Today is what as known in the United States as “Cyber Monday”. It’s the Monday after the day known as “Black Friday”, so named because multiple low-paid retail store employees get trampled to death by rioters shoppers looking for special deals.

Stores, seeing that their terrified employees are being killed, have in the past few years decided to name especially good deals “door busters”, to encourage shoppers to kick in their doors, kill their employees, and then calmly pay for these items. This is an appalling practice and I encourage you to boycott any store advertising “door busters” until they realize that it’s super offensive. It’d be like Facebook branding a sale on ads as “democracy busters”. It’s true, but not something they should be proud of.

On “Cyber Monday”, however, no one is trampled to death. Instead, all shopping is done via the internet. It is called “Cyber Monday” because old people think buying things on the internet is a novelty worthy of a cute name. Millennials just call this “shopping”. Old people also use the word “cyber” to mean things besides having internet sex with a furry. (Note: If you are an old person about to type “What is a furry, please?” into AltaVista, please don’t do it.)

Regardless, this has me thinking about the future on the 1960s and ’70s, when we were promised a gleaming future filled with unimaginable conveniences and shiny robots. One band that lives in this future is Daft Punk.

The group rose to prominence in 2005 after performing at James Murphy’s house and were the perfect choice to do the soundtrack for the sequel to a 1980’s computer movie.

Their song, “Robot Rock” gives us a shocking glympse into our “cyber” future:

First off, let’s get this out of the way. This song is terrible. Don’t people like Daft Punk? Is this what they normally sound like? Kids these days just don’t understand music. In my day…(Editor’s note: 5,000 word rant elided.)

The video opens with some groovy computer graphics.

Then we see some robot men rocking out.

I apologize that these screen shots look terrible but the reason is that video looks terrible. And I’m pretty sure this isn’t a “bad bootleg video taping from MTV” problem, but more of a “this video looks deliberately awful” problem.

Take this for example:

Most of the video looks like this. A bunch of lights flashing so you can’t actually see anything. Is this the future we were promised?

The robot drummer seems to think so.

One thing I love is the this song consists mostly of a single chord so it’s super funny that the guitar player is using an enormous double-necked guitar. He also keeps making these complicated, unnecessary hand movements:

I want to emphasize that no sound is coming out of the guitar while he is doing this.

Then we get some vocoder vocals, “Robot Rock”.

Indeed.

I like this shot of the drummer from above.

The band plays us out.

This is definitely a vision of the future from a time when “the year 2000” referred to the future rather than a pre-9 / 11 time disturbing far back in the past.

The only conclusion I can make from this is that we shouldn’t buy things online anymore. We should steal them.

-PTD