The (not so) futuristic technology of “Lazarus”

I’m currently watching an anime that the streaming service Max kind of threw in my face, Lazarus. The animation is stunning, and the soundtrack is awesome. It really reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, and not by coincidence: both series, separated by nearly 30 years, are directed by Shinichirō Watanabe.

The story of Lazarus takes place in 2052. There are several curious nitpicks, such as the nationality of the protagonist, our Brazilian Axel Gilberto. (A risky bet by the writers, suggesting that by ~2030 “Axel” will took over Enzo and Gael as popular foreigner boy names for newborns in Brazil.)

Right at the beginning of the fifth episode, “Pretty Vacant,” two technological details caught my attention.

The first was that Delta Medical, the company responsible for manufacturing the drug that drives the story, published the test results of the medication encoded in audio files on SoundCloud. Did you remember that SoundCloud still exists? I could bet that by 2052, SoundCloud will just be a footnote in some Wikipedia entry.

(By the way, someone noticed that in February 2024, SoundCloud changed its terms of use to give itself the right to use user content to train AIs. The future is now, and it’s dystopian.)

The other detail, which is kinda bad news, is that we will still be using phones, and the ones in the future will also have glass screens prone to breaking. Early in the fifth episode, the CEO of Delta Medical, Dr. Ahmed Rahman, throws his phone against the wall and *crack*, another shattered screen.

A murky future for Corning and a bright one for the case and screen protector industry — which products, apparently, Dr. Rahman wasn’t using. (My pet conspiracy theory involves manufacturers of phone cases and screen protectors, but that’s another story.)