<$BlogRSDUrl$>
THE PURLOINED LETTER
 
   
 
renice.com web

 

Monday, January 26, 2004


Nothing to Hide 


The President's Analyst is one of my favorite movies. I'm reminded of it every time I walk the dog, with cell phone headset melding to my head. The movie seems timely to me, but I wonder how much of it would make sense to my younger colleagues. I think it needs an updated remake and then a sequel.

Imagine that Bill gets his hands on the technology. Of course, his lawyers convince world governments that his company can provide a GrayMatterModem™ to every citizen at birth for pennies, with a little humanitarian aid thrown in to sweeten the deal. Naturally chaos ensues with kludgey versions and security holes which the net admin/physicians, or "physadmins", refer to as "Mad Bill Disease"; cults of alternative physadmins, known derogatorily as "quackhacks" and "guru-randas", spring up with counterfeit Patch-Aids™; complicit bureaucrats conspire to hide the incidence of brain tumors resulting from the implanted chips; privacy rights activists are admonished by right wingers that we have nothing to worry about if we have nothing to hide; and the Amish, though they'd have no problem asking their neighbor to buzz someone, dourly provide refuge for anti-brainmodem revolutionaries.

Something like "Harrison Bergeron makes a Minority Report", starring Johnny Depp as the president's analyst, Keanu Reeves as the ingenue rep from MS TeleCompany, and Chris Rock as the CIA agent.


Comments:

Post a Comment