At 2:53 PM -0700 on 10/24/00, Tim May wrote:
Interesting that Bob Hettinga is so offended by the ideology/outlook of "The Matrix."
I'm offended, if you can call it taking offense at all, by "cartoon physics", and innumeracy in general, in the movies and television. Just because we can show it on the screen and it looks real, doesn't mean that it'll ever be physically possible, and I don't mean that in the 19th century patent-examiner sense, I mean it in the "ain't physically possible" sense. Sound in space is a good example. Or, frankly, "morphing", "shapeshifting", or whatever. Sure, we might all turn into nanotech grey goo sooner or later, but, frankly, that stuff more likely in the realm of faster-than-light travel, which is another thing I have trouble with. However, life is too short to grumble about *everything*. :-). Moreover, all of these Hollywood Computer Generated Image applications were designed to model *physics* to begin with, and it's just plain ignorance on Hollywood's part, or at least on their audience's part, that keeps them from being used the right way in the first place. Blame it on public schools, or at least 30 years of socialist control of same.
I thought it was mostly consistent with our main outlooks, albeit set in a world unlike our own.
I think it's a lot less consistent with the cypherpunk viewpoint than most people here think. Morpheus et.al., are not libertarian anarchists, boys and girls. They're proto-statists. When the sequel comes out, if ever, and they show where the rest of the humans are, you'll see that, I bet. Unless they read cypherpunks, of course. :-).
Some film ideologies _do_ offend me. The world of "Star Trek" is a good example: the Federation, Starfleet, Prime Directive, aliens speaking English, too many aliens by Fermi's Principle, affirmative action quotas for races and species, and goody-two-shoes namby-pamby simp-wimps.
Amen. Hierarchical, frankly communist, nonsense. In a hairshirt, for that matter. At least Banks is a communist with a sense of humor. Roddenberry's Earth: The Final Conflict is certainly in the same vein, and, so, too, is Andromeda, from the looks of it. I still watch the damn stuff though, even if they take a chainsaw, or at least a lemon meringue pie, to Starship Troopers.
By the way, I didn't take seriously the view that _we_ are living in a Matrix world.
Neither do I. With the exception that most people out there *are* statists, and that the Matrix makes a marvellous allegory for the nation-state, at least in terms of its pervasiveness. Frankly, having learned about the impact of cryptography on public internetworks, it's hard to just "jack back in", even if some of us can probably afford the odd Armani jacket themselves now, as a result what they've learned here... :-).
it seemed to me some fraction of Bob Hettinga's hate-rant had something to do with the supposed conceit that _our_ world is the "Matrix" world.
Nope. Didn't intend that, sorry for creating that misapprehension.
Anyway, no accounting for tastes, as I said.
No argument there... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'