Talk:Everything Is Online

In the 1960s-1980s, Everything Is Online looked like pure futurism. In the 1990s-2000s, it looked like Hollywood with a case of Did Not Do the Research. In the early 2010s, it looked like maybe a bit of an overreach.

But by the end of this decade? It's going to be People Sit on Chairs territory. Yes, of course everything is online. Cars with no internet connection have been remotely hacked. Refrigerators have bug reports filed with Google. Amazon Dash means that cabinets can be connected to the internet. Even secure, air-gapped systems can be hacked using speakers and ultrasonic frequencies.

For now this is mostly a first-world phenomenon, but not for long. Electronic payment is becoming more popular than cash in a few African countries.

Can we reach the point where a trope is no longer tropable, because it became omnipresent in real life, and thus meaningless in terms of a story?

Now there's "shilling|mockind IoT" part, but yeah. Not everyone in the world eats Apple.

If a trope becomes too omnipresent because of scientific or technological advances, it can become a Discredited Trope.

I concur with SelfCloak on this one.

So what does becoming a Discredited Trope mean, in this context? The closest tropes I can see are:

• Cut Phone Lines
• Poor Man's Porn

The problem is, these can still be invoked in modern works, and still apply occasionally. Giant storm like Katrina, imprisoned in Qurac, etc.

All of the examples here seem to be positive examples of something that's no longer going to be notable. By which I mean no longer tropable. Any examples from new works set in the present would have to be aversions, or off-limits. We're not far enough along that aversions are notable either.

Would we be OK with closing the page to new works, then? The work had to be made in the period 1970-2010 to qualify, or be set in that period. All examples are a subtrope of Did Not Do the Research. Also mention Not So Crazy Anymore.

Again, most people neither live in California, nor are suicidally stupid.

Again, you bring Non Sequiturs into the conversation, TBeholder.

Perfect.

I think Discredited Trope is the right place for this, at least when considering the progression outlined in Dead Horse Trope (and really, we ought to have that little snippet in all the tropes it references). It does, almost offhandedly, include tropes affected by Time Marches On (and maybe we ought to make that inclusion a bit more prominent, too).