Hacker Cinema
Viva Zapata!
1952 · Film · 113 min
Directed by Elia Kazan
The story of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who led a rebellion against the corrupt, oppressive dictatorship of president Porfirio Díaz in the early 20th century.
2 positive1 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
Honestly... I don't think there's much difference between games and other forms of media in terms of longevity in the public consciousness. "Singin' in the Rain" was released in 1952 and might very well still at least ring a bell today, but what about "Monkey Business" or "Viva Zapata!", released the same year? Those films even had some pretty big names (Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando). Even nowadays, there are still plenty of "shovelware" movies out there.
That being said, I think the real difference comes down to the fact that games are (by necessity) relatively tightly coupled to the hardware required to run them. Movie projector systems, while complex, are still much "dumber" than a computer. I think it's safe to say that if you have a film print from, say, the 60s, there would probably be a range of projector models from the preceding decade that could play it.
By contrast, if you have a copy of a PC game from, say, 1996, you're going to have to pay a lot more attention to its specific hardware requirements in order to build a system that's capable of running it. That raises the skill floor to run it in the first place. Honestly, I think this is one reason console retrogaming is so popular: to play a game, you only have to get a hold of a working console. The problem these days is that consoles are becoming more PC-like, so they're kinda backing into the same problems as PCs.
> by not respecting property rights
Ref. the movie Viva Zapata! Which has Marlon Brando playing a Mexican revolutionary hero facing this kind of disillusioning outcome over & over. (Mostly bringing this up because I went to the trouble to watch it recently and needed a conversation to work it into)
> by your definition there is no large scale democracy in existence
Take a look at Chiapas or Rojava. They are large-scale governance systems that most people would agree fit the definition of a democracy, if only because local assemblies and women's assemblies have a lot of power. They both have some forms of representation but nothing similar to what we have here in terms of accountability. You can for example watch "Viva Zapata" documentary about autonomy in Chiapas.
Also, if it hypothetically did not exist yet, would it be a reason to give another meaning to the word? If we can admit a God does not exist, should we call an AI a God because its ways are ineffable?
> Most people would consider a representative democracy to be a democracy.
In some places, most people would consider vaccines a trojan horse of the Illuminati and homosexuality to be a sin. Does the majority always have to be right? Isn't the tyranny of the majority precisely one of the problems with our pretend-democracies? To be fair, tyranny of the majority would be better than the current tyranny of the minority elite elected by the majority (of people who have a right to vote, which is not everyone) in a process that resembles more reality TV shows than a political argument.