Last month, at long last, we enjoyed Back to the Future Day — the day to which Marty McFly travels in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II. It’s a kind of death sentence for our era: we’re all living in the future now; the time in which things might have changed has passed, and all the possibilities that once populated the void in front of us have faded away into a 2015 that’s drearily, crushingly actual. And this time, there’s no getting back.

This might be why so many people complain that our future doesn’t look futuristic enough. Where are the flying cars? Where are the flying skateboards? Where are the household fusion generators?

But there are also a few who comment on the supposed prescience of the film: it shows us a dystopian 2015 in which an outward futuristic glossiness conceals widespread social decay; where a callously efficient justice system allows someone to be arrested, tried, and sentenced in a single day; and where the young have all turned into snarling cybergoth nihilists or drooling dupes transfixed by a pervasive computerized spectacle. And, well, here we are.