Network
1976 · Film · 122 min
Directed by Sidney Lumet
When veteran anchorman Howard Beale is forced to retire his 25-year post because of his age, he announces to viewers that he will kill himself during his farewell broadcast. Network executives rethink their decision when his fanatical tirade results in a spike in ratings.
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64 comments on Hacker News
> The WikiFlix tool is hosted on Toolforge in the US. Toolforge is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. All WikiFlix content is generated from Wikidata and maintained by that community.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:WikiFlix
Network's WikiData entry is https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q572165, which includes the Archive link and lacks a copyright status. This is also linked to from the barcode icon at the top of the movie's WikiFlix page: https://wikiflix.toolforge.org/#/entry/572165
Took about 2 minutes with no prior experience to remove the dead IA link and add the copyright status attribute to the WikiData item.
That frontend seems to have things that aren't hosted on Wikimedia Commons, whereas I think OP's link is Wikimedia-exclusive and more reliable.
For example, Network (1976) - one of my favourite films - isn't listed on the Wikimedia page, but it's listed on the WikiFlix frontend. I was a little surprised to see that, since AFAIK it's still under copyright. Clicking through, it's trying to embed a copy from the Internet Archive, from which it was taken down because, yes, it's still under copyright.
Apparently this is a movement started by Louis Rossman (Clippy meme explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xAGUrkDsj4) to protest the fact that the world feels like a dystopian hellscape run by evil corporations and greedy politicians. He's not wrong, but it's kinda felt that way since the 70s (see the movie Network for reference)
This is strange, because for those of you who aren't old enough to remember the ambient noise in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A), you won't know that Clippy was infuriating. But I guess the choice is controversial, which someone popular on YouTube knows will get lots of discussion. So... cool?
For fun: Clippy being annoying on Family Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPeKsBmqlZs
Is the "mad as hell" an allusion to the movie Network?
> In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. He is soon hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
Scene:
> It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
> Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
> I want you to get mad!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RujOFCHsxo
* Transcript: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork2.html
"at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth"
To be fair, while shorts is clearly designed to generate high virality and compete w/ TikTok, YouTube does incentivize longer form content. For regular videos the platform appears to optimize for engagement at about the 10 minute mark.
Political/social discourse is complex and I believe goes beyond a simple soundbite problem. One could argue this began with 24 hour news cycles with all the time in the world, and news had to become entertainment to fill the space. The movie "Network" presaged this sensationalized this culture situation well before it became a thing, and certainly well before social media was conceptualized.
US mass media is the longest-running experiment in the world at "if you scare people for long enough, can you make them more paranoid?".
Since 1972, Americans' trust in each other has fallen by half[1]. Pew Research has been showing how trust in all forms has been plummeting for a long time[2]. Of course trust in Government nose-dived in the 60's and 70's. In 1976, the movie Network! satirized "The News" as a force of corrupt capitalist enterprise meant to sensationalize rather than inform.
But none of this is new. In the 1890s, William Randolph Hearst waged a "media war" of propaganda at an unprecedented scale, intended to both dominate an industry, and turn popular opinion. He coined the phrase "if it bleeds, it leads" [3]. And well before then, newspapers have been used locally and nationally to push agendas, frighten, lie, exaggerate, and taunt the public into a submissive frenzy.
Today we have media juggernauts that wield a massive pulpit with brazenly political spin. They can lie, intimidate, insinuate, and generally bombard an already terrified public into believing just about anything. And the political fringe weaponizes it into not just political action, but also inspiring real violence and oppression at all levels of society. We allow it because it's good politics, it's good business, and, well, that whole freedom of speech thing.
But politics is a small part of the story. The media controls the narrative, and society is nothing but the accumulation of stories. Everything we consume is delivered to us through the media in one form or another, and all that accumulated payment funds the machine.
Society in America is big business. Most countries can't hold a candle to the control our media wields over our populace. Its tendrils seek out every eyeball and ear, pumping us full of fear and elation, followed by the next commercial break. Our culture is a media product. We wouldn't know what to do without it.
So, why do we fear our kids on the train, where other places don't? We're way better at packaging fear, and we're damn good consumers.
[1] https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/ [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/trust-and-distrust-in-america/ [3] https://pepperdine-graphic.com/opinion-if-it-bleeds-it-leads-the-modern-implications-of-an-outdated-phrase/
I enjoyed it a lot, though was a kid. It made a statement similar to the movie Network (1976), that I somewhat understood at a young age—they’ll do anything for ratings.
An oft-forgotten movie is the Network (1976) that predicts the rise of activist news hosts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
24 hour cable news, where news became entertainment, definitely sowed the seeds of this.
There is a great movie from the 70s called Network that predicted the slide of society in this direction.
+1 for the movie Network. This is one everybody interested in the intersection of media and demagoguery should watch.
It is a myth that Americans ever had faith in the News (any more than they have had faith in Politics).
For about 250 years (in the US), newspapers have been mostly political rags. They rose to popularity as a way for a single person or group to spread propaganda. Around 1900 they shifted from political rags to scandal-themed yellow journalism, and later turned more "professional", but never lost their slant towards ideologies, social/economic classes, trades, etc. The powerful have always controlled, influenced, and suppressed them. They've never been objective.
We've thought about the news as entertainment for the last 50 years. The movie Network came out in 1976, and predicted the abandonment of "balanced" journalism and information in favor of entertainment and profit. We've also known that the news may be staged, selectively covered, biased, and have a leading agenda in the stories they cover and how they cover them. And I mean, come on: Editorials? Literally just a biased person shouting their biased opinions, as if they have the right to speak for every reader?
The news has always been bullshit. Useful bullshit, but still bullshit. Anyone who thinks what they read is "true" doesn't understand the concept of truth.
What can modern journalism do when it was all bought by the 'power' its supposed to be speaking truth to?
The consolidation of media has been a massive issue throughout the world but predominantly in the US and started a long way back. There are two movies that are imho great watches reflecting the topic:
Network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) Christine: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a51606/christine-rebecca-hall-2016-canon/
The movie Network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)) famously skewered TV culture and its effect on people.
It won several oscars, and is still referenced today.
Sidney Lumet's film "Network" (1976) explores the idea of "hyperreality" in an accessible way, where people model their lives in reaction to relationships shown on television.
>"I think this is odd, at least if over done, as if the constructed media representation is somehow evidence of anything true"
Constructed media representations, like clips of movies, can still be quite useful for introducing an idea where the evidence will be presented later on. For example, some research psychologists use clips from Ratatouille to introduce concepts about memory.
However, I agree that it's unfortunate that people sometimes do uncritically use fictional depictions as evidence of arguments for human nature. For example, Lord of the Flies depicted a highly pessimistic view of how shipwrecked boys would behave over time, and people have formed a cynical worldview from the story. A real-life case of shipwrecked boys in 1965, however, ended with cooperation: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
The film Network (1976) predicted all of this.
The difference is that instead of a TV network exploiting the crazy for profit, the lunatics are now fully in control.
It's truly something that Elon went from calling a rescue diver a "pedo", spreading dangerous covid misinformation, and generally doing everything a normal person would get banned from twitter for to becoming a board member. But I'm not surprised.
There are a lot of cultures around the world that have the same salary and travel as other cultures, and they have not melded. Perhaps it is because culture is something that specifically resists melding.
At the same time, some people's idea of what a culture is, or what is "melding" culture, are amorphous and ill-defined. Is McDonalds culture? Are the many regionally-specific dishes at McDonalds around the world a result of "melding" culture?
Is the Poutine at McDonald's in Canada a "melding" of culture? Or is it just Canadian culture expressed through a McDonalds? Is the Banana shake at McDonald's in Japan a "melding" of American and Japanese culture? Or is it actually just "McDonald's" culture, since it's offered in Great Britain and Italy?
I'll leave you this quote from the 1976 movie Network!:
Arthur Jensen: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel."
We need a Howard Beale… except in this day and age I’m pretty sure they would be silently cut off by the station manager from the production booth and such a speech never heard by the public but here for anyone who hasn’t heard it is the speech by the character Howard Beale (a newscaster) from the 1975 movie “Network”….
————————————
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’
Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. (shouting) You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’
I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’
————————————
When was the last time you saw someone interviewed on TV who didn’t have a book to sell? At this point they could stop mentioning the books at all and I’d assume they were advertising them in the lower third or on the website and I hadn’t noticed it or perhaps that they have just started to expect viewers will search for the person online and find their book like some kind of Pavlovian response.
The only way I see people regaining trust in established media organisations is if they were “watching them burn”. The distrust is so built in now that to be trustworthy they have to be actively engaged in blatant self sabotage before we can overcome our collective cynicism. For us to trust them they must believe the “truth” they wish to tell us so much they are willing to self-immolate in-front of their audience otherwise how can we possibly tell it isn’t yet another marketing campaign for someone pulling the strings we haven’t seen yet.
What you are missing is that at some point they did become one and the same.
Give "world is businsess clip" from the movie Network a look..
After rewatching the film, Network from the 1970s last night I felt a weird sense of shame for supporting almost any modern news. The film conceptualized the modern issue with news and money in an unbelievably perfect manner for today.
> Outrage existed long before internet
I recall the film 'Network' with its "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" thread.
Among other messages.
The writing was already so clearly on the wall by the 70s that a cult classic satirical film [0] was made on exactly this subject.
I'm mystified to not see any mention of it in TFA. Nay, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
There's a movie you should see. It's called Network[1] and it was made in 1976. It deals with prime time TV news and how it is used to exploit people.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/
> Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
There are some real problems (such as healthcare and education costs), sure, but so many of the things that cause anxiety are self-inflicted. 1950s-level tech and medicine would be cheap, but you can't buy that today at any price. Relationships are harder because of changing social norms, not because we're too poor. The Capitol storming was a dumb stunt that's being milked for all the political capital it's worth.
The movie "Network" has all the same anxieties, (our country has been bought by the highest bidder, the air isn't fit to breathe, etc.)--if things are broken, they've been broken for 50 years, so I'm not convinced that the kids aren't all right.
Well the film Network deals with this theme and it came out in 1976 so I'd say that ship has sailed around the world a few times by now.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
First, the Last Starfighter. My mom said this was the first movie I stayed awake for the entire time as a toddler, and while I don't remember seeing it in a theater, I think this made me instantly interested in everything computers and space, and I eventually became a rocket scientist (kinda). Yay!
Network - It was made a long time ago, but it's really about Facebook. Watch it.
Requiem for a dream - I'll never forget this movie, ever. This will make you want to quit all your drugs.
Hearts of Darkness (A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) - This is the making of Apocalypse Now, and it's amazing. It's so much more than a documentary about how to make a movie, it's about life, movie making, and youtube, long before it existed.
Wargames - still relevant about how technology could destroy us. I feel like this is the Ferris Bueller's Day Off for Hackers.
And lastly, who could forget, Hackers.
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
This comment isn’t a rebuttal — I agree with you and every time I mull on these things I am reminded of the memorable saying from the movie Network.
The original “Fail Safe” is a great movie btw, if you’ve never seen it. As mentioned in the article, that and “Dr Strangelove” were based on the same book, with “Fail Safe” being the more sober interpretation. Amazing cast, and Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon”, “Network”, “Twelve Angry Men”) is a legendary director.
I wouldn't have chosen "The Machine Stops". The movie "Network", (1976) is rather close to "Fox and Friends".[1] "The Space Merchants" (C. M. Kornbluth, 1952) is more about the advertising business but has aspects of that.
[1] https://youtu.be/2FOD1jZr-S4
As an aside, “Fail Safe” (1964), is one of the best movies ever made, IMHO, about the risks of technology and warfare. Once you get past the slow pacing, the black and white... it’s an incredible film. It’s based on the same book as Dr Strangelove — but just takes a completely different, dramatic take on the material. You also get a chance to see why Henry Fonda is considered such a legendary actor. Sidney Lumet, the director, is also a legend: “Dog Day Afternoon”, “12 Angry Men”, “Network”...
As David Runciman has pointed out in his book How Democracy Ends and on the Talking Politics podcast - https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/71-how-democracy-ends - if you could only ask one question of someone you'd never met before, which would give you the best possibility of guessing whether they'd voted for Brexit, it would be whether they went to university (Remain) or not (Leave). He argues that, in the UK at least, there's a bubble of professional politicians who all went to university and were completely blindsided by the result of the Brexit referendum because they knew almost no-one who'd consider (or admit to) voting Leave.
Also John Lanchester's compelling (to me) argument that the bailing out of the banks after the crash (which was, on balance, right) followed quickly by austerity (where everyone else unfairly picked up the cheque for the bailout) lead directly to Brexit and Trump, because people were (to paraphrase the film Network) "mad as hell, and not going to take this anymore!" https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall
It really does feel that the university crowd (which I'm a part of) have completely detached from the lives of large chunks of the rest of the country. I get that this account of Amazon workplaces may be rose-tinted. Perhaps this facility is run by a good manager, and others aren't. But as it says, for this to be a specific kind of evil it needs to be compared to all other jobs in a similar environment. There are things that can be made better, sure, as there always are. But I find quite a bit of this middle-class hand-wringing tricky because it always seems to be well-paid journalists going "undercover". They'd probably find any manual labour degrading when compared to their comfortable Aeron chairs and plate-glass offices.
> You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
—- From the movie Network, 1976
To me it wasn’t about that at all. I read it in the context of the movie “Network” — the evolution of news from a public service towards one of profit generation. The point seems to be that as a culture we take “news” as reality. But ultimately it’s its own construct; having more to do with pulling emotional strings for attention than pushing a particular agenda. [Bias and propaganda certainly exist; but the argument here is about a different, overriding bias that serves the aims of “news” itself.]
James Fallows of the Atlantic has a great book from a long time ago called “Breaking the News” which offers a compelling take on how we ended up in this state, and what the news is really about.
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. The sociopaths running these projects have always cared solely about personal profit and power.
The company that became ExxonMobil supplied fuel for the Luftwaffe, while Davis Oil and Texaco fueled U-boats.
Chase Bank funneled money for the Nazis.
ITT improved German telecommunications infrastructure (working closely with the Gestapo) and built bombs.
Ford supplied tanks to the Nazis.
Hollywood changed content and even dropped films for the global market in collaboration with Nazi censors.
The Associated Press hired actual Nazis and hid the worst elements of Nazi Germany from the world so they could continue to operate there.
IBM's German subsidiary helped with the Holocaust, operating with the approval of the New York office during wartime.
Plenty of other US companies collaborated as well, often with the tacit approval of the government, which was given by sympathizers in positions of power and extracted by extortion, since the US needed their help to win the war.
US companies often had the same approach with the Soviet Union.
The thing is—it works. These companies get away with it again and again, and then the people in charge, and later their children, use their ill-gotten fortunes and influence to entrench themselves even more. It's literally Ned Beatty's speech from the end of Network.
http://www.ivanachubbuck.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Network-Monologue-Ned-Beatty.pdf
A little bit before that, everyone thought "the Arabs" would buy everything -- see the movie Network. (No, I mean it, see it, it's brilliant).
What?
My advice is to study the techniques, to better guard against them. This much is obvious, no?
Though illustrative, I acknowledge The Illuminati and the Subgenius stuff are not very accessible.
Thank You for Smoking https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427944 and Network https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958 are probably more your speed.
Clearly you haven't yet seen Network:
https://youtu.be/yuBe93FMiJc?t=19s
(I highly recommend the film if you haven't seen it)
Not a new problem. My favorite modern retellings:
"Network" [1978] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/
"De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" [1980] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v2GDbEmjGE
Dialectics are hard, man.
But to be fair, the longer we get into the current era of politics, the harder it is to distinguish between earnestness and satire. Young people who watch the movie Network today don't see Howard Beale as satirical, because there are too many people like him today who are deadly serious.
I have asked these questions in interviews like these and truly -- I get straight-up blatantly illegal discriminatory answers based on age and experience level. It's as though these interviewers have no idea that we have laws against discrimination in the US, and I'm guessing because they are not properly trained in hiring practices/we just don't hold companies accountable for discrimination like we should. This has happened to me four times in the past year alone. Even worse, it has happened to my over 40, African American friend and colleague many more times than that in the past year even though he has a CS degree and experience in teaching code with modern languages. He can't get a dev job, despite his ability to code and teach it and document it well. He's a published writer to boot. They always ask him in interviews why he has not worked as a dev (outside his own projects) at a company... why has he only taught coding? Of course the unvoiced answer goes a little something like this: "well, because companies tend to hire devs according to what is more politely known as "culture-fit", and I just don't seem to "fit the current culture", if you know what I mean." He just needs a job, any job, working in his field or adjacent to it in any way. For three years, he has looked as though it was his more-than-full-time job. (of course then the question is-- what have you been doing outside these side-projects and the unspoken answer is: "interviewing, if I get lucky enough to get an interview, with anyone who will hire me every waking moment of the past three years, when I'm not doing side-projects to make it look like I'm doing something time-consuming and deep and meaningful for no money." He went through his savings doing side-projects and applying to jobs. He's about to be homeless. He recently went after technical writing positions instead of dev roles hoping the age and race thing would be less of an issue. It was ridiculous: he applied at a well-known hosting company for a tech writer job. They put him through his paces with a take home of ridiculous scope/length (for free, as you do). He politely and squarely nailed it. They wrote him back telling him he didn't get to advance because he made a mistake in his directions and they didn't do what he said they did. This was outrageously incorrect. It makes a person want to scream. Instead of being outraged and screaming out the window like in the movie Network, he wrote them back in the most gracious way possible and explained how he understood how their mistake can easily get made by anyone, (not really, but ok, he was being nice) and why his direction was in fact correct and that as a result, he hoped to meet them in person soon, as he was eager to discuss "how he could help over at XYZ" or similar. (this after two phone interviews with them worried he might be overqualified for an associate role there, during which he assured him that the pay would be great, and that he's be happy to write documentation at any level and help in any way he could--). Well, guess what? They wrote back to thank him for alerting them to their ridiculous error, stating that they would change the assignment for future candidates based upon his gracious and clear suggestions (pretty much the definition of his effective technical writing helping them at their company right there). They then explained that he didn't do some other piddling aspect of the writing that if it were an actual compaint, could be solved by a team conversation on preferences. (but the crit was actually untrue in a concrete way, just like the above) Anyway, they let him know that they would not be inviting him to the on-site.
Neither one of us can get hired anywhere despite multiple degrees and experience in engineering and in other fields. We are both over 40 and unemployable. Can't get jobs at Trader Joe's bagging groceries (and other unskilled labor, yes- have tried very hard)... overqualified, you see. Maybe we should try for a job in neurosurgery? Neither one of us has experience in that field...
I love that it's a "will someone please think of the children" piece, but really, adults are just as self absorbed. Being able to see how everyone around you is tuned out to the real world (on their phone, talking to imaginary bluetooth people) it's hard to ignore (especially when it's the person in the car next to you).
> “And I know when I take [technology] away from my kids what happens,” Fadell says. “They literally feel like you’re tearing a piece of their person away from them—they get emotional about it, very emotional. They go through withdrawal for two to three days.”
I mean, you could say the same thing for me and SNES, and that was long before phones. Or TV.
Go watch the movie Network if you haven't seen it. TV was the Facebook of its day.
I think the real question is one of human psychology and development. Now that we have more power, more information at our command, how do we use that? How does society, psychology and individual action need to change in order to let humans use the ever increasing power of technology responsibly? Same goes for climate change, nuclear weapons, poverty, healthcare, etc.
It's reminiscent of the way that broadcast news was transformed as profit became a motive (basically the themes that are explored in the movie 'Network').
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
I'm sure you can find lots of bad and shallow movies released in 1976 (e.g. a rather bad remake of King Kong) though there were also a number of good films in addition to Network (All the President's Men, Taxi Driver, Rocky). Network was particularly good though and seems rather prescient today.
One of the strengths of Network is the lack of music. In fact if I remember correctly the opening scene is just the camera moving through a newsroom with ambient sound.
Music can date a film badly.
In a weird coincidence, I watched the movie "Network" (1976) with my wife & kids last night, none of whom had ever seen it. They liked it. It didn't even feel very dated, despite the fact that the televisions all looked like the one in this picture. The complexity of the dialogue in the movie astonished us. More was expected of the audience back then.
I thought about creating a syllabus of essential biz/capitalism/media movies for new grads tonight. "Network", "There Will Be Blood", "Office Space", etc.
Let's build this thing...
People need to wake the fuck up. This is not a test. This is not a drill. I feel like a person from the movie Network. I'm mad as hell and want to shout it from my window.
News like this has me gardening, biking, DIYing all sorts, switching to solar and electric, considering the entire lifecycle and systemic effects of the products I buy and choices I make. But an enormous percentage of Americans, who have the same data and news available to them, go vote for Trump. We are so royally fucked.
(I apologize for the language used here, but strongly believe in targeted use of the f-bomb. End-of-world type issues qualify as far as I'm concerned.)
That "speech" in that Black Mirror episode for me is up there with the "Network" rant.
> All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit. What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful. You couldn't. Yeah? It'd break us. We're too numb for it.
I wonder if there had ever been a show in the history of television in which 70% of viewers who watched the pilot made it to the finale. Fortunately, the article states Netflix has no plans to "rejigger" (i like that word, plan on using it more) its method of greenlighting shows. Which probably, despite the enormous quantity of data they collect, still resembles something akin to that scene in "Network," where they consider doing a docu-drama about the Symbionese Liberation Army.
You can count me as one of the 30% that never makes it past the first ten minutes of even the most acclaimed serial content. I just like movies. But out of curiosity I did watch the extended trailer of the 500 Startups reality show "Bazillion Dollar Club." There is a scene where a team is finalizing a prototype with its sourced design consultants. Its all dudes and they select a shape that is, well, let's just say suggestively masculine in its proportion. They decide they need to counterbalance their opinion with the female perspective and invite the ladies on staff to give their opinion. The women choose a completely different design. Soft, with rounded curves. But most importantly they have a visceral negative reaction to the men's choice. But the startup leadership completely ignores what I would consider a very important data point in favour of an arbitrary metric. That "70% of men make electronic purchasing decisions for their households." Completely ignoring the fact that generally, men don't really care about the appearance of their gadgets, just that they function properly. And that women generally tend to make the design choices at home. Obviously a very broad generalization but still.
The lesson here is about letting stats influence faulty reasoning while ignoring intuition. It doesn't appear that Netflix is allowing data to dictate programming. Yet.
I think this quote from the movie Network, might be relevant here.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes?item=qt0447849
The scene (in fact, the whole movie also) is worth watching too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKkRDMil0bw
> I also take offense at the libelous implication that Amelia (author) makes of the sexual nature of Wadhwa's offer to talk to people who disagree with him at his private office at Stanford.
I don't really think it's like that. It's more the latently threatening implications of requesting that someone come see you, one-on-one, behind closed doors on your own turf.
Think of it like the iconic scene in the film Network (as referenced earlier this week in the Better Call Saul premiere) where Ned Beatty's seemingly-harmless Arthur Jensen invites Peter Finch's anxious and ambitious Howard Beale to talk in his corporate conference room. Once the doors close and Beale is without recourse or defense, Jensen blows up into an apocalyptic rage, contextualized by his tone and environment to inescapably inculcate his forced parishioner that he is no less than, as Beale meakly whimpers at the end of the tirade, "the face of God".
Clip for those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuBe93FMiJc#t=20s
Thirded.
However, Network is more of an economic conspiracy movie and less of a military conspiracy one, and it's got nothing to do with nuclear weapons or war.
Another film manages to do this and was nearly written off by the screenwriter for being too "Strangelovian" at times. Network.
Highly prescient film. Both Network and Strangelove are mandatory watches, IMHO.
Or they see Network[1] and they just never watch TV anymore.
1: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/
Is anyone else reminded of "Network", near the end (spoilers, for a 40 year old film), in which the Howard Beale character goes off on a rant about a secretive global merger, causing the public to flood the government with protest, which then earns Beale a meeting with the company CEO and a lecture on free trade and the insignificance of humanity?
If you haven't seen "Network", it's the movie from which, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" comes from. However, the movie is not really about standing up for your rights, it's more about modern American media, and of all the satirical movies I've ever seen, it's the one that comes closest to predicting what has come to pass. It's a brilliant, brilliant movie...the only one, I believe, to have nominees in all four Oscar acting categories (it won 3 of them).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(film)
Since you seem to be overly fond of coming across as highly sophisticated, I will have you know that you said it in language the OP understands, not in a language, good sir. Furthermore, I disagree with you in substance, and although I don't feel motivated at this point in time to write an essay on the matter, I do sincerely hope this quote from the movie "Network" might suffice:
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
Reminds me to the best motion picture I've ever seen: "The Network" from 1976.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE
I want you to get mad!
And I love how this movie naively predicts the madness in concentrated power. Naively because attractors such as powers will always be existing generators of fractions of people going into similar directions generating new ideas and innovation replacing control with choice.
Reading this I'm reminded of the movie Network. A major network producer sees the value of producing original "disaster porn" (my term, not from the film) for public consumption in a television news magazine. Only here we see that a one-hour news magazine hardly begins to strain the attention span of the average consumer. Rather the author of this blog post seems to recognize that the public is desirous of far more, and that they may be led so easily by piecing out details bit-by-bit. How often does real life deliver on--and even exceed--it's own satire?
On a related note, the author is listed as Edward O'Neil, which just happens to be the name of the actor who portrayed Stan Mikita in the referenced film. Color me intrigued...
For anyone about to click the above YouTube link: if you haven't yet seen the 1976 film Network, don't click the link, watch the film instead.
Watching it probably won't do much to spoil the film, though it is a great scene that's made greater by context - and it's a fantastic film, that more people should watch.
I've always wondered if Steve was inspired by the movie "Network":
"We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF..."
I highly recommend it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(film)
Network (1976) - The phrase "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" comes from this film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/
The hidden assumption of "Idiocracy" is that survival of the fittest is the only selection mechanism. Even if survival and breeding become trivial, sexual selection will continue, and many intelligent people will only want to mate with others of their kind, even if they become overwhelmed numbers-wise.
I understand, though, that the film is an allegory, and as such it succeeds admirably. In terms of the downward trajectory of our political and cultural discourse, it is disturbingly spot-on. Reminds me a little of the prescience of "Network": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29
There is a good movie called "The Network". It is about a news corporation, and what they will sacrifice in order to get ratings. It is a bit old but the message of the movie is timeless.
One of the many great quotes:
Diana Christensen: I watched your 6 o'clock news today; it's straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park; on the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex, scandal, brutal crime, sports, children with incurable diseases, and lost puppies. So, I don't think I'll listen to any protestations of high standards of journalism when you're right down on the streets soliciting audiences like the rest of us. Look, all I'm saying is if you're going to hustle, at least do it right.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/
The reason why I get too uncomfortable around this kinda stuff is that they seem to treat human-beings like machines.. These entities seem to say, we know what you do, what you like, when you're hungry, what you're supposed to do... etc. We're gonna get you so bombarded with stuff that you lose whatever little consciousness you have and start spending wherever we ask you to..
From movie Network (1976): "I'm a human being, goddamn it. My life has value."
I think the movie Network (made in 1976!) was really close to exactly this hybrid.