#there's a lot about PR worldbuilding that baffles me like wouldn't trade routes just go AROUND the Pacific? would the world change THAT MUCH

[avelera]

Yooo, just had a really interesting discussion about technology in the Pacific Rim world and I work in tech so I have a lot of OPINIONS about how and why technology looks like THAT in Pacific Rim, ie, no cell phones in 2025, no social media as far as anyone can tell and, oh yeah, JAEGERS:

1) Trespasser made landfall in San Francisco in 2012, by all accounts the longest and most devastating Kaiju attack because it was so unexpected. It rampaged for days. My assumption is that this rampage would have taken out the headquarters of all the big name tech companies: Apple, Facebook, Twitter, basically all of Silicon Valley (and a later attack on Seattle would take out the HQ of Microsoft, if they hadn’t already moved by then). Basically, consumer technology as we know it gets stopped in its tracks and these companies never recover from the loss of the majority of their employees and leadership. 

2) You also go, oh yeah, the entire country shifting to a WWII-esque wartime mentality. Combine that with the fact that the only tech companies left (in the US) are on the east coast, that’s aaaall military-industrial complex and some health technology. Raytheon, Lockheed, Northup, etc are now the name of the game in technology, and those guys make weapons, so we see a huge pivot away from any kind of technology being made for civilian entertainment. 

3) Raise your hand if you know where computer chips are manufactured? That’s right, 99% in Asia! Mostly Malaysia, in fact. The U.S. doesn’t have a single factory creating computer chips. With travel across the Pacific in chaos as a result of a Kaiju invasion, the US’s new war effort would lose consumer silicon chips real quick which is where you get that mechanical/analogue renaissance that we see in the design of Jaegers. Digital is just no longer an option, which actually might explain why Hermann has so many old computers lying around his lab: new ones aren’t being made anymore, and/or are extremely expensive ones like his holo-projector thing which are only meant for use by Shatterdomes.

It’s a lot of reaching and very Watsonian. I mean, the Doylist explanation is “GDT wanted it to look cool and hearken back to WWII technology, also most filmmakers his age hate cell phones because they disrupt the kinds of stories they know how to tell too much”. But this is my headcanon for why tech is so different in the fictional 2025 of Pacific Rim.