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I hate it when I get 10 million thumbs down
"Majority Rule," while obvious and unsubtle, feels like a modern-day take on a Twilight Zone episode crossed with Star Trek: TOS. It takes the frequently employed "alternate Earth" approach of those series and gives us an alien society that’s essentially ourselves plus an exaggerated twist — and then mines that for an hour of whimsical social satire/commentary that our heroes find themselves mired in. This is consistently entertaining, albeit not particularly challenging. It alternates scenes of wry observation with others of grand absurdity. In both cases, I got the sense that’s what they were mostly going for.
The story presents us with a "pure democracy" in the form of an alien society that conducts all its legal proceedings (in particular, punitive criminal measures) through social media votes — up or down. Everyone is required to wear a badge with an up and down arrow (you can press someone’s badge with an up or down vote if they do something you like or dislike), and you can vote online to pile on for someone’s mild transgression that somehow ended up in the public eye. If you get more than 10 million down votes during the "judging window" (how the timing of the opening and closing of this window works is not really clear, but who cares), you are sentenced to a "correction" measure to fix your bad behavior — essentially a lobotomy that turns you into a docile mental simpleton.
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