Re: The Net (short movie review)

[Sandy Sandfort <sandfort@crl.com>]

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                          SANDY SANDFORT
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C'punks,

On Mon, 31 Jul 1995, Bill Stewart wrote:

> I rather enjoyed the movie, though I did share the experience of being
> one of the two or three people in the theater laughing at various technical 
> gaffes and/or in-jokes.  Obviously, you can't take anything from Hollywood too
> seriously technically, but they did look at a few social issues related to
> computerisation, such as the isolation, computer addiction, lack of face-to-face
> relationships, difficulty in knowing what's real when everything's on the
> computer,
> vulnerability of society to computer problems, trustability of people who
> tell you
> that you can trust their computer security system for everything - even the 
> government uses it!   So they didn't look into them too deeply - they're
> Hollywood.

Got to agree with Bill here.  Book, TV, movie, etc. stories are
not about "what" they are about "what if."  For our purposes, it
was sufficient that THE NET plausibly created distrust in 
solutions provided by monolithic big brothers.  A lot of elements
echoed arguments about Clipper, this Alltel conspiracy stuff,
secret back doors, manufactured justifications for government
mandated or endorsed security programs, etc.  Of course the
nominal enemy was an evil corporation, but it, could certainly 
be read as something more.  The "Praetorians" are taken right 
of history, and can only be interpreted as a governmental group.

I hope the movie is very popular.  It helps us by inducing 
healthy cynicism with a dash of paranoia.


 S a n d y

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