Hacker Cinema
Dopesick
2021 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Danny Strong
The story of how one company triggered the worst drug epidemic in American history. Look into the epicenter of America's struggle with opioid addiction, from a distressed Virginia mining community, to the hallways of the DEA, and to the opulence of "one percenter" Big Pharma Manhattan.
5 positive1 mixed1 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
It was a good show. I've re-watched it a couple of times. The actors are excellent, and it's well-done.
I take it for granted that a lot of it was amped up for drama, but other sources (several documentaries) seem to agree on a lot of the actions and timelines. The show added motivations, and some fictional characters.
I also enjoyed Dopesick, and that's a subject that I have direct experience and knowledge of. I have pretty much the same issues with that show.
But I still enjoyed both of them as dramas.
If I want facts, I'll do my own research.
Yes, there's an element of messiah and saviour complex in there.
> That doesn't come from the organizer enjoying pain/harm, but from desperately seeking to avoid experiencing a certain kind of it, emotional pain or harm to their ego.
I think you actually describe a good picture of sado-masochism, the protective mechanism against emotions of unworthiness, though maybe you assumed I was emphasising the sadism side.
Of course no actual tech leaders are exactly like that (they're real people with their own subtle issues that are personal, private and none of our business - even if they would not allow the same dignity for everyone else). We are talking about archetypes here. Jobs was paradigmatic. And not limited to tech, things like drugs (and the media/arts) are a space where you can achieve mass-reach much more easily. For me, the portrayal of Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbar) in Dopesick [0] is an even better depiction of the tech leader archetype than the fictional Peter Isherwood (Mark Rylance) in Don't Look Up [1].
We talk about "disruption" as if it were a synonym for progress but what I see is how many tech-obsessed "creator types" actually delight in destruction, and the pain experienced by others who they affect.
Of course they would say, with that twisted Nietzschian faux-Christian 'compassion', that they "love" humanity and don't want to see anyone "left behind" (whether they want to be left out of an insane project or not).
The recent Apple advert was a timely expression of this. I'm glad they made it. Its better to have this "out" than ignored.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick_(miniseries)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up
Thanks for the recommendation - added to my burgeoning tbr list. I've seen some dramatised documentaries on the subject (I think it's pulled ahead of Theranos documentaries now), and I'm sure there's a lot more nuance than is covered in screen retellings.
Though Dopesick did make it fairly clear that federal agencies had been corrupted, as part of the original approval granting process. They didn't properly explore that angle, unfortunately.
Yeah, it's very much a case of Netflix thinking they're more important than Apple or the end users and deliberately not playing nice. The end result in this house is that we barely watch anything on Netflix because new episodes aren't tracked along with literally everything else that we're watching. Doesn't help that 99% of their output is lowest common denominator garbage; compare and contrast Dopesick on Disney+ and Painkiller on Netflix - the former being one of the best, most moving dramas I've watched in years, the latter one of the most superficial, turgid things I've watched.
There's a dramatised version of this story on Disney+ called "Dopesick", it's very good, but not great PR for the US.
There's also the movie "Dark Waters" about DuPont and Teflon if you want to trust your government even less.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick_(miniseries)
> How do you write or even read that document and believe you're acting in a moral or ethical manner?
Slightly off-topic; There's a TV show about the US opioid epidemic called Dopesick, they depict one of the responsible corporate execs, some Sackler family member, in a really interesting way.
Throughout the whole show it's really difficult to tell if he honestly believes what he's doing is something good, or if he's trying to outdo his other family members legacies.
I can see a very similar situation with somebody at Amazon who's just really convinced how Alexa-powered devices will somehow improve humanity on some fundamental level. In their PoV they are doing these unethical things for an ultimately greater good, in a "the ends justify the means" way.
Rarely anybody perceives themselves, or their actions, as fundamentally immoral or unethical, most of the time we are the heroes in our own narratives.