QUICK WARNING: ok, So I’m supposed to be writing about other stuff that will help you to organize your digital life right now, but I’m experiencing a bit of writer’s block, so I’m doing this post in the hopes that I’ll shake some mental energy loose and get going on my proper posts. Just bear with me on this one, and we will get back to our regularly scheduled program next week….hopefully….
SO something that I like doing when I’m I’m not working with technology or writing about technology is watching movies. I’m a huge fan of movies, and not strictly just “good movies” I like my share of cheesy movies, too (don’t judge me). What’s fantastic is that I married a lovely woman who can usually join me for a good cheesy movie every once and a while, but there are some movies that even she looks at me like I’ve lost my mind for wanting to watch. I was recently left unsupervised and came across one such film, I hadn’t seen it since it was released back in the 1990s, and I thought I would give it a go. This time, the movie in question was a Keanu Reeves classic called Johnny Mnemonic, and the plot is relatively simple.
In the future, there is a plague called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (or NAS….this is just for context, by the way), and with the internet being how it is, sometimes people need to send information “safely” by using people who’ve been wired up with effectively internal hard drives. Dear ol’, Johnny gets paid to carry WAY more data than he’s supposed to and needs to download it before it fries his brain. It turns out the info he’s carrying is the cure to NAS, and he’s trying to escape the evil Pharmacy corporation, which is trying to keep the information from getting out so they could make a fortune. Johnny is able to get it out and save the world…etc. etc.
Hey, I said it was a cheesy movie…Anyway, I did find a few things within the movie that I found interesting and really stuck with me.
1) The future usually predicts disaster – Almost all of the movies set in the “near future” predict something that happened in their past, which caused the world to go from what we have today to some dystopian disaster. They usually have the same kinds of things going on, trash overflowing, disease infestations, a general dystopian landscape. In this case, NAS (also called the black shakes…I imagine cause it sounds scarier) was what was causing the downfall of society and humanity in general. Some people were part machine (because most cyborgs would hang out in that kind of environment….), and the world, in general, looked like no one had tidied up the place in a while. This struck me because this movie was supposed to take place in roughly January of 2021. So at least the big about the global health crisis was bang on. We don’t have cyborgs everywhere, and the Pharmaceutical companies are in no way “evil and greedy,” so at least there’s that.
2) Technology doesn’t change much – I love watching these movies because they all use today’s technology in a “future-y” way. In this instance, one of the things that they did was load Johnny up with his data, and to get it out, he needed a sequence of three images to start the download. Fair enough, you need a password to get into things. But they printed off the pictures and then faxed them to where Johnny was supposed to go. (deep breath Jason, deep breath). The people using Johnny to deliver the data needed to move 300 GB’s of data, which back in 1995 was probably a lot (honestly, I don’t -really remember…), but now I can get a terabyte of storage (or 1024 Gb’s) on a cloud account for less than twenty bucks a month. What made it even better (and by “better, I mean eye-rolling worthy) for me was They had to fax the code to the destination. They faxed it because that way the low tech rebels wouldn’t get the code…..the low….tech….rebels, who are using outdated technology to hack the internet, wouldn’t be able to intercept a fax transmission….. While I recognize that back in 1995, the Fax machine may have been serious technology, but not at all by actual 2021 standards.
3) It’s really not that bad – As we are in the process of trying to emerge from our own global pandemic (as the people in the movie were more in the middle of, I think…) I want to believe that overall, life isn’t as bad as it was made out to be in any movies that predict the near future. We may not have flying cars yet or hoverboards like in Back to the Future 2, but I hardly think we’re living in a dystopian universe where every day is a fight to survive. I realize that we have just gone through a global pandemic, but we see the light at the end of the tunnel. There is an end in sight, and I fully believe we will get there.
I love disaster films like this one for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, I can walk away from the movie thinking to myself, “It may be bad in our day to day life, but it’s not like THAT!” and you always know that when you’re watching those kinds of films that the hero (or heroine) will do a thing and save the world. It’s a little escapism to know that no matter how bad it gets, it will always turn out in the end. The bonus for me this time around is that because this movie takes place this year (2021), I can REALLY look at the differences between what we thought would have happened and what did. Both from a societal standpoint and a tech standpoint, We’re much further ahead than they were in the movie. This gives me hope for our actual future. Certainly, after how the world has handled the Covid pandemic and how far and how fast our technology has come, I have great hope for our future.
What’s your favourite disaster film?
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