http://www.rollingstone.com/sections/magazine/text/excerpt.asp?afl=rsn&lngF eatureID=120&lngStyleID What's in your top five from the past year? Being John Malkovich; East Is East; Shall We Dance? I liked Gladiator a lot - I thought that was an excellent movie. I loved The Matrix. I loved the metaphor. Somebody gigged me in the mainstream media for not liking too much violence in the movies but simultaneously liking that movie. Well, you know, it was rated for adults. It was very violent, but it was a terrific movie. And I can hardly wait for the sequel.
At 2:08 AM -0400 10/24/00, Declan McCullagh wrote:
http://www.rollingstone.com/sections/magazine/text/excerpt.asp?afl=rsn&lngF eatureID=120&lngStyleID
What's in your top five from the past year?
Being John Malkovich; East Is East; Shall We Dance? I liked Gladiator a lot - I thought that was an excellent movie. I loved The Matrix. I loved the metaphor. Somebody gigged me in the mainstream media for not liking too much violence in the movies but simultaneously liking that movie. Well, you know, it was rated for adults. It was very violent, but it was a terrific movie. And I can hardly wait for the sequel.
This is not new. Al Gore was enthusiastic about "The Matrix" and then the Columbine shootings happened. He back-pedalled and began explaining away his enthusiasm, with language like the above, about it being suitable for adultsbutnotchildren, etc. This says more about the culture of political correctness in politics than about his actual views. (Sort of comparable to the demands by some on our own list who periodically demand that list members "denounce" acts of terrorism or whatever it is they don't like. "If you don't come out against the bombings of federal buildings, then you are as guilty as the bombers.") --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
-- At 11:39 PM 10/23/2000 -0700, Tim May wrote:
(Sort of comparable to the demands by some on our own list who periodically demand that list members "denounce" acts of terrorism or whatever it is they don't like. "If you don't come out against the bombings of federal buildings, then you are as guilty as the bombers.")
I of course am in favor of bombing federal buildings. To judge by the cheer that goes up in the movie theatre during the big scene in "independence day" when Washington gets nuked, I have some company. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG RbyQGhtcSal+Jl5AK/03A47wMmWrsA0Tz4p/Fcei 41hxVbQh4jsFd1tmHegmmn9xjuEVBhIsXbhiMMQUH
At 7:45 PM -0700 10/24/00, James A.. Donald wrote:
-- At 11:39 PM 10/23/2000 -0700, Tim May wrote:
(Sort of comparable to the demands by some on our own list who periodically demand that list members "denounce" acts of terrorism or whatever it is they don't like. "If you don't come out against the bombings of federal buildings, then you are as guilty as the bombers.")
I of course am in favor of bombing federal buildings. To judge by the cheer that goes up in the movie theatre during the big scene in "independence day" when Washington gets nuked, I have some company.
Yes, this was quite striking. Many people, even journalists, have reported the same observation. There was a visceral reaction to the sight of the White House being destroyed from above. Similarly, crowds went wild as hundreds of cops and feds and SWAT ninjas were mowed down in the attack on the police building in "The Matrix." Some lessons there. (No time to write a piece on this, but perhaps the whole Libertarian Party effort is foundering precisely because it has picked the "safe and boring" route. Murray Rothbard, for example, has his arcane theory about how people may not even take action when someone is attacking them...until the attack has actually resulted in injury. Many exposed to this kind of thinking, and the "inside baseball" of ultra-boring LP conventions, probably lose interest in Libertarian issues. Part of human nature, driven by evolutionary pressures, seems to be an inclination to act decisively.) --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
Perhaps this is one reason why Ralph Nader is reportedly drawing crowds of 5,000 at rallies. He's active: Bashing Gore, attacking corporations, etc. No philosophical twaddle (oh, it might have its place but not in politics) about landing on someone's balcony and trespass righs. -Declan On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 10:44:18PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
(No time to write a piece on this, but perhaps the whole Libertarian Party effort is foundering precisely because it has picked the "safe and boring" route. Murray Rothbard, for example, has his arcane theory about how people may not even take action when someone is attacking them...until the attack has actually resulted in injury. Many exposed to this kind of thinking, and the "inside baseball" of ultra-boring LP conventions, probably lose interest in Libertarian issues. Part of human nature, driven by evolutionary pressures, seems to be an inclination to act decisively.)
Declan McCullagh wrote:
Perhaps this is one reason why Ralph Nader is reportedly drawing crowds of 5,000 at rallies. He's active: Bashing Gore, attacking corporations, etc. No philosophical twaddle (oh, it might have its place but not in politics) about landing on someone's balcony and trespass righs.
5,000? They've all been sellout crowds of 10,000-12,000 or more and they all have to *pay* to get in, $10-20 each. Bush and Gore don't charge anything and nobody comes. -- Harmon Seaver, MLIS Systems Librarian Arrowhead Library System Virginia, MN (218) 741-3840 hseaver@arrowhead.lib.mn.us http://harmon.arrowhead.lib.mn.us
http://www.rollingstone.com/sections/magazine/text/excerpt.asp?afl=rsn&lngFeatureID=120&lngStyleID At 2:08 AM -0400 on 10/24/00, Declan McCullagh wrote that Albert, "Gort" Gore, Jr., (a robot who would destroy the world to save it :-)) told the Rolling Stone:
I loved The Matrix.
Innumeracy is as innumeracy does, I guess. And, unlike another, and equally
fictional, moron with a better clue about how the world works, "Gort's"
liking the Keanu Reeves neo-Platonist adolescent-hacker power fantasy The
Matrix is paradoxically, but utterly, consistent with his currently-closet
Luddist Socialism.
For some reason, the very cartoon physics which made it popular was the
main thing which bugged me most about The Matrix, as it does in a lot of
other movies these days.
Ships and weaponry in movie or television space opera whoosh by, as if
there were really sound in space. To me, at least, that's just the tip of a
towering iceberg of modern scientific and mathematical ignorance. Just like
the premise of the movie itself, it might seem otherwise, but "The Matrix"
is actually a classic example of this kind of mental noise.
I understand the urge to make up something familiar to convey to the
audience a sense of speed, or size, or whatever, and, since most of us have
no direct experience of what things in space "sound" like anyway, movie
directors can get away with it at our expense. It certainly seems harmless
enough.
Nonetheless, this kind of lazy physical shorthand is exactly the wrong urge
in the face of our actual possession of so many actual *facts* about space
itself, or anything else in math and science. Facts that get misrepresented
all the time in the movies and on television, and which perpetuate our own
ignorance about them.
The result, especially in something proporting to be *science* fiction, is
nothing short of propaganda, when you think about it enough. Like Edward
Tufte's famous "Pravada charts" -- found frequently on the front page of
their famous eponym, charts containing no scale and just an arrow graphing
something, usually something immeasurable, up and to the right -- lots of
modern celluloid "science" fiction actually perpetuates the really awful
transfer-priced government educations most of us got the hands of the
modern nation-state.
To me, these misrepresentations of mathematics and science are exactly in
the same intellectual league as the statist, cheerfully communist,
paradises found in Star Trek, or Norman Spinrad, or Iain Banks' "Culture"
novels. All of which I watch and read anyway -- just like I've seen "The
Day the Earth Stood Still", containing Gort, a robot who would destroy the
world to save it -- but all of which are just as ignorant of economics as a
whooshing starship is of physics.
And, of course, it is our very mis-education at the hands of those very
Marx-inspired statists that causes us to demand, or at least accept, that
kind of thing from the people who sell us our entertainment in the first
place. The result works out rather nicely to keep us just as ignorant of
reality as Neo, The Matrix's Gen-Y protagonist, ever was. Of course, like
in the Matrix, where humans *couldn't* handle reality anyway, so they
deserved what they got, some would say we deserve our own modern ignorance,
preferring cartoon physics, and cartoon economics, to the real stuff.
So, even though The Matrix's very premise -- that life as we know it is
actually a Road-Runner cartoon in disguise, that because The Matrix *is*
pseudospace, that the rules of physics *didn't* apply, that it's actually
*okay* to have "physical cartoons" there, of all places -- even though that
premise is, paradoxically, consistent with my trashing of the prevailing
innumeracy and ignorance in movies and television somehow, all of that
still didn't keep the movie from really getting up my nose.
And, what I think finally did it for me wasn't the movie's depiction of the
pseudoreality of the matrix itself, really. It was watching The Matrix's
increasingly stupid Saturday-morning cartoon depiction of what "reality"
*really* was that eventually drove me up the wall and almost out of the
theater. Here we were, looking at the same old "revolutionary" neo-feudal
response to a thoroughly feudal ultimate-surveillance society living
*above* the sewers: Che Guevarra meets William Gibson, all depicted with
deliberately cheezier CGIs to make it more "real" than the Matrix itself.
Sheesh.
So, ultimately, I suspect that the real reason that the libertarians and
crypto-anarchists I like to hang out with on the net rave about The Matrix
so much is because Neo gets to blow away so many cops, and in such
exquisite detail. Quake with better graphics. And, like Quake, what would
normally be considered murder in the "real" world doesn't "matter" so much,
because the cops are not "real", not actual human beings. They're just
software.
Maybe, frankly, that's also why Albert, "Gort", Gore, Jr., a
died-in-the-hairshirt man-the-barracades Mailerian Crypto-Communist
disguised in a blue suit, white shirt, red tie, and, more recently, a
Ronald Reagan pomade -- when he's not disguised as a earth-toned
plaid-shirted pseudo-Gomer, or something else -- liked The Matrix so much.
He's just as much an ideologue as my friends and I are, and he objectifies,
and categorizes :-), his enemies as much as we do.
In his heart of hearts, "Gort" sees himself as Neo: donning his Virtual
Armani and titanium framed granny-shades every day in a never-ending fight
smash the forces of the Evil Capitalist Matrix.
Just wait, Al, until the financial cryptography of bearer transactions
teaches "capitalism", a Marxist name for what normal people should call
"economics", Al, to our very machines themselves.
Profit and loss on the device level. You ain't seen *nothing* yet, Komrade
"Gort". Klaatu Baruda Nicktoe, indeed.
In the meantime, the Matrix's supposedly masterful special effects, its
apparent main attraction, were, for the most part, pedestrian, and could
have been found in any music video -- or even commercial -- of the time.
Proof, to me anyway, that movies, and other filmed/taped media, will
continue to fall behind the technical curve in a world of emerging,
instantaneously-available, and, eventually, real-time programmable,
geodesic media. Sooner or later, things like internet games, and,
eventually, real-time immersive multi-role fantasy -- the *real* Matrix --
will relegate recorded film and video to the same status that painting, or,
better, grand opera now has: nice, even pretty impressive once in a while,
but too expensive, much less predictable and formulaic, to be useful for
anybody's actual entertainment.
Finally, the movie's preachy metaphysics was wheezing so badly -- in a
Kung-Fu-in-mirrorshades, "Listen to the Stones, Grasshopper", sense -- that
it needed Albuterol just to breathe.
That's probably because its entire premise, frankly, was so ancient even
its dust was heat-dead. As old and tired as Plato's cave, and, given that
both the Matrix itself, and the world proporting to be "real", had all the
implicit political repression and hierarchical social-stratification that
Plato himself wanted in his own _Republic_, it's no surprise that Albert
"Gort" Gore, Jr., a product of a private all-boys Epsicopalian education,
cured in marijuana-smoked socialism until college graduation and military
decommision, super-glued to 1980's born-again Baptist evangelicalism,
composted in "environmental" pseudoscience, and grafted onto the largest
cleptocracy this side of the Iron Curtain, liked it so very much.
As a much better philosopher, Bertrand Russell, noted once, communism
("Socialism", "Environmentalism", "Consumerism", whatever) is just really
feudalism, after all.
Enough, already, Al.
Gore: Klaatu Baruda Nicktoe!
Cheers,
RAH
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
At 10:14 AM -0400 on 10/24/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
all depicted with deliberately cheezier CGIs to make it more "real" than the Matrix itself. ^^^^ *less*
Sheesh.
Edit twice, send once. Welcome to the net...
:-).
Cheers,
RAH
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
At 10:37 AM 10/24/00 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
At 10:14 AM -0400 on 10/24/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
all depicted with deliberately cheezier CGIs to make it more "real" than the Matrix itself. ^^^^ *less*
Sheesh.
Edit twice, send once. Welcome to the net...
:-).
But Bob, I thought you usually did "Edit once, send three or four times" :-) This one only went to cypherpunks and dcsb (plus Declan), without also hitting two or three other lists, unlike most of your announcements. (I don't mind - Eudora's pretty good at sorting stuff, and it's easy to skip the excess copies since they've got the same date and Subject, though I do occasionally get bouncegrams for replying when some of the lists allow non-subscriber content and some don't.) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
At 10:38 AM -0700 on 10/24/00, Bill Stewart wrote:
But Bob, I thought you usually did "Edit once, send three or four times" :-)
Right.
I figured it would only really be relevant here, and I tried to restrain
myself, but couldn't, quite. ;-).
As to sending it to lists which have subscriber-post-only, it is, as usual,
a consequence of spam prevention and not malice aforethought. Kinda sucks,
of course, because anonymous posters can't post. Hope they fix that in
future versions of majordomo, but I bet it'll be a while.
Cheers,
RAH
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
At 15:43 10/25/2000 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
As to sending it to lists which have subscriber-post-only, it is, as usual, a consequence of spam prevention and not malice aforethought. Kinda sucks, of course, because anonymous posters can't post. Hope they fix that in future versions of majordomo, but I bet it'll be a while.
The current version of majordomo allows for an authorized-poster file, which I use with one of my lists to let people who aren't on the list contribute. You could use a cron job to combine subscribers with add'l posters to allow some of the more-likely-to-respond cypherpunks to post. -Declan
At 4:17 PM -0400 on 10/25/00, Declan McCullagh wrote:
The current version of majordomo allows for an authorized-poster file,
That's probably the way to do it, with all the anonymous remailers listed
in it, I bet.
Oddly enough, people who are clueful enough to use the current state of
remailer technology aren't clueless enough to spam with them. Or so it
seems from the content of remailer generated traffic I've seen, anyway.
Cheers,
RAH
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 04:17:22PM -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
At 15:43 10/25/2000 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
As to sending it to lists which have subscriber-post-only, it is, as usual, a consequence of spam prevention and not malice aforethought. Kinda sucks, of course, because anonymous posters can't post. Hope they fix that in future versions of majordomo, but I bet it'll be a while.
The current version of majordomo allows for an authorized-poster file, which I use with one of my lists to let people who aren't on the list contribute. You could use a cron job to combine subscribers with add'l posters to allow some of the more-likely-to-respond cypherpunks to post.
Here's the cron-run script that I use to do it. In my case it combines the regular list and the list of subscribers to the digest version and any other address that's been added to the allowed posters list into a new allowed posters list. If you set up majordomo to send rejected emails to the list manager (the default) then any "legit" poster who's post gets bounced by somehow not being on the approved list can be added by the list operator. #!/bin/sh mjhome=/home/majordom if [ $# -ne 3 ]; then echo "usage: updateperms list1 list2 permlist" exit 1 fi cd $mjhome/lists if [ $1 -nt $3 -o $2 -nt $3 ]; then cat $1 $2 $3 | sort | uniq > $3.tmp && mv $3.tmp $3 echo "updated $3" fi -- Eric Murray Consulting Security Architect SecureDesign LLC http://www.securedesignllc.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5
At 10:14 AM -0400 10/24/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
http://www.rollingstone.com/sections/magazine/text/excerpt.asp?afl=rsn&lngFeatureID=120&lngStyleID
At 2:08 AM -0400 on 10/24/00, Declan McCullagh wrote that Albert, "Gort" Gore, Jr., (a robot who would destroy the world to save it :-)) told the Rolling Stone:
I loved The Matrix.
Innumeracy is as innumeracy does, I guess. And, unlike another, and equally fictional, moron with a better clue about how the world works, "Gort's" liking the Keanu Reeves neo-Platonist adolescent-hacker power fantasy The Matrix is paradoxically, but utterly, consistent with his currently-closet Luddist Socialism.
No accounting for taste, of course, but I _loved_ "The Matrix." I'll leave it to others to decide whether I'm innumerate or not, whether I'm a luddite or not, and so on. Overall, it's up there in my Top 5 of SF films, with "2001," "Terminator 2," and "Blade Runner." Not necessarily in that order. Ihre Meilenzahl variiert vielleicht.
For some reason, the very cartoon physics which made it popular was the main thing which bugged me most about The Matrix, as it does in a lot of other movies these days.
Given that the characters were clearly described as being in a VR, and given that they "learned" to use the new rules they could access, the "cartoon physics" was very consistently done. As a physicist, I had no problems with it.
So, ultimately, I suspect that the real reason that the libertarians and crypto-anarchists I like to hang out with on the net rave about The Matrix so much is because Neo gets to blow away so many cops, and in such exquisite detail. Quake with better graphics. And, like Quake, what would normally be considered murder in the "real" world doesn't "matter" so much, because the cops are not "real", not actual human beings. They're just software.
Then count _this_ crypto anarchist as a counterexample to your point.
Maybe, frankly, that's also why Albert, "Gort", Gore, Jr., a died-in-the-hairshirt man-the-barracades Mailerian Crypto-Communist disguised in a blue suit, white shirt, red tie, and, more recently, a Ronald Reagan pomade -- when he's not disguised as a earth-toned plaid-shirted pseudo-Gomer, or something else -- liked The Matrix so much.
M
In the meantime, the Matrix's supposedly masterful special effects, its apparent main attraction, were, for the most part, pedestrian, and could have been found in any music video -- or even commercial -- of the time.
Actually, not so. The so-called "bullet time" effects hit the ads about the same time as "Teh Matrix" only because the tools and methods spread to the ad business faster than the film could be finished and distributed; in many cases, the same folks were taking what they'd learned and applying it to television. In any case, the proof is in the pudding. I certainly thought the effects were far from pedestrian. As to your not liking "The Matrix," fair enough. But using it as some kind of touchstone for everything that is bad in modern America is a bit of a reach. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
At 11:17 AM -0700 on 10/24/00, Tim May wrote:
But using it as some kind of touchstone for everything that is bad in modern America is a bit of a reach.
Sometimes people do that.
:-).
Seriously, I knew you liked it when I fired up the old rant-machine this
morning, but I hope we can agree to disagree about a movie or two around
here.
In the meantime, The Matrix just drove me nuts, and more so because I was
*supposed* to like it, I guess...
Cheers,
RAH
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
participants (8)
-
Bill Stewart -
Declan McCullagh -
Eric Murray -
Harmon Seaver -
James A.. Donald -
R. A. Hettinga -
R. A. Hettinga -
Tim May