Lev Manovich - fallacy

Toward the end of Lev Manovich's excerpt from "The Language of New Media," Manovich begins a new section on Interface wherein he positions the film "Blade Runner" in relation to the Macintosh computer. He claims that both articulated visions of the future that are still invoked today, and that because of this, Ridley Scott's directorial contribution to a Macintosh commercial in 1984 is historically significant.

I am interested in when Manovich writes, "[…] while a number of strong aesthetic systems have been articulated in the following decades, both by individual artists [...] and by commercial culture at large [...], none of them was able to challenge the hold of "Blade Runner" on our vision of the future."

It seems to echo what Fisher calls the "fallacy of the lonely fact," which is a fallacy that results from generalizing from a single case.

Manovich assumes "Blade Runner" maintains vast cultural significance and suggests that it is the single inspiration of human visions of dystopic futures in media ("futurism and decay, computer technology and fetishism, retro-styling and urbanism"). If there is some kind of hold on "our vision of the future," then Manovich has attributed likenesses in today's versions of dystopic-futures to "Blade Runner" as evidence that "Blade Runner" is the grand source of those visions. This leaves out all other literary genres and art forms that directly inspired "Blade Runner" and continued to inspire other similar visions. It seems that Manovich generalizes that the prevalence of certain elements in dystopic visions of the future are a direct result of Blade Runner's influence, simply because "Blade Runner" is a popular film.

- Stefan Elnabli