Hacker Cinema
They Live
1988 · Film · 93 min
Directed by John Carpenter
A lone drifter stumbles upon a unique pair of sunglasses that reveal aliens are systematically gaining control of the Earth by masquerading as humans and lulling the public into submission.
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92 comments on Hacker News
Ever see that movie, They Live?
Also... Money is Theft and The Economy is a Lie. Education inoculates you against new facts. Our meritocratic democracy ensures government by the mediocre.
As Paul Virillo once quipped, "the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck." And we appear to have shot the ensign who was looking out for icebergs.
"They Live" was a documentary. "Idiocracy" is far too optimistic to be accurate. Reflexive modernity has made Ballard's "High Rise" into a love story.
Will the people wake up?
We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).
"Did you watch The Matrix on cinema, without knowing anything about the movie?"
Yeah, that's what I mean. I went in not knowing anything, never having seen any trailers. And halfway through I went, "oh this is They Live, but the skeletons wear sunglasses."
Well - while I like the movie, I'd also not want to see these slogans. I use ublock origin to get rid of unwanted content. I also simplify user interfaces a LOT. My default youtube view I have removed a lot of stuff from (hopefully one day I no longer have to use youtube; I don't want google in my life, but I haven't yet found enough motivation to degoogle my life completely); same with old.reddit.com back when I was still using reddit. So I think your proposal, while not bad in its own right, may not be ideal either - I'd not consider this an easter egg but rather content I'd want to block, so ublock origin would not do its job properly if it were to show this to me (and keep in mind I like They Live).
I had a similar problem with Nate when he abused all KDE users with his "donate-now-or-else" daemon (https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1f42sew/kde_is_asking_for_donations_in_plasma/).
I never ever want KDE widgets to pop up and pester me (that does not mean I have anything against donations; I have a lot against people who abuse the user base though, such as pestering them via unwanted pester-widgets. Sadly when you point this out on reddit, you get banned from #kde, same as when you critisize systemd on #linux - reddit censorship is out of hands).
They Live was such a fun B movie. It is also kind of timeless.
It is far from a perfect or even very good movie, but the key messages are great and simple and the "chew bubblegem" scene is one very actionable scene. Long live Roddy.
> Basically skeptical of common forms in modernity, that is very clearly the intention. However, I have also seen that in extreme far-right communities this film represents how Jewish people control the world... somehow I don't think that is what Carpenter was going for.
Say what you will about claiming that the Jews secretly control the world like the aliens in the 1988 John Carpenter movie They Live, the people making this claim are certainly not obeying, conforming, or refraining from questioning authority.
I think we can agree that this is not something anybody will actually use, but rather an homage to "They Live", and IMHO, letting this be done by AI is in contrast to the basic premise of the movie.
"They live" was a cult classic, and great fun if you were a Roddy Piper fan.
Other entertaining films =3
"The Great Dictator" (Charlie Chaplin, 1940)
https://archive.org/details/the-great-dictator-disc-01-title-2
"Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951)
https://archive.org/details/day-the-earth-stood-still-1951
"Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" (1956)
https://archive.org/details/invasionofthebodysnatchers1956_201911/
"The Man in the White Suit" (1951)
https://archive.org/details/the-man-in-the-white-suit_202105
"The Twilight Zone" (1959)
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-01-e-00-original-pilot/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S01E12+What+You+Need.mp4
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-01-e-00-original-pilot/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S01E25+People+Are+Alike+All+Over.mp4
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-03-e-15-a-quality-of-mercy/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S03E24+To+Serve+Man.mp4
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-03-e-15-a-quality-of-mercy/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S03E28+The+Little+People.mp4
Oh the irony: "They Live", a movie famously about alienation and dehumanization, and you let AI do all the coding.
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin to question what they see.
There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich in Denmark or Sweden for instance.
Most people don’t want to admit that the author of the book wants you to take the book and movie at face value and thus the film/book are unironically right wing coded.
A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that.
Similarly, “they live” might have tried to pretend to be liberal coded and that might be the directors intention, but it’s schizo /pol/ right wing coded too in practice. After the Epstein stuff, we need reparations for /pol/ schizos.
They Live vibes from your comment.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/
Literally my first thought was "They Live!"[0]. Like that color is so unnatural and even that pattern has been copied for many other Sci-Fi movies that I'd think there'd be a very strong association with "alien"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
That's the point of the movie. Nada got played, and he played himself. It was sound and fury, but it signified something, because it's a movie, not a documentary or fable. Sometimes there's not a sensible ending. Nada didn't get a good guy ending because good guys don't exist the way Nada thought they did.
Nada is not smart. He's a useful idiot. I think that like The Thing, They Live is pretty ideological and subversive, but it's also just a weird campy movie. It's a genre flick, but there's a reason it's a cult classic. Just like Zizek and his guide to cinema, Carpenter knows how to make iconic quotable expressions involving a camera.
> start really strong and then just descend into pointless violence
So it goes.
Artists tell the truth by first telling a lie.
https://i.redd.it/ak5ejwle2li01.jpg
I really wanted to like They Live especially after having watched The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Similar with The Thing which is also directed by John Carpenter. Both movies start really strong and then just descend into pointless violence. Anyway, I digress ...
Social Media in general (not just Nextdoor) has outed so many angry, belligerent, mentally-unwell, terrible people who, for a really long time, have successfully pretended to be normal and nice. Not just neighbors, but friends and even family. It's like the movie They Live, but where we all suddenly got the ability to see who the antagonists are, and realized there are so many more than we thought there were...
> Anyone got any good advice?
Let yourself be sad about it. It is sad. Our potential as a species is being squandered for the sake of unmitigated greed. On a personal level, it's deeply depressing how things could have been so different for our loved ones.
If you have at least one close friend who can still listen and think for themselves, then you're doing okay. It's when you can't talk about this stuff that it gets most toxic. - if that ever happens, there's still books, movies... They Live is a good one.. Anything to remind you that you're not alone.
Even seeing people express these ideas is a relief, so thanks for that.
Also, there are good reasons to be hopeful, or at least stoic. Karma is inevitable. It may be that all this was necessary in some way... Like how the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs made room for mammals. Those loopholes in human nature which are being abused; they won't work for ever. And surprises can be surprising - unpredictable phase shifts can turn things around in unforeseeable ways.
In any case, we're responsible for the effort; not the outcome. Be good
That wasn't a solution. It was just one of many statistics listed by the article.
Also, the comment about secular monks mentions friends before spouses and children. It's about the total lack of other people:
> What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children.
The article talks about sixth graders, who are kids themselves and obviously can't get married and have kids:
> In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent.
And marriage in itself is obviously not the solution:
> Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week.
Again, kids and teenagers can't get married and have kids:
> American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens
The article talks about young people meeting friends. Again, this is not about marriage and having kids:
> Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.
I could go on and on:
> The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.
It's only in your mind that this article is somehow a "marry and reproduce" message like in the movie "They Live".
Nobody in the article mentions Star Trek movies, though. That guy mentions "They Live" and somebody else makes a comparison to Dementors in Harry Potter movies, but Star Trek was gratuitously inserted by your cranky chatbot.
Not so distant. The films are only a decade apart and They Live was hugely influential.
Part of me agrees with you, but another part of me hesitates to dehumanize anyone, as that way lies madness.
I'm reminded of the film They Live (1988). The protagonist, Nada, seeks a job at a construction site, as that is his trade. Due to the union, the foreman can only hire Nada as a day laborer, as Nada is not in the union. His way of life is gate-kept by powerful interests controlling the hiring process, and access to capital is constrained by these interests. By the time Nada obtains the sunglasses, he has already lost that job and is well down the path of becoming radicalized. Ironically perhaps, he first heard about the group producing the sunglasses when they hijacked the TV signals to essentially advertise their ideology.
Once Nada acquires the glasses, he could be said to be enlightened, but I also view it as a sort of cautionary tale, considering how the film ends for Nada. Along the way, he sees through all of the ads, and in fact much of the surrounding content itself rings hollow for him. His actions are reminiscent of Ted Kaczynski in this context. Why didn’t he instead seek to join the union? Were the glasses actually what they purported to be, or were they a kind of rose-colored glasses that were designed to manipulate the wearer just like the advertisements did, but while making them believe they were seeing things more truly? Nada thought he was acting under his own agency before putting on the glasses, and yet he so readily trusted that he was still after putting them on, while adopting an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian ideology as part of an underground fringe group.
Perhaps Nada was just tired of being part of the system, but by rage quitting as he did, we as the viewer are led to believe he goes out in a blaze of glory, but I view his exit to stage left thusly as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” to quote the Bard of Avon. There is no exit from capitalism that way, if there is any alternative at all if capitalist realism holds true, and Nada’s final line is perhaps an admission that he was himself used all along, and he was simply tired of scraping by and being in scrapes. He had gone down the path he was on as long as he was willing to go, and there was no way back, as he was already too far gone to come back.
I’m reminded of the is/ought distinction, and I’d make a similar distinction between advertisements/content. Content is itself a similar kind of appeal to believe or think about concepts and ideals and ideas that come from outside ourselves. Due to the power of belief, capital seeks to gate-keep access to content, and advertising acts as a sort of escape hatch, blow-off valve, or side door through which access to those seeking content are able to be reached, accessible for a fee. It’s not exactly ideal, and not without its own hidden costs to the buyer or seller.
Lack of capital is the conflict that leads to the crisis in Nada’s life, but I wish that his story had a happy ending. I feel that Nada was perhaps less free after putting on the sunglasses than he was before, as strange as that may sound. He fell for a classic blunder, believing that he actually was immune to advertising, rather than being sold an even bigger lie: that he could (only?) effect change through violence, that his life was no longer worth living.
Thank you for the interesting write-up.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
> There is a pretty good explanation of this in the documentary movie 'They Live'.
Featuring renowned journalist Roddy Piper, no less.
There is a pretty good explanation of this in the documentary movie 'They Live'. Turns out they're just aliens most of us can't see.
> take hacker for example... I think that it started as something good.
You just reminded me of one of the earlier uses of “hacker” in popular culture that I’m aware of - They Live (1988) - one of the vagrant guys in the homeless encampment referred to the interference upon the analog TV broadcast as being the work of a hacker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V-4JHT2q3w
This fictional hack may be inspired by actual events from a year earlier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijacking
I remember one of the kids in the film Jurassic Park referring to themselves as a hacker, but this time in a positive light. Not sure if that line was in the original book, or if that was an addition for the movie.
I wouldn't consider multinational corporations defrauding me into thinking I'm dealing with my fellow countrymen as positive. In fact, it's literally the plot of the movie They Live.
Imagine if Chinese companies masqueraded as American when they sell you phones and gadgets, or American companies masqueraded as Indonesian as they buy up their farmland.
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
Or, even simpler - replace it with the 1-2 word version of the message so that it's obvious and blatant. Like the 'They Live' movie. Long as it's a decent AI at reasonable speed, that sounds incredibly useful.
Edit: if those apple glasses take off, and we can live-edit text in the real world (if it's done, it'd probably be for sign translation etc) - those 'They Live' glasses could probably become an actual reality.
“They Live” as in the movie from 30ish years ago?
One day it will be like the movie, "They Live", only putting the glasses on prevents the ads that have invaded every waking moment of your life from showing.
Right-on. EG Often-repeated chirpy jingles with imperative lyrics will hang around in heads for decades. Couple of oldies:
"See the USA in your [??] ..."
"You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with [??] ..."
Carpenter's They Live was great pointing out how many 'OBEY's are buried in adverts. 30 years before, Vance Packard The Hidden Persuaders was published. 2010, Eldon Taylor's Mind Programming.
Worse yet: TV tearing a great movie up into shreds punctuated with adverts (imagine doing that to famous paintings). I eventually dropped cable as a result.
"Lower than pond-scum" = all the disciples of Freud's nephew Ed Bernays.
> the right combination of hardware and software > this is actually an empowering piece of tech
People wear sunglasses to avoid eye contact, Roddy Pipers character wore one in the movie "They Live" to see the real message - I would love one that blocks irl ads. Perhaps when they're small and hackable enough.
When I was working in a bacteria research lab I often thought about how cool/terrible it would be to have magic glasses to actually see the invisible, biologically thriving worlds that are present on basically every surface of this planet, in the style of the movie 'they live'. [1] It would be either terrifyingly fascinating or fascinatingly terrifying.
This invisible world is even on all of the surfaces in and around your body, right now! We are all each host to a personalized ecosystem of microbial organisms. Something like 1-3 percent of 'your' body mass actually belongs to other organisms that you can't see.
P.S. stay up to date on the tetanus vaccine! It's not just in rusty nails, it's pretty much everywhere.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live
It's 'they' again isn't it? They are everywhere. Better be careful, they probably run this website too. And your ISP.
Have you seen the movie 'They Live'? If not, go see it, that's what's really happening!!
I disagree.
Blade Runner seems to age like wine, and becomes more poignant with each re-watch.
It has a good pace, amazing visuals, asks tough questions, has some really good action sequences, etc.
Of course, everyone is looking for different things in movies and the experience is highly subjective.
Blade Runner will always be one of my favorites - right there with Contact, They Live, Jurassic Park, and other top-notch SciFi films.
>> now that I have kids I'll soon be on the other side trying to convince them that the old stuff I like is cool and special
Nope. Kids today have access to everything under the sun. The classics still resonate with them. My kid loves Queen and Zepplin. Enjoyed the hell out of "They Live", the Matrix and many other classic movies. Not so much John Carpenters "the Thing" which even I found a bit slow these days.
A lot of this was discovered without my introduction too. Music in particular.
Share the movies without explanation. Classics are universal.
> Did mixed races no exist at the time of the stories writing?
Not really, Asimov was born in 100% white Russia and then moved to USA during the 1920s where segregation was still a thing.
> Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist?
Of course there were different worlds with different cultures, rites, traditions, religions and even food (or martial arts), but their look is not taken into great account. Asimov was a biochemist after all, not an anthropologist.
I agree that actualization of a work of fiction it is not bending objective facts, my impression though is that content platforms are more following than leading, they are giving the public what the public will consume, which is dull, it is like giving kids candies or cake because we already know they'll eat them.
There is no real surprise, no Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead or Carpenter's The Thing/Assault on Precint 13/They live, no Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, everything is so canonical and completely unimaginative. There is no space left for provocative, out of the box, even offensive, creation (unless it is sexually defining for minorities, like a dildo, homosexual intercourse, etc. something that wouldn't even shock my 82 years old dad)
In a way they are segmenting the market based on the idea they wanna project of themselves:
- Netflix: social activists involved in identity politics, teenagers (with superpower or supernatural powers), binge watchers, kids and some old show to entertain their parents too (all of Star Trek for example, the only reason I still use Netflix)
- Prime Video: crime aficionados, intelligent comedy (it better be British), superheroes with a twist, people like me who already pay for amazon prime and are not young anymore
- Apple TV: fancy, grandiose, epic stories, that unfortunately lack in writing and results are mixed. For people who love a great cast in a show.
- HBO: actual quality content, for people who love to pay for quality content.
It makes me think of the movie "They Live", which predates Google.
You just need to put on the special glasses right? They Live is a great movie. "I came here to kick ass and chew gum, and I'm all out of chewing gum." is one of my favorite lines from it.
beyond having one of the best extended fight scenes in a movie, I think that "they live" is as close to Hollywood acknowledging fnords as you're bound to get.
Reference to a great cult movie: They Live with Roddy Piper and Keith David.
If you remember from the documentary the analysis of the movie They Live, the protagonist puts on the glasses in order to see the truth. For Zizek, the putting on (not taking off) of the glasses is crucial. It is specifically not a gesture of unmasking:
“The key feature here is that to see the true nature of things, we need the glasses: it is not that we should put ideological glasses off to see directly reality as it is”: we are “naturally” in ideology, our natural, immediate, sight is ideological.”
https://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=397
Unless you have good reason to see any malice: assume there is none, because it'll be less stressful, and you're less likely to get into embarrassing self-defeating arguments.
The incentives make sense for commercial companies to participate to gain exposure, and the organizers probably don't mind if it boosts their attendance (although it can, as you've observed, reduce the sense of authenticity for some participants - even award-winners like yourselves).
Choosing a project to sponsor with the winnings is a tricky question. What kind of properties would you look for in an honest, enabling open source project? (disclaimer / notice: I both work in the area of open source software, and have a (free and) open source project, and I wouldn't make any request for your money in either of those contexts -- I'm not indirectly fishing for anything)
For some reason your comment made me think of the film "They Live" (very tongue-in-cheek) which you might enjoy, if you haven't seen it already.
Conform to influence. OBEY.
I was going to upload a nice screencap from a 1988 movie They Live to IMGZ and link it here, but it turns out my trial expired so no link for you.
That is also the premise of these three great films, inducing disease/mind-control via digital communication:
1. Videodrome
2. They Live
3. Pontypool (which heavily references SnowCrash, the book)
It would not surprise me if this becomes a concern this century (e.g., digital manipulation of the brain remotely).
I think the message of They Live; is that our rulers complete lack of empathy for ordinary people means they might as well be aliens.
I'm more interested in what the movie tells me than in the message the author was trying to convey. If you look at it from the rulers perspective, it will depende on whichever the rulers are. I prefer to look from the perspective of the individual and how propaganda and the need to conform affects my ideas, conscience and behaviour.
I know that Shepard Fairey is familiar with They Live, my (abstract) question is how many people familiar with him know of the movie.
> Everyone knows that advertising and the news are run by agendas.
I really want to emphasise this point. The reason They Live might not resonate with younger audiences is they've already internalised its message. Ironically, mass culture has been the greatest disseminator of the ideas the film has about mass culture.
If you haven't seen "They Live", I recommend you watch it on a double bill with Alex Cox's 1984 masterpiece "Repo Man"
"...in They Live, ideology is not imposed, Zizek postulates. Rather, Nada puts on the glasses in order to see how things really are, because ideology is "spontaneous relationships to our social world" and therefore indivisible from reality. The glasses, therefore, finally remove ideology from the equation."
Except that in They Live ideology is imposed by the aliens.
"In the movie's most notorious scene, Nada tries to impose this truth on another person, brawling with Armitage for several minutes in order to force him to put on the glasses. This endless fight scene, possibly the longest in cinema history, is a metaphor for the struggle to achieve enlightenment. "To step out of ideology ... you must force yourself to do it," Zizek concludes. "Freedom hurts.""
But Piper's character didn't have to force himself to put on the glasses. There was no struggle and it didn't hurt.
Zizek is amusing and I agree with many of his left-wing sentiments, but a lot of what he says is pure bullshit, concocted to sound profound with zero substance to it if you think about it for half a second.
"They Live, meanwhile, sort of became reality... Drones in the sky, conspiracies in our heads, militarized police in the streets, economic inequality in every corner of society, media that seeks to control our minds"
Max Headroom and Brazil were a couple of other 80's scifi films which were uncannily prescient.
I wonder how many people familiar with OBEY iconography variations[0] or OBEY Clothing actually watched They Live.
It's a pretty corny movie, but it's quite good.
And regarding warnings, I can't help but feel Idiocracy is also one we're not paying attention to.
[0] I own a t-shirt with futurama's hypnotoad, and I love it
I recently read that the main character in "They Live" had an entire backstory that was never told in the movie. Someone (producer, director, ???) Told Roddy Piper to create a backstory for his character and he did, and he played that part even though it was never shared with anyone. I'd thought about that myself for writing - if you define each character ahead of time and keep their character in mind it will aid writing their parts so they are seamless and self-consistent.
Go is good. Based on decades long research and experiments of Rob Pike and others.
It's interesting to read comments by employees of american corporations that act like members of a national-socialist organization(of workers).
There are people from Europe(not western) that became almost suicidal after working in those environments in US. Main principles of some organizations are pathological lying and suppression of free speech in any forms.
That banner is like a test of obedience. Anyone who questions it - is problematic, "toxic". It doesn't matter what that banner contains.
Obey. "They Live" movie.(1988, John Carpenter)
For those unaware, the premise of They Live is that the elites and one-percenters are actually inter-dimensionally traveling space aliens.
It's a great movie, but a metaphor not a "time-shifted documentary", unless I missed the latest Qdrop.
It’s mostly normal people freely associating with other normal people, without fascist establishment elite government control, like Twitter, Facebook, elite media, and most other social media.
Did you ever wonder why you are calling others far right or far left? Why are you referring to other American citizens with those terms? Who is pushing those terms that divide the vast majority of normal Americans? Who stands to gain?
The fascist establishment elite are getting richer by the second, while the lower classes are calling each other insulting names and fighting amongst themselves.
There’s an old movie called They Live. When you watch it now, you can call it time shifted documentary.
Be careful, you'll be called wrong thinker and censored and deplatformed.
There's an old movie called They Live, starring wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper.
It's supposed to be satire on consumer culture, but looking at it now can be thought as time shifted documentary.
There's an old movie called They Live, starring wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper.
It was supposed to be satire on consumer culture. Looking at it again, it's could be called forward time shifted documentary.
Now that you've become "Red Pilled" as wrong thinker, you'll search out for more truths.
Especially how the establishment elite class pushes propaganda and pits the lower classes against each other.
When lower classes are fighting each other about racism, etc. then they don't have time to fight against oligarchy. How the establishment elite keeps getting richer every second.
> Is [OBEY] related to Carpenter's movie?
Yes. This is covered a bit in jwz's writeup "They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo".
I think very few people realize Shepard Fairey ripped off Carpenter’s “They Live” movie.
Sounds like he watched the movie They Live too many times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJC4R1uXDaE
Adversity is the rock against which you sharpen your knife. If that rock is always covered with silk pillows, you are going to grow up dull indeed.
You would think money would, while maybe not buying happiness, at least free you from the kind of sniveling, insecure, desperate worrying these parents seem to be engaged in. Apparently not. "We're just one Harvard rejection away from totally still having plenty of money OMG!!!" It's like their brains have been hijacked. It's like being in that movie "They Live" before finding the magic sunglasses.
> that violence and illegal activities may be both legitimate and necessary to pursue justice. Dystopian fiction appears to subtly expand the political imagination of viewers and readers to encompass a range of scenarios outside the normal realm of democratic politics, and what people then consider reasonable and thinkable appears to expand accordingly.
America was founded on a revolution, and often changing the system from within for anything other than the most trivial issues is seen to the cynics seems impossible.
The fact is that in the present mode of existence the only revolutions that do happen can only happen in fiction. Like for instance see the movie They Live! The protagonist finds himself completely alienated by his newly perceived reality and decides to chew gum and kick ass to get to the bottom of it, only to find that he's in a much deeper hole than something he can do anything about, the aliens run a galactic economic empire of which earth is just a small part -- which could be a pretty apt metaphor for individual existence or maybe the human condition -- even the most powerful can do little about the system. Who controls us? Maybe it's money or technology or a conspiracy, or God, or bacteria and viruses?
So the message is one of revolution because those who are unhappy with reality as it is, can only rebel against it on the screen or in books... and do so idealistically without any sort of heavy handed intellectual exercise which might cause revolution in a hundred years -- like for instance Communism.
The truth is that these days revolution can only be televised. And that is itself cathartic for both the author and for the audience.
This is absolutely brilliant:
“As for the design? Cash says they modeled the glasses after the 1988 film, They Live, in which a magic pair of sunglasses exposes the subliminal messaging in advertisements. When viewed through the special lenses, billboards revealed messages like OBEY, CONSUME, CONFORM, placed there by aliens to surreptitiously control humanity. It struck Cash as the perfect metaphor—just replace the alien overlords in the film with the mind-hijacking companies of Silicon Valley.“
I've had the same reaction, "They live" was an unforgettable movie. These glasses appear to have the same design as well
> As for the design? Cash says they modeled the glasses after the 1988 film, They Live, in which a magic pair of sunglasses exposes the subliminal messaging in advertisements.
I have come here to chew bubblegum and block screens, and I'm all out of bubblegum.
The article mentions that the film served as their design inspiration.
"As for the design? Cash says they modeled the glasses after the 1988 film, They Live, in which a magic pair of sunglasses exposes the subliminal messaging in advertisements."
Pretty damn cool.
Sort of reminds me of the sunglasses from the 1988 John Carpenter film: "They Live".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w
SPOILER ALERT
in my mind, a sequel to They Live would pick up ~30 years after the events of the first film, where it becomes obvious that everyone saw the ghouls in their midst and responded by essentially shrugging. it seems to me that's pretty much what happened irl.
"They Live" is a cheesy sci-fi movie on this topic that should be mandatory viewing.
If you like Alien you might go back to Carpenter’s first movie, Dark Star. And if you like Dark Star you might look at They Live! (That is if you haven’t already.)
That said, I’ll need a very strong recommendation before I see Blade Runner 2.
As in the example you pointed out, this is a very common trope in SF. Often aliens are used, rather than animals; a recent well known example is District 9. Or my favorite example (in film), They Live.
>WSWS is a political and a ideological advocacy site
I'm always a little amused when people use "ideology" in this way. Marx said that ideology promotes "false consciousness" about political power structures; by this measure, that which exposes false consciousness is anti-ideological. So by this measure, WSWS is non-ideological.
On the other hand, Zizek claims that for someone to actually be captured by ideology, the ideology must be first presented to them as non-ideological. Can you see the conundrum? Ideology isn't an illusion, rather, to be rid of ideology may be to put on the glasses rather than take them off, to use Zizek's example in the film They Live.
>with a non-mainstream interpretation of world history
Perhaps it is the mainstream that is ideological, because it's true ideology that holds the most power!
Most major movies are, if not "CONSUME", "OBEY", etc billboards (like in "They Live"), at least party-line affairs promoting the establishment.
Between promoting the prevalent mores (instead of criticizing them), military manipulation to promote "national interests" like in TFA, product placements, and plots for your inner 13 year old in movies for 40 year olds, with the rare exception it's a long way since the 60s-70s and films like "The Network", "Apocalypse Now" and the rest..
I'm 0 for Thrillers on this list and only 2 for SciFi. So my word is suspect. But still, I would recommend startup.com for the documentaries.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
I'd also recommend 2001, Repo Man, Dark Star and They Live on general principles.
Eight O'clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson which was the basis for the movie They Live.
Read it here: http://www.whale.to/b/eight_o.html
The Egg by Andy Weir http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
I had the opposite experience when I moved to the US (coming from Europe). It struck me how people consumed more of everything. Tech gadgets, food... I think in Europe we are a bit more defiant toward consumerism, esp. in more educated environments (but we're catching up!).
It reminds me of a cool classic sci-fi movie about consumerism. John Carpenter's "They Live". I watched it as a kid but it started to make sense later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live
"Nada quickly discovers the sunglasses have unique properties: they reduce the colors of the world around him to black and white and allow him to see that media and advertising hide omnipresent subliminal totalitarian commands to obey, consume, reproduce, and conform. They also make clear that many people in positions of wealth and power are actually humanoid aliens with skull-like faces."
Oh god. This article is so fucking disappointing.
What a quaint boogey man this "Search Engine Manipulation Effect" is. It even has it's own obscure little acronym, SEME, to appear more relevant.
I learned about the subtle effects of advertising by the time I was in fourth grade, and certainly understood how to ignore them by middle school.
Back when special holographic foil comic book covers and trading cards were new, I had already figured out that all of these "collectibles" were mass-produced, and would never wind up as valuable as, say Action Comics Issue#1, despite so many claims otherwise. This was something you could kind of figure out on your own. If your were easily amused by shiny objects though, you might not arrive at the same conclusion.
Meanwhile anyone could figure out that the influence of single frame inserts in movies was as potent and realistic as the subliminal messaging in John Carpenter's Sci-fi movie, THEY LIVE.
So too, with Search Engines.
Figure if a fourth grader can figure out the shenanigans of opinion and belief influence in advertising, and unravel the bullshit of religion before high school ends, then this other newer form of bullshit is similarly debunked by comparable intellects. If you're so stupid that you buy into bullshit, without multiple channels of factual verification, you're your own worst enemy.
Okay, okay, maybe this is good reading material for an elementary school classroom assignment, focused on current events. Sure, why not?
I was hoping this would be about technological manifestations of psychic telepathy through malicious use of functional MRI systems.
Bah!
This reminds me of the movie They Live.
I agree on some of what you say. However, I disagree with the interpretation of the result. On the surface that veneer is tantalizing, but in actuality it's more damaging than blatant leftists and rightists. Do you recall the Movie "They live". It's like that. Insidious. Pretends to be nice and psychologically it's more sophisticated, but also more believable and people tend to give their pieces more credence with less critical questioning than say a Fox news or MSNBC, because they mask it well.
But as I said in other comments, they're the best available option (to me), but that does not mean they are a good option. so long as you keep your ears open for their biases, they're okay to listen to.
They Live is a Carpenter movie in which aliens in invisible pizza masks - you can see them if you have special magic shades - live among us and control us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp_K8prLfso
And of course there's The Thing, which does an excellent job of explaining why you should you never allow important data to be mutable.
> Some time later, The Carpenter ran into Bob Plissken at a local technology meet-up. “John! What happened at Thing?” Bob wanted to know, “I asked them what they thought of you, and all they would say was, Writes unreadable code. I thought it was a lock! I thought you’d finally make your escape from New York.” > The Carpenter smiled. “I forgot about them, it’s been a while. So, do They Live?”"
The character's name is "John, The Carpenter".
bob plissken - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Plissken the thing - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/ escape from new york - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082340/ they live - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/
FWIW, I don't get the connection to javascript interviews either.
"They Live" is a fun movie, and like Marxism, it certainly taps inot the vague, nearly universal "everything is wrong" vibe that affects nearly everyone but especially young adults. Other examples: The Matrix. Philip Dick and Stanislaw Lem (perhaps the most underrated SF author ever) made careers out of this emotion. For a modern incarnation on Netflix, check out Black Mirror, particular "15 Million Merits"[1]. Powerful stuff.
When I step back and look at the world, for all of our terrible mistakes, we (the western capitalist states) really are the good guys, because personally and politically, overwhelmingly, we really do despise the despots, and the racists, and the needless violence and barbarism that rises to power in too many places in the world. More than once we've spilled blood and spent money not to benefit ourselves, but to stop something evil from happening to others. And no, this doesn't excuse the fact that we've spilled even more blood for our own selfish ends, be they resources or the assertion of misguided idealism.
Consumerism, unlike unjust war, is a trickier beast to slay. Why? Because it's good in one important way! Consumption really does drive an economy, which is good for people's bellies, and well-fed people are pretty happy (watch Triumph of the Will[2] and notice how often Riefenstahl shows food and people eating). The urge to consume, and all the messaging that goes into it, are manipulative, but it manipulates us into wealth. (Heaven help us all when even the elite can't ignore the externalities of this approach, particularly WRT climate!) We will soon see if virtual goods can thread this needle.
>Once we’ve put on the glasses, what do we do? Where are the aliens, and how do we start killing them?
As anti-authoritarian as I am, I still can't get behind killing anyone. Maybe it's naive, but I really believe in non-violent (not passive) resistance. Ghandi, MLK, Aung Yung Suu Kyi - they show us the remarkable power of patience, love, and unyielding persistence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHs2coAzLJ8
First line of Moxie's post: "The 1988 film They Live is one of the last great masterpieces to come out of the hollywood left."
First sentence spoken in Zizek video: "They Live from 1988 is definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left."
they live is one of the best john carpenter films, and that includes the epic 10-minute on-concrete wrestling match before keith david will don the glasses.
being extremely entertained to see a blog entry about they live aside, making privacy simple is super hard. similarly, making people care about privacy is super hard. killing the aliens is even harder.
ubiquitous surveillance has a pretty obvious response in the long run: ubiquitous encryption.
Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18qD9hmU9xg
This is an excerpt from Slavoj zizek's Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which in turn excerpts the cult sci-fi film They Live. Both are very much worth your time.
> We've never been freer as we are now on iOS and Android,
That's the part I just can't fathom. You do not control your device. You have to hack it to get "root." There is one app store, and all apps sold within that store must give a percentage (30%?) to the lord of the app store kingdom. The app store can remove any app for almost any reason, and can in some cases even go out and uninstall that app from users' systems. At the very least it can be made uninstallable for new devices and users at any time.
How is that not absolutely feudal? How is that at all free?
We're getting way off into areas not relevant to the OP, but I'm just in a continuous state of amazement at peoples' acceptance of this. It almost seems as if people have been brainwashed into not seeing it... it's like that scene in that old film "They Live" where the guys have the fist fight over putting on the glasses. When I talk about this I feel like that. "Put on the damn glasses!" "No! Mobile is the future!"
Am I out of my mind?
We know we have a problem when transparency is largely demonized. Allegations of "terrorism" seems to be bringing much benefit to government. I saw a movie recently from the 1980's called "They Live!" I noticed that in the movie the word terrorism, allegations of terrorism or terrorists toward those who opposed them, was the weapon of control of the disguised, camelion totalitarian regime in power. Only those with special glasses could see them. It would seem as if this would be the playbook in protecting criminal government activity done under the auspices of law. Al Capone would have drooled for such type of power.
Top Secret should not be an excuse to undermine the law, the rights of individuals, and the Constitution of the United States. Those who witness such crimes have the duty to come forward to the public. By keeping quiet and turning a blind eye to crime, one partners with it.
Crime grows in the dark while the light of day exposes it. Freedom requires transparency. A war on whistle-blowers is really a type of barometer as to the amount of freedom that we really have.
That "and I'm all out of gum..." quote is actually stolen from John Carpenter's film "They live".
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/quotes?qt0479492
Well, first impression: They Live is an alien invasion movie, not a zombie movie, so I gotta question the accuracy of the data!