CDR: Re: Gort in granny-shades (was Re: Al Gore goes cypherpunk?)

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Tue Oct 24 11:17:40 PDT 2000


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.





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list