“Memories are meant to fade… They’re designed that way for a reason.”
November 28, 2023 2:22 AM Subscribe
“Strange Days in Cupertino” by Christine Gerardi for Blood Knife.
(When this first appeared in my RSS feed a week ago, I was able to read it, then it was behind a Patreon paywall. I checked in two browsers and on multiple devices before making this post, but if it nevertheless isn't viewable by others, apologies.)
(When this first appeared in my RSS feed a week ago, I was able to read it, then it was behind a Patreon paywall. I checked in two browsers and on multiple devices before making this post, but if it nevertheless isn't viewable by others, apologies.)
Wow, this one hit me right in a bruise. Thanks for posting.
One detail I found jarring — a superconducting quantum interference device is a real technology used in magnetoencephalography, a kind of brain imaging. You can’t actually use it in the way they describe, but it did make me wonder what kind of background research went into the writing of this film.
posted by eirias at 4:18 AM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
One detail I found jarring — a superconducting quantum interference device is a real technology used in magnetoencephalography, a kind of brain imaging. You can’t actually use it in the way they describe, but it did make me wonder what kind of background research went into the writing of this film.
posted by eirias at 4:18 AM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
Strange Days being one of the few films to really do cyberpunk well, I'd always assumed SQUID was lifted from Johnny Mnemonic (the short story, not the film).
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 4:28 AM on November 28, 2023
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 4:28 AM on November 28, 2023
That's an excellent article, thanks for posting. I have seen "Strange Days" more than once, it is well worth seeking out. In many ways it's a cyberpunk "Brainstorm", and I say that in a good way.
posted by chavenet at 4:36 AM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 4:36 AM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
wow. This is a great piece. I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s great new book Doppelgänger, which touches on some of the main points here (dangers of technology companies and social media inserting themselves in between our social interactions) but from a different angle. If you want more reasons to delete all your accounts…
posted by heyitsgogi at 4:36 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by heyitsgogi at 4:36 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
If you ever want to see Angela motherfucking Basset in full goddamn flow, at the peak of her powers, watch the clip (2 mins worth the whole thing) where her character is disabusing Rafe Fines' character of his delusions where she utters the words that make up this FPPs title. Absolutely one of my favorite scenes from any hollywood film.
Fatboy Slim sampled this phrase and, and "real time, time to get real", "right here, right now" for some of his most iconic tunes, as well.
posted by lalochezia at 5:43 AM on November 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
Fatboy Slim sampled this phrase and, and "real time, time to get real", "right here, right now" for some of his most iconic tunes, as well.
posted by lalochezia at 5:43 AM on November 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
So glad that Apple is on top of the emotional Torture Nexus.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:19 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by jacquilynne at 6:19 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
(strange days has one of the best 90s soundtracks ever!)
posted by mittens at 6:40 AM on November 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by mittens at 6:40 AM on November 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
Strange Days isn’t a title that even dedicated film fans are likely to remember
Okay, I came here to throw some serious shade at that, only to find that everybody here has fond memories of Strange Days. My people!!
posted by Naberius at 7:17 AM on November 28, 2023 [16 favorites]
Okay, I came here to throw some serious shade at that, only to find that everybody here has fond memories of Strange Days. My people!!
posted by Naberius at 7:17 AM on November 28, 2023 [16 favorites]
Just introduced my wife to Strange Days last year. (She liked it.) It holds up quite well, and the article does a good job of explaining why.
posted by mrphancy at 7:28 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mrphancy at 7:28 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
This might be peripherally related both to this thread and to the discussion around the Emily Gorcenski article Making God that ob1quixote linked to in the "Effective Altruism" thread from yesterday.
In his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, media historian Friedrich Kittler quotes a 1902 German monograph on gramophones/graphophones by Alfred Parzer-Muhlbacher:
"Cherished loved ones, dear friends, and famous individuals who have long since passed away will years later talk to us again with the same vividness and warmth; the wax cylinders transport us back in time to the happy days of youth-- we hear the speech of those who lived countless years before us, whom we never knew, and whose names were only handed down by history."
Media always have this possibility of death/immortality (two sides of same coin, where the coin is an exit from human experience's quality of being embedded in time) - Kittler further cites the speed with which photography was used as spirit photography (contemporary with the invention of the technology) and the telegraph, similarly, was instantly used as a tool in seances.
I want to just quote a bit of that section, in part because I think Kittler pulls off one of the best puns I've ever read in a critical work:
"...one of the ten applications Edison envisioned for his newly invented phonograph in the North American Review (1878) was to record "the last words of dying persons."
It was only a small step from such a "family record" with its special consideration of revenants, to fantasies that had telephone cables linking the living and the dead. What Leopold Bloom in Ulysses could only wish for in his Dublin graveyard meditations had already been turned into science fiction by Walter Rathenau, the AEG chairman of the board and futurist writer. In Rathenau's story "Resurrection Co.," the cemetery administration of Necropolis, Dacota/USA, following a series of scandalous premature burials in 1898, founds a daughter company entitled "Dacota and Central Resurrection Telephone Bell Co." with a capital stock of $750,000. Its sole purpose is to make certain that the inhabitants of graves, too, are connected to the public telephone network. Whereupon the dead avail themselves of the opportunity to prove, long before McLuhan, that the content of one medium is always another medium -- in this concrete case, a deformation professionelle."
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:36 AM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
In his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, media historian Friedrich Kittler quotes a 1902 German monograph on gramophones/graphophones by Alfred Parzer-Muhlbacher:
"Cherished loved ones, dear friends, and famous individuals who have long since passed away will years later talk to us again with the same vividness and warmth; the wax cylinders transport us back in time to the happy days of youth-- we hear the speech of those who lived countless years before us, whom we never knew, and whose names were only handed down by history."
Media always have this possibility of death/immortality (two sides of same coin, where the coin is an exit from human experience's quality of being embedded in time) - Kittler further cites the speed with which photography was used as spirit photography (contemporary with the invention of the technology) and the telegraph, similarly, was instantly used as a tool in seances.
I want to just quote a bit of that section, in part because I think Kittler pulls off one of the best puns I've ever read in a critical work:
"...one of the ten applications Edison envisioned for his newly invented phonograph in the North American Review (1878) was to record "the last words of dying persons."
It was only a small step from such a "family record" with its special consideration of revenants, to fantasies that had telephone cables linking the living and the dead. What Leopold Bloom in Ulysses could only wish for in his Dublin graveyard meditations had already been turned into science fiction by Walter Rathenau, the AEG chairman of the board and futurist writer. In Rathenau's story "Resurrection Co.," the cemetery administration of Necropolis, Dacota/USA, following a series of scandalous premature burials in 1898, founds a daughter company entitled "Dacota and Central Resurrection Telephone Bell Co." with a capital stock of $750,000. Its sole purpose is to make certain that the inhabitants of graves, too, are connected to the public telephone network. Whereupon the dead avail themselves of the opportunity to prove, long before McLuhan, that the content of one medium is always another medium -- in this concrete case, a deformation professionelle."
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:36 AM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
her character is disabusing Rafe Fines' character
I can't tell if you're being lazy or trying and failing to make some kind of point or joke, but his name is Ralph Fiennes.
posted by hippybear at 10:59 AM on November 28, 2023
I can't tell if you're being lazy or trying and failing to make some kind of point or joke, but his name is Ralph Fiennes.
posted by hippybear at 10:59 AM on November 28, 2023
I can't tell if you're being lazy or trying and failing to make some kind of point or joke
I hope it's not too much of a call-out to say this seems awfully uncharitable to me... There are MANY more reasons than those two that someone might misspell a name. The name in question is even pronounced "rafe fines!"
If this is a derail, mods, please delete.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:05 AM on November 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
I hope it's not too much of a call-out to say this seems awfully uncharitable to me... There are MANY more reasons than those two that someone might misspell a name. The name in question is even pronounced "rafe fines!"
If this is a derail, mods, please delete.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:05 AM on November 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
To bring the conversation back to the tech angle... I'm unconvinced that even Apple's latest attempt to make AR and VR a thing in the consumer space will succeed, outside of the niche of gaming.
However, I do have a theory as to why Apple, Meta, and other companies have been so gung ho about consumer VR of late: it's the perfect tool to atomize consumers. Capitalism has been slowly but surely atomizing society into smaller and smaller groups, mostly as a way to sell more products through targeted marketing. VR and AR are perfect for this because they are the ultimate in single-user technologies. Especially for Meta, which is built on advertising as its primary revenue model, being able to isolate a single user to a single headset means collecting a ton of data that can be used for 1:1 advertising without the risk of it being seen by the wrong person or cohort.
posted by SansPoint at 11:26 AM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
However, I do have a theory as to why Apple, Meta, and other companies have been so gung ho about consumer VR of late: it's the perfect tool to atomize consumers. Capitalism has been slowly but surely atomizing society into smaller and smaller groups, mostly as a way to sell more products through targeted marketing. VR and AR are perfect for this because they are the ultimate in single-user technologies. Especially for Meta, which is built on advertising as its primary revenue model, being able to isolate a single user to a single headset means collecting a ton of data that can be used for 1:1 advertising without the risk of it being seen by the wrong person or cohort.
posted by SansPoint at 11:26 AM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
Capitalism has been slowly but surely atomizing society into smaller and smaller groups
I mean, yes and no - people made the same claim of individualism turned destructively inward about the walkman, and before that about the English Novel (i.e., that it moved one too far into the realm of private experience and too far away from the social), and while both the novel and the walkman were creations of capitalism they were potentially just as effective as tools of resistance... And it's not like Apple is creating an individual movie for every individual user, Amazon Apple Facebook et al are still producing mass media and doing just as much to capture the "big head" as the long tail of the market...
My tinfoil-hat theory on why Facebook bought Oculus (over and above Facebook's Saturn-like desire to eat any child that might possibly grow up to threaten them) is to start collecting an extremely granular data set on the relationship between peoples' attention and their eye movements, with the usual end game of monetizing that eventually.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:44 AM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
I mean, yes and no - people made the same claim of individualism turned destructively inward about the walkman, and before that about the English Novel (i.e., that it moved one too far into the realm of private experience and too far away from the social), and while both the novel and the walkman were creations of capitalism they were potentially just as effective as tools of resistance... And it's not like Apple is creating an individual movie for every individual user, Amazon Apple Facebook et al are still producing mass media and doing just as much to capture the "big head" as the long tail of the market...
My tinfoil-hat theory on why Facebook bought Oculus (over and above Facebook's Saturn-like desire to eat any child that might possibly grow up to threaten them) is to start collecting an extremely granular data set on the relationship between peoples' attention and their eye movements, with the usual end game of monetizing that eventually.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:44 AM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
I was a kid when Strange Days came out. I remember seeing a movie poster for it at the local video store. I was intrigued by the premise, but I knew that my strict parents wouldn't let me watch it, so I forgot about its existence for a couple of decades.
All the recent conversations about the film have inspired me to track it down and watch it. I'm a huge fan of cyberpunk films a la Blade Runner 2049, so I'm excited to see this one as well.
posted by carnival_night_zone at 11:48 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
All the recent conversations about the film have inspired me to track it down and watch it. I'm a huge fan of cyberpunk films a la Blade Runner 2049, so I'm excited to see this one as well.
posted by carnival_night_zone at 11:48 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
I can't tell if you're being lazy or trying and failing to make some kind of point or joke, but his name is Ralph Fiennes.
posted by hippybear at 13:59 on November 28 [+] [⚑]
His spoken name is pronounced "Rafe" and he prefers it that way...... and I wrote it down phonetically. I'm a huge fan of his.
posted by lalochezia at 12:00 PM on November 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
The SQUID shows up in Johnny Mnemonic but the way Strange Days handles it is more like the ASP from Fragments of a Hologram Rose.
I suspect this framing of "relive precious moments in time" and "experience it all over again" is to dissuade you from immediately thinking about **other** people looking at your recordings.
To go with the social media analogy, there's Youtube Voice and people moving like Disney cartoons on Tik Tok. What will performative looking be like?
posted by RobotHero at 12:42 PM on November 28, 2023
I suspect this framing of "relive precious moments in time" and "experience it all over again" is to dissuade you from immediately thinking about **other** people looking at your recordings.
To go with the social media analogy, there's Youtube Voice and people moving like Disney cartoons on Tik Tok. What will performative looking be like?
posted by RobotHero at 12:42 PM on November 28, 2023
Clearly I need to rewatch. I watched it early in it's DVD release and remember not hating it, but not being very impressed. I don't even remember the plot. as a fan of cyberpunk it makes me happy that others love the genre. I'll try to remember to report back , maybe on fanfare.
posted by evilDoug at 1:04 PM on November 28, 2023
posted by evilDoug at 1:04 PM on November 28, 2023
Anyway, I am a huge fan of Strange Days, probably saw it 4 times the week it was released, and if I remember it didn't run in the theaters all that long. [Going to the movies used to be one of the cheaper forms of entertainment, and the year that Strange Days came out, I could probably get into the theater for $2 on cheap nights and showings before 6pm.]
One thing about Strange Days is that the script is from James Cameron, which is why we have this very strong female character helping carry the protagonist forward through his broken life.
I remember the film tapping strongly into a lot of the angst around the turning of the Millennium. The television series Millennium would begin airing less than a year after this film came out, and the Y2K issue was beginning to become a mainstream topic of conversation.
Not exactly a companion piece, Vanilla Sky is another movie that gets into technologically assisted memories of lost loved ones warping ones ability to function in the everyday world.
posted by hippybear at 1:34 PM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
One thing about Strange Days is that the script is from James Cameron, which is why we have this very strong female character helping carry the protagonist forward through his broken life.
I remember the film tapping strongly into a lot of the angst around the turning of the Millennium. The television series Millennium would begin airing less than a year after this film came out, and the Y2K issue was beginning to become a mainstream topic of conversation.
Not exactly a companion piece, Vanilla Sky is another movie that gets into technologically assisted memories of lost loved ones warping ones ability to function in the everyday world.
posted by hippybear at 1:34 PM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
You know how long it took me to realize that “Ray Fiennes” was not Ralph Fiennes’ brother?
posted by atoxyl at 2:34 PM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 2:34 PM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
I loved the hell out of that movie. It's such a vibe and yes, Angela Bassett is god like and grounding in the middle of something otherwise fantastic.
And boy, do I not need to relive memories. I already do enough of that in my brain, thank you very much.
posted by drewbage1847 at 7:11 PM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
And boy, do I not need to relive memories. I already do enough of that in my brain, thank you very much.
posted by drewbage1847 at 7:11 PM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
fwiw, wim wenders' until the end of the world (1991) dealt with the 'disease of images':
strange days on fanfare
posted by kliuless at 2:56 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think of it as allegorical, as yet another attempt by Wenders to discredit the creation of signifying images with no substance, or what he calls a "television aesthetic."also btw...
After being lost in herself and her dreams, Claire is rescued by seeing herself, through Gene's words, recontextualized in a larger world view. Gene's book takes all of the images that we and the audience and the characters have been seeing and arranges them into a narrative, which is that of the film. Wenders has written previously about the strange difference he sees as a filmmaker between stories and images.
strange days on fanfare
posted by kliuless at 2:56 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Was literally about to mention Until the End of the World. A similar topic in a similarly vibe-y '90s film with another disproportionately strong soundtrack.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 3:32 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 3:32 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Mod note: Comment and response remove about how to pronounce an actor's. A link was posted with the named person's desire on how it should pronounced , so that's settled and there's no need to derail the thread.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:23 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:23 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
> "the wax cylinders transport us back in time to the happy days of youth"
I expect that the author of that 1902 monograph had no idea how just how right he was. Great comment, and thanks for linking that book, just ordered a copy!
posted by LooseFilter at 7:03 AM on November 29, 2023
I expect that the author of that 1902 monograph had no idea how just how right he was. Great comment, and thanks for linking that book, just ordered a copy!
posted by LooseFilter at 7:03 AM on November 29, 2023
John Gruber on playing back VisionPro videos recorded with the iPhone 15 Pro:
posted by Wilbefort at 8:04 AM on November 29, 2023
Spatial photos and videos — photos and videos shot with the Vision Pro itself — are viewed as a sort of hybrid between 2D content and fully immersive 3D content. They don’t appear in a crisply defined rectangle. Rather, they appear with a hazy dream-like border around them. Like some sort of teleportation magic spell in a Harry Potter movie or something. The effect reminded me very much of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, in the way that Tom Cruise’s character could obsessively watch “memories” of his son, and the way the psychic “precogs” perceive their visions of murders about to occur. It’s like watching a dream, but through a portal opened into another world.
posted by Wilbefort at 8:04 AM on November 29, 2023
Kittler's other book (that I know of that has been translated into English) Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 is great as well. Kittler comes out of the age of big-t Theory but his work is informed by rigorous historical accuracy to material detail.
It bums me out when any current tech criticism treats the current thing (AI, the endless content feed, immersive vr, whatever) as completely sui generis and representing a break from all hitherto recorded history. Kittler's historicism is an excellent antidote. Commentators who treat our current moment as historically unique really underestimate the complexities of history. People in the past weren't children and they weren't rubes. /soapbox.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 9:08 AM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
It bums me out when any current tech criticism treats the current thing (AI, the endless content feed, immersive vr, whatever) as completely sui generis and representing a break from all hitherto recorded history. Kittler's historicism is an excellent antidote. Commentators who treat our current moment as historically unique really underestimate the complexities of history. People in the past weren't children and they weren't rubes. /soapbox.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 9:08 AM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
I have seen "Strange Days" more than once, it is well worth seeking out.
Two things crack me up about Strange Days - a) it's largely about a serial killer wearing Google Glass and screwing with other people's AR kit, which is conceivably no longer sci-fi, and b) the film starts with a classic dystopian film trope of a news reader going down the list of headlines that are supposed to show how raggedly on the edge of collapse all of society is, and the content of the headlines actually doesn't sound as bad as our real world headlines (or even those of 15-20 years ago - it released in 1995 and was set on the cusp of NYE 1999).
posted by FatherDagon at 1:06 PM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Two things crack me up about Strange Days - a) it's largely about a serial killer wearing Google Glass and screwing with other people's AR kit, which is conceivably no longer sci-fi, and b) the film starts with a classic dystopian film trope of a news reader going down the list of headlines that are supposed to show how raggedly on the edge of collapse all of society is, and the content of the headlines actually doesn't sound as bad as our real world headlines (or even those of 15-20 years ago - it released in 1995 and was set on the cusp of NYE 1999).
posted by FatherDagon at 1:06 PM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
I went to a William Gibson reading and book signing in 2003 when Pattern Recognition came out (ask me later about my belief that Pattern Recognition is secretly Mona Lisa Overdrive wearing a less-far-in-the-future hat) and Gibson, talking about scifi's spotty record of predicting the future, said in 1983 when he wrote Neuromancer he was able to imagine cyberspace but was unable to imagine a future without public pay phones.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 1:42 PM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 1:42 PM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
I've got an Oliver Grau book, Virtual Art, that makes a good case for panoramas being a proto-VR in the sense that it was meant to completely surround the viewer.
But the creation of a panorama was no small task so nobody would expect people to document their own life in such a way.
I think there's a long history of people imagining what if a medium was all-encompassing or indistinguishable from the real thing. But the production and distribution of the medium usually remains familiar. Brave New World has the movies become the feelies, but it's still a studio production that you go to the feelie theatre to experience. It doesn't give everyone a feelie camera in their pocket.
posted by RobotHero at 2:30 PM on November 29, 2023
But the creation of a panorama was no small task so nobody would expect people to document their own life in such a way.
I think there's a long history of people imagining what if a medium was all-encompassing or indistinguishable from the real thing. But the production and distribution of the medium usually remains familiar. Brave New World has the movies become the feelies, but it's still a studio production that you go to the feelie theatre to experience. It doesn't give everyone a feelie camera in their pocket.
posted by RobotHero at 2:30 PM on November 29, 2023
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posted by blue shadows at 2:52 AM on November 28, 2023 [11 favorites]