“A Scanner Darkly” On My Wall In 720p
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.”
You see, anyone who has any grasp or understanding of the true state of the information economy knows, the idea of having any kind of “total awareness” or even “semi-awareness” of the terabytes, petabytes, exabytes of data that are being created, destroyed, transmitted and copied every moment of every day is patently, absolutely ridiculous. Perhaps God has some grasp on it all, but even thats a stretch. There’s just too many bits to capture, observe, connect, and process, and the idea that a hulking bureaucracy like the United States federal government could have any marginal grip on those bits that are flying through the worldwide network of the internet that once existed solely in America but now just flits through it is paranoia at its penultimate. I mean seriously, the CIA can’t even act on information from 60, SIXTY, of its own agents throwin up the the red flag that “Hey!” Al Qaeda appears to be camped out in San Diego! Nope, 9-11 came and went, and all the information trolling the government could muster couldn’t do a thing to stop the ‘Systemic Breakdown’ in our nation’s intelligence community.
World-changing tragedies aside, I’d have to say we live in a golden age of information freedom right now. The arbiters of freedom, the agents of the United States government, are still hopelessly enthralled in a 1960s perspective of similarly hulking cold war behemoth enemies and the cloak and dagger spy work of bugs and phone tapping. How quaint, how charming, how totally X-files of them. Meanwhile, my and most of America’s DSL and Cable lines suck down any content we choose, with little to no regard for what the MPAA or the RIAA deem as right and legal. But in our defense, it’s the data that wants to be free, we are simply doing its bidding in our libidinous sharing and deviant peer to peer activities. But even I wonder how long this can keep up. There are forces greater than us molting in the cocoons of AI laboratory crèches and mutating in toxic NSA database dumps. How long before the internet itself monitors our trespasses, our transgressions against the data it supports, multiplies and distributes? How long before surveillance is conducted by the network itself? Hopefully not before the armies of hierarchical systems and controls have crumbled and fallen to little bits on the ground, replaced by the self-organizing, ground-up forces of what could only be called the revolution have taken hold.
Most likely though, these two forces, of near-total system awareness, and tipping-point revolution will happen around the same time, and calamity and uncertainty are the only guarantees. For a battle is what nature likes, and the struggle is never meant to end.
Jeez, now I think I get how Philip K. Dick could make an entire career out of paranoia.
I end with a quote from Haruki Murakami’s “South of the Border, West of the Sun,” not necessarily because it’s connected, but because I was for some reason drawn to pick it up and turn to its page after watching “A Scanner Darkly” tonight:
“Did you see that Disney film in elementary school - The Living Desert?” “Yeah,” I answered. “Our world’s exactly the same. Rain falls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end, every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That’s how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn’t make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.”
