As much as I love GITS, I feel like so much of Minority Report is prescient to much of what we are seeing now or starting to see, from pre-crime to the personalized advertising. And that is scary.
GitS pushed ideas on many fronts in every episode, but Minority Report felt to me really shallow. I mean, how deep does the precog go? Why aren't they used in worldwide politics? If only 3 are used for crime prevention, what happened to the other ones? Why is it murder prevention specifically? How did the local police start with the program rather than a federal agency - mutating people is not something that would be a quiet local development.
It's been some time since I've seen MR, so maybe I'm missing details, but it seemed to show a big idea and then concentrate on tiny group only / action sequences. Kind of the reverse of GitS showing the actions of tiny group, but never losing the context of the big idea.
Keep in mind, it's a movie vs. a tv series so there's only so much time to explore different concepts. Plus I would not focus on the fact that it's just the 3 people but rather the notion of pre-crime itself.
The current TV version of Minority Report unfortunately does not seem to have tackled these issues much and is more like a near future police drama instead. Bummer
The Minory Report vision of pre-crime is indeed scary. However, we're already using analytics to prevent conditions which encourage criminal behaviour or increase risk of victimisation. I believe it's a question of implementation. Just as with stereotypes, these systems of generalisation can be useful but when applied to individuals they can be disastrous. Extending the metaphor, you can view racism as the extension of (positive as well as negative) stereotypes to the individual.
For me, the future vision of hyper-personalised advertising and 'clienteling' is in many ways, far more insidious than any overt Big Brother-type figure lurking in guises such as that of Minority Report's pre-crime division.
I found Huxley's vision - a world in which we, as a populace, are distracted from truthful experience and thus controlled by being overloaded with the experiences we love - to be enormously more terrifying than a world where we are controlled by what we fear. If you think of this type of control in the context of an abusive relationship, then it becomes clear how many more people would be vulnerable and how few would be willing to leave even if they did realise the truth of their situation.
You need far more control and fear to manipulate people than you need if you employ loyalty. If you can get people to love you, they imprison themselves.
I dunno. I would say Trump seems to be doing a good job taking advantage of people's (misplaced?) fears.
Incidentally, John Oliver had a great bit on Drumpf but the comments I've seen so far run along the lines of "F*uck you, you just be hating" by people that don't seem to have even bothered watching the whole segment. I find this infuriating. It's okay to disagree but dammit, at least take time to get educated before outright dismissing things. /rant
Agreed. Trump's campaign isn't inspiring fear. As you say, it's using and amplifying existing fears to form and strengthen a relationship with as many people as possible -- to establish itself as a member of the voter's in-group.
Expanding on my earlier premise, notice how this activity resembles a sociopath who is attempting to control a target or, perhaps as a more concrete example, an abuser in an new relationship. The isolation and alienation map fairly well. This then proceeds on to the campaign then making policy promises that sound like very good things to those it has captured all while moving the goal posts to ensure those promises needn't be kept.
Of course, because they needn't be kept, these promises are distractions for whatever goals the campaign might actually have, if any. It would be refreshing to have, in office, someone who simply wanted the power of it and wouldn't know what to do with it once gained. Actually, that's terrifying.
The methodology is clever, if you can call it that, in that most it targets of it are willingly blind to it, but it's also quite transparent if you know how to interpret it. Ever spent some time with a couple who have a terribly manipulative co-dependent relationship? Much of politics is like that. Sadly, those who buy into the charade will have the dismissive statement, "you're too cynical," or, "you always see the worst in them," ready for use if you have a moment to talk about it with them -- no matter the party or policy, so long as it's their party or policy. Such is humanity. I may be cynical, but since when has that ever been a reason for dismissing an argument?
Of course, most campaigns (read, sociopathic entities whatever they may be - be they a corporation or a single person) work this way. It's the easiest and most efficient way to gain control in, around and over any group of humans. The really terrifying thing is, once you've realised what's going on, you can never unknow it. I suppose that learning to cope with that realisation is something most people never really have to do whether through ignorance or, well, not coping with it.
His points are all pretty dismiss-able even if the whole 22 minutes are viewed. The only people that his show will convince are people who have already taken a anti-trump stance prior to watching the show.
I found myself quietly laughing at some portions of the show, but overall it didn't seem like "oliver skewers trump" was fitting.
I am genuinely curious to hear how the points are dismiss-able? I'm not saying there is any one "gotcha" point but taken in aggregate, it paints a picture.
Yeah I watched it, but I feel like a lot of political talks are preaching to the choir. They're not going to win over any Trump supporters by ridiculing him outright. A calm rational argument backed by evidence might win some people over.
> I feel like so much of Minority Report is prescient
That was a shallow movie if I ever remember one. How could a whole society idea of justice depend on just a set of 3 freaks detained in a kind of underground lab. This just does not make any sense, because it does not scale and it depends way too much on the human factor.
I'd wager that if such a thing ever exist in the future, it will be a matter of computers calculating probabilities based on a huge dataset they are constantly mining to detect abnormalities. But even if that were the case, it would probably fail to work unless you have a direct feed into everyone's private lives and way of thinking (and i don't mean just internet spying, it would need to go way further than that).
This shallowness is my biggest pet peeve about science fiction. It irks me especially in novels, because in that format the author has room to flesh things out.
I find older science fiction especially to seem to be made from cardboard cutouts. I couldn't make it through the first book of Asimov's Foundation series for that reason. A masterpiece in the estimation of many, but unbearably simplistic and shallow to me. A story stretching across a galaxy and hundreds of years, and nothing seems to be happening in that galaxy except the minor events driving the main characters forward.
