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

[R. A. Hettinga]

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 at 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'