Conversation

Blade Runner (1982) is set in a future Los Angeles in which both of the following are true:

1. Earth is deserted and empty and crumbling because all the best people in the world have run away to the stars and only the dregs are left

2. Earth is also a massively overpopulated and polluted cosmopolitan melting pot of many cultures

If we could grasp the (white upper middle class) worldview which feared both these dystopias simultaneously, we'd probably understand a lot of things about the 1980s.