you get to Rocky IV the narratives are simply blended together: Ivan Drago might as well be fighting on behalf of Skynet, and Apollo Creed's place in the series is often a stand-in for race relations, in this case using his death as a punctuation - it is white America that must fight for survival.

The Matrix, then, is in its own way a development and turning point to these tropes. While Neo does act as a "white savior", the critique of technology is through its efforts embodied in Agent Smith to give up his crusade and push him back into the system - into normative white society.

In general, it's more the exception than the rule for any of these stories to be technology-centric, rather using it as one of several themes.