I just finished watching “A Scanner Darkly” for the first time. I downloaded the hi-def 720p HD-DVD rip off of bittorrent and enjoyed the amazing clarity and detail that only animation can provide through my Infocus projector projecting onto the living room wall of my apartment at 1024×768. I find it a bit ironic … A Scanner Darkly is a very paranoid movie, pretty much a rumination on the mental and emotional state of paranoia throughout. The main character is paranoid of every entity he interacts with, his friends, his girlfriend, his boss, himself, and most of all the very high-tech 3-D surveillance police state that he works for. In some ways it is true, we live in a police state. More than ever, surveillance cameras, federal wiretapping and internet snooping programs and efforts are moving forward and coming online. But back to the irony, here I am, publicly blogging about a movie I watched that was downloaded off of bittorrent. Perhaps this is folly (though, who’s to say I haven’t already bought the HD-DVD of Scanner Darkly and just downloaded a version because I don’t have an HD-DVD player to actually play the disc), but I think it says a lot about the state of law enforcement and its attempts at “total information awareness.”
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When I discovered my dad’s William Gibson books as a teenager, my view of reality and the possibilities to come in our technology-infused culture was forever changed. His vision of a net-connected world and the information black market it thus created spoke to me on a deep level. It has been interesting to see current culture catch up with his prophetic visions, while at the same time his books have moved backwards in time to the point where he now writes about the present. It seems a telling characteristic of our time that science fiction, once the harbinger of things to come, has now reached a point where it can only struggle to explain the character of the present, accelerating so rapidly that only the eyes of prescient futurists can make any attempt to take true stock of the changing world we now move through so rapidly. Such is the case with Gibson’s latest, “Spook Country,” an examination of America post-911 as only William Gibson could tell it.
A statement Gibson makes in the video below again reminds me that as unnatural and destructive a force humanity can appear to be, there is no escaping the fact that we are still, in fact, a force of nature. Or even, humanity is nothing more than another aspect of the force that is nature. From the viewpoint of an animal species moving through evolution, perhaps this point in human history is really not so strange. Read the rest of this entry »
