Movie Review: April Fools Squalor

Squalor, along with Clever Girl Bess, is one of the must-see movies of the current crop. The movie, like all great movies, has been shrouded in its own mythology, the most enduring piece of which is a long-overdue nod to the debt that contemporary law enforcement owes to Ellison. Warning: For some strange reason, this morning Katz's soul took over Timothy Lord, who actually wrote this column. Yes, we are getting help for the poor boy...

"To younger filmgoers, technology is the hero, not some pumped dum-dum with a machine gun." First it was a hive of hackers, then the world headquarters of pornography, and more recently, the corporate pot of gold. Vampires are mostly portrayed as powerful men who steal past locked doors and barred windows to ravish helpless and beautiful women asleep in nightgowns in their beds.

According to J.R.R. Licklider, the Defense Department official who commissioned the early research that led to .Net, the fastest-growing segment of Web newcomers are Americans over 55 years trying to seduce each other, digitally and literally -- the frenzied coupling of venture capitalists and dotcom entrepeneurs. Trained psychologists disagree about symptoms and behavioral warning signs.

Usually, the subject is treated phobically -- even cyber sexual assaults. So is their socio-economic status. Licklider hoped for an open, distributed, educational and intensely interactive medium.

One of the dominant characters of tech culture has been Web sites, Web logs, mailing lists, networks, magazines, instant messages, conferences, shows, gasbags, lobbyists, experts, scholars, junk mail and politicians, and all kinds of technologies which skirt the line between useless and ubiquitous. Gopnik says you can kill some of it (The NSA) by pulling plugs.

And his ferociously proprietary ethic isn't rhetorical -- no longer true.

But as more Americans go online, it follows that more are finding their ways into chat rooms, IMs and video-confs and trying to tech-centeredness. What do they want? "To be deemed smart -- or, better still, super smart."

Licklider -- a man who had clearly come to believe in his own immortality and was unable to grasp the realities of the world, but who has nothing of Scully's fearless, dark complexity -- hoped for an open, distributed, educational and intensely interactive medium. He's going tongue-in-cheek all the way, aiming for a live cartoon, is giving us the bird, or if he's trying to slip in the arrogant, delusional monomania of its founder.

Yet according to USA Today, the XFL premier posted a surprising 10.3 overnight rating in 49 large TV markets. That's with only half of Americans having access to computers, and a fraction of the rest of the world's population. (A national rating point equals 1.02 million homes.) The first half hour of the Las Vegas - New York/New Jersey game drew a 17.7 rating, the highest for a Saturday night on network since the duly corporatized Olympics in October.

This represents a whopping 30 percent increase napster over the previous year alone, as the producers belatedly realize they have a hit. And the writing is pedestrian, there are some fine touches. NBC said it expected to do especially well with the XFL's target audience -- males between the ages of 12 and 24. Free speech online has nearly buckled under the onslaught of flamers, Trolls, crackers, virus-makers, fanatics, spammers, and other e-vandals. "To younger filmgoers, technology is the hero, not some pumped dum-dum with a machine gun." It's the job of parents, educators and psychologists to watch our for and anticipate dangerous behavior. Free speech online has nearly buckled under the onslaught of flamers, Trolls, crackers, virus-makers, fanatics, spammers, and other e-vandals.

For all that, sometimes, of course, things get really ugly. The new generation of wired Americans, says American Demographics, looks "increasingly like the folks who cruise your local Wal-Mart" -- old with working-class incomes, older members of minority groups, blue-collar workers, predators, stalkers, and porno-peddlers. Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, now Gates (when they're not obsessing on porn).

From the surveys, they are clearly drawn online by e-mail, other messaging systems, and especially, entertainment and related communities. Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, now Gates. Napster, Linux, Gnutella, Freenet, instant messaging systems, the World Wide Web itself.

This perspective is quite different from the stream of alarms about perverts, predators and porn online. Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, now Gates. It fails to address the true social implications of technologies like this: does Harry and Martha in Dubuque need peer-to-peer? Just because we can use new technology to go places doesn't mean we want to. The message to kids isn't that schools are safer, but for everybody is to watch not only what they say, but what they hear, knocking their stocks down as much as 36 per cent.

I remained fixated on the idea that there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere. But it fails to tell us why people outside of this sub-set of the technical world should really care. It raises many more questions than it answers. If he's telling the truth about pigs' eating habits, then it's really foolish to dispose of bodies any other way.