#post scarcity

I just got back from watching Predator: Badlands. First off, I did not particularly care for it. It is Avatar (the one about the blue people) if it was directed by Zach Snyder.

There are some attempts at satirizing and critiquing how the manosphere thinks about "being alpha" and "stoicism"(1), but because the version of "toxic masculinity" is so over the top and there's so much emphasis on survival crafting and Assassin's Creed style action that its unlikely to resonate with anyone who doesn't want to hear the film's gentle push back on aestheticized violence and cult like worship of rugged individualism.

There's some decent if blunt messaging about found family and abusive power/social structures, although its all kind of undercut by the main character choosing to go back to avenge his brother and earn his right to call himself Yautja. The alternative being him realizing that by any other world's standards he's a super soldier with a cool spaceship that seems to be so reliable it can crash, appear to be inoperable, but repair itself off screen and therefore he could go anywhere, be anything he wants as long as he was willing to let go of the creed that shaped all of his decisions.

To be frank, the only thing I really did get out of the film was what I think, emphasis on think, may be a radically different fan theory about who and what the Yautja really are. The two dominant theories I've always seen are that they are a stereotypical tribal warrior people but with futuristic technology - aka the Yautja of the novel universe and Dark Horse comics: this is also the version the film seems to be presenting us - at least on the surface. The second is that the Predators are actually quite normal and civilized on their own world and the members of their society that Humans encounter are sport hunters and thrill seekers getting some adrenaline from hunting other intelligent beings and various other nasty game like the Xenomorphs.

As I said, this film makes it clear that the Yautja of the books are who the Yautja are at home. However, compared to my vague recollections of the couple of 90s era AVP novels I read, the film goes harder on just how devalued life is among the Yautja and how perilous their lives are. My partner also expressed some confusion and annoyance at how Predators in the 1990s and 2000s (in universe) showed a clear willingness to work with each other and even with other species and it not be weird or disgraceful. Yet by whenever Badlands is set, the Yautja are even more extreme in their xenophobia and ritualized violence.

So my theory is a twist on the tribal warrior ethos: rather than the Yautja being analogous to Klingons or Fremen, my theory is that the obsession with hunting, violence, and culling the weak among them is a malady rather than an evolved survival strategy for a hostile world. Yautja Prime is presented as a harsh world but compared to the lushness of the "death world" of Genna, its a seeming wasteland. Thus my headcanon is that the Yautja are in the midst of a slow motion great filter event by their own hand: their biosphere has been savaged and they are very likely dying faster than they breed.

The Yautja reached a technological zenith where they could offload most labor and even most scientific thinking to machines to the point where "soft" endeavors like care work and contemplative work were increasingly devalued. One of my hobby horses is thinking about sci-fi in terms of how different societies answer the question of "what now?" when they start approaching post scarcity. What is the role for people in a highly automated society?

For Star Trek's Federation, the answer is two fold: to be of service to others and to live with intention - for some that means opening a restaurant and for others that means "boldly going" but regardless in the Federation people distinguish themselves from machines by experiencing life directly and altruism. The Romulans and Cardassians built nightmare dystopias where an elite were able to capture the means of post scarcity production and use it as a form of control. The Ferengi and Klingons do much the same, but with more steps: the Ferengi pretending that the market is deciding who is worthy and the Klingons using honor as a mechanism to distribute material comfort and authority.

In my head, for the Yautja it started out similar to the Klingons but where the Klingons found an equilibrium where there were release valves for those who didn't fit the conventional warrior ideal and, more importantly, a need to keep population and resource levels up to prevent annexation or extermination by other species; the Yautja came of age in a time with no rivals to speak of. Alien has always been depicted as a setting where the "angels and cavemen" theory of interstellar civilization holds. That is to say, that given how ancient the universe is, any other intelligent species are likely to have developed millions of years before us and could be completely incomprehensible to us now or they're millions of years behind us. A very different set of assumptions to Star Trek where there are a lot of civilizations that are all very similar in capabilities.

The Yautja found martial prowess as the answer to what it means to be alive when machines can do pretty much anything. This hardened over time to the point where its my contention that the Yautja is a civilization that is consuming itself in atavistic fraternal violence and an embrace of what may just be Eugenics with a patina of ceremony or may literally just be Eugenics.

The set up to the story is that the clan patriarch has ordered the death of our main character for being a runt. His brother dies defending the main character, first horrifically maimed and then executed by their father for protecting "the runt." So right from the start, while we can't really know how many other children the clan patriarch has, we do know that he was willing to kill two adult offspring because something something tradition.

Given the main character repeatedly asserts that Yautja hunt alone and the pretty extreme xenophobia that he only shakes off out of necessity, I think a case can be made for interpreting this film as showing us a dying people who are coasting off of a very robust and idiot proof technological base that keeps them flush with weapons and self repairing starships. Presumably the Yautja also have a lot of ancient and highly automated WMDs that keep Earth's mega corporations from screwing with them or their homeworld is remote enough that Earth just hasn't expanded that far yet but could one day just overrun the Yautja in Synth soldiers and other automated weapons.

To put it in a more flippant way, as I expressed to my partner: what if after "AI takes all the jobs" rather than turning our efforts and resources towards building a utopia, truck nut militants end up taking over?

Does this all very conveniently and suspiciously align with my concerns about what feels like a growing callousness and celebration of cruelty in society that seems like it could accelerate with the collapse of the "knowledge economy" at the hands of AI? (Regardless of whether AI is actually up to the task or not.) Why yes, yes it does. But the I do think that some of these datapoints, such as Dek's ideology being challenged and partially deconstructed, are intentionally leading us to some version of this conclusion, albeit probably not to the same extent I'm taking this. Yautja Prime is probably meant to be a stereotypical hell world like Arrakis, not a post apocalyptic wasteland.

The absence of engineers or factories or scientists need not be any more remarkable than it is with the Klingons. (2)

And yet, the way the presentation of the eponymous monster of this saga has gone from an exploration of what it would be like for humans to be on the wrong side of being hunted by an intelligent being with unfair advantages to this comically violent, comically extreme trope of the tribal warrior makes me want to think there's more to it.

(1) Shout out to Tanner Campbell's podcast "Practical Stoicism" that expends a great deal of effort in showing how nothing in Stoicism requires a person to be a narcissistic jerk and that you are actually engaged in Stoic malpractice if you deny the existence of a baseline level of duty to other human beings by default.

(2) Subsequent research of the Alien wiki uncovered that in the novels/comics the Yautja made use of at least one slave species to build most of their tech for them. Which worked in a pre-Chat GPT world, but now I think is less interesting than an automation fueled decline where the quest to show oneself as alive and vital has collapsed into an atavistic death spiral.

11/16/25 edits to original post: