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How Not to Make a Movie About Tech (theringer.com)
'The Circle' (a techno-thriller movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson) is a dated, far-fetched parable about an imaginary villain -- and far less scary than its television counterpart, says Alyssa Bereznak, a staff writer at The Ringer. An anonymous reader shares the article, removing the excerpts that could spoil the plot: Hollywood is keen on illustrating the awesome power of modern-day tech companies and the elite class of entrepreneurs who run them. But lately the most effective way to do that is not to focus on what's possible, but to illustrate the real-life personalities that control the near future of tech. Stylistically, a show like HBO's Silicon Valley couldn't be further from a production like The Circle, and yet it succeeds in threading together a host of issues in tech culture, including major corporations' monopoly-like power to squash competitors, manipulate the unwitting tech press, and bypass the interests of their employees and users for the sake of better stock prices. Now at the beginning of its fourth season, the show is lauded for its highly researched, accurate depictions of the Bay Area's power players -- so much so that it has spurred at least one Business Insider post dedicated to identifying each character's real-life inspiration. (The show has even featured a handful of cameos from the industry's power brokers, including Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt.) Even if it does take place in a comedy created by the man who gave us Beavis and Butt-Head, the show's researched interpretation of real life is a much more compelling way to display the tech world's flaws, rather than simply relying on imagined scaremongering.
The headline is a little misleading. The headline seems to be about the movie "The Circle", but the text about the tv show "Silicon Valley".
I read the description and it reminded me too much of the Antitrust (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_34) from 2001, just rehashed with different actors, etc.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I find nothing in this article that is so damning as it is implied I should be led to believe.
Fucking seriously? This article should have never been written. This is a thinly veiled advertisement for a TV show at the expense of a movie. I call bullshit.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
It's amazing how Butthead was the smarter of the 2, despite the name
The linked article mostly describes the plot-line of the last episode of Silicon Valley, complete with spoilers coming at you without warning. Poor journalistic form.
NOTE: I've never heard of this website/web-zine before. I've already forgotten their name, actually (but I hit Ctrl-K to blacklist them, so don't need to remember).
Why did this "never heard of before" outlet have an article on the front-page of /.? Much less a bad article about nothing but spoiling your fun if you haven't seen the latest Silicon Valley episode?
The circle jerk?
And yet it's the very thing Zuckerberg, Natella and Larry Page are DOING.
I'm reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez, about Facebook advertising. I'm at the part where Facebook internal data connects with external data to attach personal information on to every piece of data that Facebook had collected from the web. Scary stuff.
Silicon Valley is a long-form serial, which is a completely different medium than a movie. By the end of the current season, Silicon Valley will have run for a total of 19 hours over four years, while The Circle is 1h50 and has to focus on one narrative thread.
this isn't to say SV isn't remarkable, as there a lot of mediocre TV shows, but seriously it's goddam impossible to do the same thing in under two hours.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
He was only a tiny bit smarter. To make up for it, Beavis had 'frenzy' superpowers/alterego.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I started reading the book, which was pretty hyped a few years ago, and it sucked. It's totally unbelievable, from setting to characters. Why it got so much praise is beyond me. Probably because it was a book that literary critics could understand.
How did this ad get past it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's like the NSA, only full of functional people who can work for a living instead of being in a sheltered workshop for people with James Bond fantasies - of course it's scary.
[...] a sheltered workshop for people with James Bond fantasies [...]
Wait a minute... that sound like my government IT job.
Good point.
There's a few other "special" places out there that are too big for failure to wipe them out so they sustain a state of failure indefinitely.
However when the boss demands the highest possible security clearances for all staff and then invites a Hollywood set designer to just wander in and look at everything to do a Star Trek themed "command center" it's part of an especially special kind of failure. There's a very long, very public list but that's the one that really stood out.
However when the boss demands the highest possible security clearances for all staff and then invites a Hollywood set designer to just wander in and look at everything to do a Star Trek themed "command center" it's part of an especially special kind of failure.
Sounds like some of the NOCs (Network Operations Centers) I've visited at Fortune 500 companies. Impresses the hell out of visitors but not very functional for day-to-day network operations.
I'll restrict my comments to the Circle. It's not a great movie, but it's not bad. It's not entertaining. It's a little too real for that. It's very much a "Big Brother" tale with all the check boxes of rising totalitarianism ticked. It proposes the idea that privacy is dying and either is or soon will be extinct. It further proposes that we have a choice, as to the consequences of the extinction of privacy. We can either blindly surrender to it and allow corporations and governments to be the arbiters of what is and what isn't transparent, and how that lack of privacy is used; or we can accept the inevitable and ensure that everything is revealed to everyone, that no one controls that knowledge for their own ends. Frankly, the idea that the extinction of privacy is inevitable is a scary one. The idea that some individual, corporation or government has control of it is far, far worse.
While the magnitude may be subjective, he was noticably smarter
You'll note that: every time he is smarter, he is still a _huge_ dumbass.
e.g. 'Stick it in her taco', 'I'm trying dumbass, but first I've got to get her to take the spanish fly' also: 'Hey Butthead they spelled Womyn wrong' 'Cool, dumb chicks are easy' or the times that Beavis is clearly smarter, again from Womyn. 'These chicks are giving it away, why aren't there other dudes here' 'Fartknocker, you're in a room full of women that give it away for free and you're worried about where the dudes are, what's wrong with you?'
To say nothing of the times that Butthead doesn't know either, but bluffs: Blood donation: 'They stab you, and soak up the blood in with a rag, then squeeze it in container'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, and the epic fail with that NSA incident was the guy was not cleared in any way and was free to roam around.