Don't fear the iReaper

I was talking to my coworker Alison about the movie Avatar today and she mentioned an interesting quote from Dave Howlett of Strange Adventures, which was " Why is it so many movies that require great leaps forward in technology to be realized usually end up having an anti-technology message?"

It's a good point. The Terminator franchise, The Matrix, Star Wars, Minority Report, Jurassic Park, I, Robot and the TV show Battlestar Galactica all use state-of-the-art technology to warn as about the dangers of state-of-the-art technology. The Transformer movies kind of count, though they're also anti-human in that I wanted everyone onscreen to die.

But aside from the searing hypocrisy, the problem with these movies is they get it all backward. I'm not worried about machines forcibly harvesting my organs, traveling through time to kill my grandchildren or framing me for murder. But what I can see is people paying money to download iPhone apps that do all of those things.

See, Hollywood, robots aren't the bad guys. We want to be enslaved by machines. We've already ground our economy to a halt through incessant facebook checking, embraced 1984-style newspeak by condensing all our thoughts into 140 characters or less and sacrificed all social decorum.

Take the Globe and Mail story this year about Conservative MP Rick Dykstra. Liberals accused him of texting during a Remembrance Day ceremony when photos surfaced of him playing with his phone at the service.

Dykstra swore it was all a misunderstanding and said he was actually live blogging the ceremony, as if that wasn't much, much worse.

Must... inform... masses...

To recap: Our elected politicians are attending ceremonies honouring veterans who fought for us to have the freedom to ignore those same veterans at said ceremonies and instead type up internet posts for people craving up-to-the-second Remembrance Day updates without actually going near old people.

Dykstra and his ilk will be first against the wall when the Google Apocalypse (or Wikipocalypse, iPocalypose, WiiPocalypse, Microsoft Intel quad core apocalypse, take your pick) hits.

If Hollywood wanted to be truly scary it shouldn't bother with the clichéd stories of robots committing evil deeds like imprisoning humanity or befriending Shia Laboeuf. Just show what would actually happen. Give us a scene where the Avatar guy pauses to marvel at the incredible 3D special effects and is mauled to death by a space rhinoceros. Show the machines luring Neo back into the Matrix with promises of unlimited minsesweeper, or have him die when he pauses to send a text message before using one of those phone portal things to escape.

"My twitter followers are not going to believe this."

Your heavy-handed pleas are falling on deaf ears, movie makers. Next time just show us some hover craft battles, cast Will Smith as the lead and leave out the preaching.

As James Cameron has proven, there are things people care about far more than being lectured on their technology use. To quote my amigo Glen Matthews' review of Avatar: "3 hours of naked alien humanoids running around and not one nipple slip? Thumbs down."