Unclear and Present Danger - The Net (feat. Josie Duffy Rice)

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

In this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by the Josie Duffy Rice of the Unreformed podcast to discuss “The Net,” a 1995 techno-thriller, directed by Irwin Winkler and starring Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam and Dennis Miller. The Net was one of several films in a mini-genre that you can describe as, “What if computer technology was used for evil?” Contemporaries include Hackers and Enemy of the State, both films we will eventually cover on this podcast. Here is a brief plot synopsis:Angela Bennett is a freelance software engineer who lives in a world of computer technology. When a cyber friend asks Bennett to debug a new game, she inadvertently becomes involved in a conspiracy that will soon turn her life upside down and make her the target of an assassination.The tagline for The Net is: “NO DRIVER’S LICENSE, NO CREDIT CARDS, NO PASSPORT, NO ACCESS TO HER BANK ACCOUNTS IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY … SHE FINDS HER IDENTITY STOLEN.”The Net is available to rent on Amazon and iTunes.Our next episode will on the 1994 adaptation of the novel “Fatherland,” starring Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson. You can watch it on YouTube.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our latest episode of the patreon is on the 1982 Costa-Gavras film “Missing.”

We all live in the age of information. We're sitting on the most perfect beach in the world. All we can think about is where can I hook up my mom? Every trace of our existence is computerized. Everything about us is encoded somewhere on a complex network of information. Computers your life, aren't there? Yes, perfect hiding trace. Computer analyst Angela Bennett was just doing her job.

Oh my God. When she stumbled onto something. What is this? She never should have seen. I plugged it in and I'm staring at the personal medical files of the Undersecretary of Defense Michael Borgstow. Someone's tapped into the system. How long would it take a tracker? It depends on how long she stays online.

Something. Why would anybody want to do any of this? That reaches farther than she could ever. than she could ever imagine. They hack into computers and they cause this chaos. Wall Street. The market panic has official suspended trading. The Department of Water and Power in Atlanta.

L-A-X. We've lost radar contact. Ah! No. It's finally to go. They're manipulating her world. You can make of reality. Won't you choose?

According to the department in one of vehicles, you are with marks. They've included with my information and my fingerprint. fingerprints I don't understand why me infiltrating her life find whoever she's been speaking to no he was not a diabetic and erasing her identity we've got an outstanding moron for a Ruth marks on federal charges I am Angela Bennett just give us the disc and we'll give you your life back she has the evidence she's copied the disc have a girl but they have the power Sandra Bullock is caught in the net. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade.

I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front, and I'm trying to finish my book about American politics in the early 1990s. Joining us today is Josie Duffy Rice. She is a writer who covers criminal justice, who is also the host of the unreformed podcast. Hello, Josie. Hi. I'm very excited to be here. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Talk about the net. It's 1995. As you know, I've been very, very excited to talk about the net for months. Yes, I asked you. I was like, I was kind of trying to get some guests in a row. And I was like, Josie, what movie do you want to do? And I gave you the list. And you're like, I want to do the net. And I actually, this is funny. Another future guest.

I had her sort of like, maybe she'll do the net, maybe she'll do something else. And then I was like, she'll do something else. And you'll do the net because you're very excited to do that. I was very excited about the net. I've now watched The Net one and a half times, which is more than I've watched any other movie except for maybe like legally blonde. So that's really up there on my list. The Net is a 1995 techno thriller directed by Irwin Winkler and starring Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam, and Dennis Miller. The net was one of several films in a mini genre.

I think you can describe as what of computer technology was used for evil. Contemporaries include hackers and enemy of the state, which are both films we will eventually cover on this podcast. No, John, you had asked about whether we would do hackers. We will totally do hackers if nothing else because that movie ends with an orbital song, Planet of the Shapes. That is a song I really like. I love this whole soundtrack is incredible. I love that whole soundtrack. I had a big crush on a girl in ninth grade who was into this movie.

Me too. That's strange. That is strange. That is strange. But yeah, a little younger. I was like eighth or seventh grade, but we'll talk about that later anyway. I have a lot of questions. I have a lot of questions.

Here is a brief plot synops of net. Angela Bennett is a freelance software engineer who lives in a world of computer technology. When a cyber friend asks Bennett to debug a new game, she inadvertently becomes involved in the conspiracy that will soon turn her life upside down and make her the target of an assassination. The tagline for the net is no driver's license, no credit cards, no passport, no access to her bank accounts in a foreign country. She finds her identity stolen. It's a fine tagline. The net is available to rent on Amazon and iTunes. So, as always, you should check out the movie before you listen to our discussion because

our discussion will touch on plot points, but it's not a plot summary. So if you want to actually know how the movie goes, you need to watch it first. The net was released on July 28, 1995, so let's check out the New York Times front page for that day. Okay. Well, there's some interesting foreign policy news. Senate vote to end embargo may prove a Pyrrhic victory. After their vote to break the arms embargo on Bosnia,

senators of both parties acknowledge today that their action may well produce no result this year and could lead to the dispatch of American troops in the help of the withdrawal of the United Nations force. A number of senators expressed their anguish about a vote that amounts to a judgment that the peacemaking and effort in Bosnia is futile and the worrying sides must be left to fight to the bitter end. but they said they concluded the alternatives were much worse. For the Democrats who broke ranks with President Clinton and joined Republicans in a striking challenge of the President's powers to make foreign policy, the choice was particularly difficult.

For me, the turning point was the attack on Shrebernaizza, that weekend with all the missing people, Senator Diane Feinstein of California, who had previously opposed lifting the arms of bargo, recalling the stunning pictures of despair among the Muslim refugees forced to flee when Bosnia and Serbs overran the United States' safe area of Shreberditsa, one image to punch through to me, that young woman hanging from a tree, that to me said it all.

Well, this is part of the whole saga of the United States and NATO's intervention in the post-Yugoslav civil wars. I don't know if they really count as civil wars anymore because these countries are now view themselves as independent, but I guess in Bosnia it was a civil war between Bosnian and Serbia. and Bosnians. Shabranits, of course, was a massacre perpetuated by Bosnian Serb forces, who kind of swept aside a small UN force who didn't intervene and were able to massacre the population of the town. This outrage of the world, and, you know, the policy had been to try to prevent arms from

reaching all sides in these conflicts, and then the United States kind of moved in the direction of supporting the Bosnian Muslim population against the Serbs campaign of ethnic cleansing. We spoke a little bit about the Rwandan genocide. We spoke a little bit about Blackhawk Down and Somalia. And the U.S.'s attitude towards interventions at the time was a little sclerotic. There was events that turned the population off of foreign interventions and then things would happen and that would convince the public that they were important and convinced politicians there are necessary. So that's a little bit of the background of the foreign policy.

Let's see what else here. U.S. detains Arab tied to militants. Palestinian on terrorist list is seized at Kennedy. United States officials have taken into custody of Palestinian, they say, is one of the senior leaders of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that has claimed responsibility for recent bombings in Israel, Attorney General Janet Reno said today, Immigration officials said they detained the Palestinian Musa Muhammad Abu Marzouk at Kennedy Airport on Tuesday as he was arriving from abroad because he was on a terrorist watch list. Mr. Marzuk, who American and Israeli say is the head of Hamas's political committee as being held in Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

Hamas is a relatively not exactly new throughout the 90s is becoming a more important part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. previous to the 90s and the 80s conflict was dominated or the Palestinian side was dominated by the PLO most of the organizations within the PLO were kind of socialist, Marxist, secular. Hamas is an Islamic group related to the Muslim Brotherhood

and they've become sort of, at least in Gaza, now the dominant, you know, Palestinian power and are also contesting for control of the West Bank to a certain degree, although that's firmly under, you know, what the Palestinian authorities control. So Amos just becomes more and more important. Suicide bombings are relatively new tactic. That's what's going on there. This didn't come to pass, but it's interesting. Three big unions are set to merge, creating a giant, a process of five years, auto workers, steelworkers, and machines see new strength and unification. In the face of the American labor movement's long-skitting fortunes, three of the nation's biggest industrial

unions, the steel workers, the automobile workers, and the machinists, declared today that they would merge. They invited other unions to join them. This never happened. They were going to fuse by 2000. They scrapped the plan in 1999, but shortly before it went through. I'm not exactly sure why. I think probably there's a lot of internal politics about this. But yeah, this is a sign of the troubles of the American labor union, which in many ways continue. Yeah, I mean, in 1995, I think private sector union density was about like 16%, which was down from 20% in 1980, obviously down from the heights of the mid-century where like a third of American workers are unionized, but pretty much terminal decline for American unions

to the present where I think it's something like less, some very small percentage of private sector workers. 6% I want to say. Total unionization is 13% and public sector unionization outstrips private sector. So it's real bad.

It's quite bad. And that is the product of all kinds of things. You know, unions made some mistakes and missteps. Obviously, the Democratic Party kind of pulled back from

It's affiliation with unions over the course of several decades. So that, you know, did not have. The Reagan administration also went on the offense against the labor movement, too. And also the country deindustrialized. And, you know, a lot of those jobs just disappeared. Right. You know, many of these unions now have far greater number of pensioners than workers, which is not great. One more thing I think we should talk about for sure.

war in Korea fast receding gets a memorial under the sweltering sun world under under under a sweltering sun worlds away from the cold war combat being commemorated that's a terrible sentence president clinton and president kim young sam of south korea dedicated a new national memorial today and needed to assure that the long gone korean war does not remain forgotten the korean war veterans endure terrible hardships deathly cold weeks and months crammed in foxholes and bunkers, an enemy of overwhelming numbers, the threat of brutal imprisonment and torture, Mr. Clinton said, of a conflict at which more than 54,000 Americans died, but which has faded in the public mind between the triumphs

of World War II and the turmoil of Vietnam. They set a standard of courage that may be equal to never surpass in the annuals of American combat. You know, even I didn't quite realize how many Americans died in the Korean War. That's a substantial amount. It's not that many less than Vietnam, which I think is around 60,000. I remember this maybe being, watching the news hour with my dad maybe this day in 1995, because I remember being struck by this monument, but I was, you know, really into war and soldiers as a kid, but I was very struck by this monument. But yeah, the South Korea is often, I mean, the Korean War is often called like the forgotten war. It doesn't quite have the same hold on a cultural imagination that Vietnam does or World War II does.

I think the writer of this article points it out because those were more clearly either bad things in our national imagination or good things or moments, highs and lows. And the Korean War is a little bit more gray. Did your like grandfathers go to war? Your dad's grandfather's war. World War II. What year were they born? They were all born between about 1914 and 1920. Yeah.

See, my granddad was like 1930. 1929 my other granddad was a little bit older but I think they both went to Korea like there's like a weird age range of like ancestors of our you know that we grew up with I feel like that we're too young for World War II too old for Vietnam right they all went to Korea yeah it's it's often called the forgotten war for this reason that it's not really in the American national imagination very much My grandfather had been a little too young to have been to have either enlisted or been drafted to go to Korea. But yeah, it's sort of this, in this particular generation of Americans, right? Like this 1920s, late 20s, early 30s, generation is quite small, right? Because this is the beginning of the Depression and like birth rates in the U.S. who dropped in the Depression. It's often called the forgotten generation or the silent generation.

The silent generation, that's right. So it's kind of their war because it ends. essentially in a stalemate. It's not like it's not like it's part of any like big American, you know, national triumph thing. It's like, yeah, a lot of Americans died. A ton of fucking Koreans died. And it, the status quo has been the status quo more or less since then. It's worth I think saying a little bit about South Korean history, which is very interesting. Modern South Korean history is like the same thing. But so. So I feel like a lot of people don't know this, that basically for most of the 20th century

after the war, South Korea was under a kind of brutal military dictatorship. In particular, it is the dictatorship of General Park Chong He, who ruled South Korea from about 1961 to 1979. And in 1979, he was assassinated. Which brought another coup and another general who held power in South Korea until the late 1980s, at which point there is a big democratic revolution in the country and first presidential elections, first election for director, first election for president, I think in 87, 88. And the 90s are kind of like the first real decade of South Korean democracy, which also. also, I think, makes this a little significance as well. Because we're around the same time that we're beginning to see, like, we're approaching

with Vietnam as well. So there's, like, this effort in the United States to kind of create culture ties to Southeast Asia. Interesting stuff. South Korea is also known for imprisoning its corrupt presidents. They do that a lot. They do that a lot. I admire them for it. Yeah.

Josie, do you see anything on the page that you want to highlight? I had gone a couple of pages in to the paper when I was looking and saw that mortgage rates were 7.5% in 1995, which is like, a reminder, it could be worse. Oh, yeah. I mean, the interest rates were so much higher at this time, and they were considered to be low because of how bad it was in the 80s. I mean, after the Volcker shock, yeah, it's incredible when I'm researching, you know, a little earlier this time period and I see information about that. I'm just like, Jesus, this is really insane. And now it's like, oh, interest rates are out of control. I can't believe they keep hiking, but it's nothing.

Yeah. So, yep. The other funny thing, not funny. Funny as in, you know, dystopia funny. is this article about self-defense shooting people in self-defense who break in and a guy who shot someone in the back 11 times

11 times and said it was self-de-frey 11 times, 11 times 6 in the back he was unarmed the guy was unarmed he was breaking into the man's house but this is in Florida so this is like the era of

kind of shaping the language around stand your ground before standard ground was like you know canon official policy yeah official policy yeah it was still kind of canon but official policy and you can see just how where how the country is trying to shape itself when it comes to what the boundaries we think are for self-defense and as always Florida's like leading the way and aggression at the very bottom of the country in many ways. Yeah. I mean,

I'm in Georgia, so I can't, you know, glass houses. Yeah. You're not quite there. Not quite there, no.

Yeah. I can't. There's like nothing in my home that is worth a human life. Right? I know. I don't know. Not to get into it. I mean,

my kids. Yeah. Other than my other than like my people who live here. That's, yeah. Exactly. That's the only way I'm shooting you. Otherwise, this is what my dad always says. He's like, someone tries to carjack you.

Give them your car. Be like registrations in the glove compartment. Would you like my mints? Like, do you want to die over your car? No, you don't. Just give them what they want. It doesn't, it's not worth it. This is not a problem for me because I don't even know how to drive.

I honestly don't really know how to drive either. I'm like, please, would you, I'll stand the backseat. You can help the car and take me where I want to go. How about that? I just drove to and from Florida. It was horrible. It was like 12 and a half hours. Okay, so The Net.

Some quick background on the movie. There's not like a ton of interesting stuff about the development of the film. I did watch a 20-minute little documentary called The Net from script to screen that mostly spoke to the two screenwriters, John Brancanto and Michael Ferris. And they discussed how they were inspired both by stories and the news about sort of the pervasiveness of computers and the way our identities are all tied up in them. And then also when they were approached to write the movie, they were told that the producers were looking for something akin to the parallax view or three days of a condor or a kind of conspiracy thriller. So in their original script, and this is I think Michael Ferris speaking, it says, you know, there's this hidden world of information handlers. and dealers that it's obscure and we wanted to see if we could pull up a thriller with a villain

that didn't have a face, a lurking hidden monsters. They write this script in which there isn't really a villain and the producers in the studio are like, you got to have a villain. You can't have, you can't just be, you know, no one. And so this is when this character of Devlin is developed and comes in as sort of like the face, the main villain for the film. Winkler also has a hand in shaping the film and he makes it a little more conventional. a little less of a conspiracy type killer. Now, Winkler is an interesting person because he hasn't actually directed all that many films.

He has, let's see, seven films on his director credits. Most of them are things you've never heard of. You have this De Niro picture, guilty by suspicion. It's about the Hollywood blacklist. Guilty by suspicion. Guilty by suspicion. You have the film before this, Night in the City, another De Niro picture, Jessica Gilege. I actually really like that movie.

Okay. Is it Night with a K? No, no, night like the nighttime. It's a remake of a, I think of a noir movie from the 50s. And it's, yes, yeah. It's, everyone says it's not good, but I think it's good. Anyway, that's just my two cents. I mean, it's shot by Tak Fujimoto, who is, who we've, he shot.

Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Devil in a Blue Dress. I mean, he's a, I bet it looks great at the very least. It's about low lives in New York, which I pretty much can't resist any movie about that. Other films include At First Sight, which is a Val Kilmer picture with Mira Sorvino. And, yeah, a lot, again, a lot of movies you've never heard of. But as a producer, With work going back to the 60s, he produced, he produced a producer on The Gambler, which is a 1974 crime picture starring James Kahn. I think of uncut gems except much more anxiety-inducing because James Kahn makes even worse decisions. Rocky, New York, New York, Rocky 2, Raging Bull, Rocky 3, Rocky 4.

Goodfellas. So, yeah, he's been, he's a Scorsese guy. And so he also produced Silence and the Irisman. He's a very storied Hollywood producer. Not exactly a lightweight. Yeah, no. Executive producer on the Wolf of Wall Street. Yeah.

So he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, one of those guys who's tried to make the transition to director. And as far as production goes on the net, who shot this? Who shot you? Jack Green, who is, I don't really recognize. Oh, oh, yeah, Jack Green shot Unforgiven. It's a great film. He also shot Speed 2 Cruise Control and Twister.

Also a great film. Both Jan DeBant movies. He seems to have worked a lot with Clonise Wood. And so he shot White Hunter Black Heart and The Rookie, which are Clint Eastwood pictures, shot Heartbreak Ridge in 86, Northern Eastwood, Bridges of Madison County, which is a very good movie. Midnight in the Garden of a Good and Evil, Absolute Power, which is something we will watch on this for this podcast. And Space Cowboys, a movie I saw for a friend's 12th birthday. Never heard of that in my life. It's not good.

How could that be bad? How could a movie called Space Cowboy be bad? Okay. The net. Josie, tell me why you wanted to talk about this movie. So I read the plot summary and was taken by the mention of the floppy disk, by CyberBob, was very into CyberBob. Then you actually watched a movie and it's so much more absurd. than you could have been led to believe in part because I like I really love movies like this

that are imagining how bad new technology can get and are so like both limited and extreme and the in their imagination right like kind of reminds me a minority report where I mean minority reports got to say it a lot better but just our capacity for imagination around something like the internet in 1995 and how bad how it can go wrong and how we've actually seen it go wrong and how we still don't even know all the ways it's going to go wrong because we're you know and relatively still at the beginning maybe depending on how long the world lasts which up in the air but anyway you know I found this like I was thinking about in 1995 the year before the Atlanta Olympics my mom worked for the Olympic

my mom is an engineer and she was like working on touchscreen kiosks around Atlanta trying to make it so you could like press an athlete's name and then like details would come up about them and this was like a massive undertaking by hundreds of people for years to create this thing that like now my kid has on their like whatever like leapfrog computer right just this kind of like initial understanding of what this technology can be. I mean, this is a ridiculous movie, but it's also like, I think unintentionally kind of introspective about ways in which technology can ruin your life. Yeah, to say real quickly, so as per the plot summary a little earlier, the conceded

of this movie is that Sandra Bullock plays this kind of hacker or shut in type who, does professional debugging. She gets a game to debug, and in the process of trying to debug this game, she kind of stumbles into this conspiracy involving a security program that creates a backdoor that allows awful things to happen. And she becomes a target for this mysterious group that's connected to this program in some way, shape, and form that's trying to kill her. What they first do is take her identity and kind of erase her from the shape of the earth. I feel like we should mention that when we say it's like security software, it's like apparently you just press a button and all of a sudden you're in like the Pentagon system.

Right, right. Yeah. Like it's like Russian roulette of what major like security hack you want to do that day on your floppy disk? It's a, it's like similar to when we watch the movie sneakers, which had a similar device, which was a super key to any computer system. Right. Yeah. And they could, and get into important, the FBI, so on and so forth. Right. Power grade.

The same thing happens. Very similar things happen in sneakers, which is a little bit of a, well, much better movie, but yeah, that it's a kind of a trope that's developing here is that there's like a box that can decrypt anything or one program that can decrypt everything and get into anything. But where Sneakers is a movie very much about sort of the, about less about the technology, the technology is more sort of a vehicle for thinking about kind of like changing the world, lost potential, sort of like what would you do differently in the past kind of thing? This is a movie as per the writers, right? It's very much about our identities are tied up in computers and

databases, and what could happen if someone just, like, deletes you from the databases? What happens to your life if that, if someone decides to do that? First of all, I was like, that sounds great. The number one thing about this movie that, like, it messes out on is, please, delete me from the systems. I'm ready to be delayed systems. I'm sold. You don't have to ask me twice about being deleted from the systems.

It's, like, funny that this is worst case scenario, right? Right, right, right. They do make her, they replace her with a criminal. They make her. Yes, they do. Yes. Create a new identity for her. Right.

Ruth isn't, she doesn't want to be Ruth. That's there. But it is like this very interesting, like, when she's in the hotel and they're like, you say your name is this, but the computer says your name is that. And it's like, now that we sort of know how we deal with computers when we think they're wrong, it's so funny. Right. here that kind of no they're just like sorry it's just says it's like in a hotel she's been at and they're like you're not in the computer that's not the way that would work in this life

yeah yeah exactly yeah they wouldn't be like you're not you're not you're registered not here so right right goodbye like you don't exist yeah that's hard to yeah i mean i think this this gets into something interesting about sort of how how this was imagined in the 90s because there is there is this real anxiety around sort of like the connect like the increasing connection of society through computers through all these things and the fear the fear very much is what if a government uses this to control your life what if some malicious or malign actor uses this corporation enemy of the state will basically that's the premise of enemy of the state but the government uses this technology to surveil you and to take control of your life

But as we know, like what has actually happened, I mean, obviously there's a government surveillance, but like for our day to day lives, what has happened is that this has become part of like market relations, right? Like we, it's not so much that the government is keeping track of everything we do. It is infinite number of companies that are keeping, keep track of everything we do for the express purpose of selling us stuff. Totally. Like, guess who's not going to delete me from their system, the credit card company? Right. Right. the mortgage. Like, someone's going to know I exist. It is in their best interest still, you know.

You know, fucking Banana Republic is going to know you exist because they're going to want to serve you ads. Right. Exactly. Exactly. This does not do really that great a job of establishing the motivation of the evil software billionaire guy who is behind the conspiracy in the end. Is CyberBob? Is that CyberBob? He is the cyber bob is Northam, Jack Devlin, the guy who's working as the agent of this. So this software company, the guy's arrested in the end of the movie. He works as a killer for this, for this software company, which is up to something, you know,

is trying to manipulate the system in the beginning of the movie. This, the secretary of defense or something kills himself because they've changed his records to say that he has AIDS, his HIV. Also very 90s fear. So, and that's like, I mean, I think that the anxiety of that reads differently now than then, the idea that you would find out that you've had, well, he's also for as political and personal reasons, but the idea that finding out you have HIV is a death sentence, essentially, that's changed a lot since 1995. But, yeah, so there's something about there, there is a corporate angle here. It's not that well established.

The movie is like makes it really shadowy and, you know, it doesn't make it. And there's some profit motive here. Isn't it this cabal of hackers, hacks into places and then they sell them the security software? Right. Like it's this weird cycle where, you know. know they have the key that sells them a security software it just feels um limited yeah i think basically they they wanted to just come up with a with a plot that hung the basic conceited the movie on which is like you could be deleted your identity could be removed this is the central fear how what

would you do in this situation um and it would feel like going mad in a certain way that's a little of paranoia, you know, like, she doesn't, can't prove to anybody that she exists or she's a real person. What did you guys think about that part? Because to me, that was the part that, like, misunderstands what technology is actually going to do to us the most, this idea that you could fall off the face of the earth, that nobody could know who you were because you spend so much time online. Yes.

Well, her, yeah, she, her identity is almost all, she's an early adopter, I guess you would now say. She's like, oh, this is what, like, computer people are like, you know? She's moved into the internet. She doesn't have personal relationship. She's very lonely. Her mother, and this is an important part of the plot, but also has some kind of metaphor that they're trying to make is.

Her mother has Alzheimer's disease. She doesn't quite remember who she is. Her closest personal relationship is with her former shrink, who was also her boyfriend, which was problematic. She reads also as a, not a disturbed person that's going too far, but a person with definitely, let's say, trust issues. She is not even very, and lives a kind of limited and lonely life, sexually, romantically, not that much going on, seems to have sort of given up, has kind of fantasies about, you know, meeting somebody extraordinary, but who this character, Devlin, who tries to seduce her comes in, trying to embody all these fantasies, but she's not even particularly interested. I mean, he kind of has to work for it. She's a little bit not that interested in, relationships. Now that interested in all these human

contexts, is sort of completely dedicated to her work already in a certain sense one could say losing her identity or her human identity already. I don't want to interrupt you, but I do want to say that the movie does make clear that she fucks. Yeah, she has

one, but she does not have once at least. She's heterosexual the movie. But she says, I don't do this very often. I'm not the kind of person. I've done it twice. She said she had two relationships. She's almost, I wouldn't say an in-cell because she doesn't appear to be that interested in.

She's not very sexual. She, in fact, the movie ends with no, she has no actual, weird almost, I want to dare to say feminist thing about the movie is that she doesn't end up with a, she has no love interest. That's fair. The two men in the movie are the evil seducer who can't be trusted. And then she has this sort of, like, nice, but annoying and kind of not, was, was, you know, kind of had an inappropriate relationship with because he was a shrink guy, but, but ultimately not such a bad guy. That's a fucking psychiatrist.

Yeah, yeah. It's really bizarre. It really bizarre and ultimately comes through for her as a decent person, but obviously there's some, she doesn't have normal relationships with people. This is it not a normal thing? this is this not a weird Sandra Bullock thing that they did to make her always kind of a freak

like this honestly I don't I can't think of all the Sandra Bullock movies I've seen I'm thinking of speed I like speed and miscongeniality and the blind side which we shall not speak of right but like I you know they sort of this in misconignality too it's like

oh she's a professional yeah she's like a professional and she's so antisocial and she's so not sexual and like men don't like her and I'm like but objectively she's like she's like beautiful and like she's not hold up like the first 10 minutes of the movie are her interacting with like multiple people it's like my friend sent me this I talked to his friend like it's it's such a weird thing where it's like nobody knows who I am and I'm like but ma'am I've seen you talk to like a couple people at this point this was a recurring

thing for Sandra Bullock in our in the previous episode we did Demolition Man and this was basically how she was characterizing Demolition Man as well kind of right she she wasn't asexual but she was a nerd right like yeah focused on on her career it was it was a thing in the 90s where it's like it's like in the same way um that in a movie like the pelican brief they cast stanley tucci as like an arab criminal because oh yeah yeah like the swarthy as you could be on screen in the 90s was Italian like the the most homeless you could be on screen in the 90s was a brunette.

Right, right, right, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, though, like, she's got glasses. Right. She's a brunette, she's got glasses. Right. She's not very busty. So she's, she's basically, we can, we can sell her as ugly on screen.

Right. Yeah, she's a nerd. Um, and, uh, yeah, so that, that was like, that was like what, what Sandy book was, like, really slotted into, uh, for much of, much of the 90s. Yeah. It is like, This idea, I mean, look, it was the 90s times were rough for women, so I don't know, I wasn't dating then I was whatever, eight. But I did find, like, you know, the first kind of scene

is these guys that she's sort of treating as like her friends, weirdly hitting on her online. Like, every dude is just kind of, like, a creep. But the whole conceit of this is that nobody would really want her. She's kind of a, but I'm like, literally everybody is kind of She lives in a strange world where she kind of tolerates this, um, the, yeah, this, these sort of online flirtation, if you want to call it that, but they're kind of just sort of these in-cell weirdos. And she happens to be like the one woman in this circle of this chat room, or one of the few ones. So, so she attracts us attention. But, but yeah, it's true. And she's sort of like, ha ha, that's funny, but it is, you know, objectively menacing because one of

them actually is attempting to pray on her, not for his own gratification, but for some kind of business that he's involved with. But yeah, the internet is intrinsically, the world is an intrinsically threatening place. The internet is filled with people who you don't know. That was a huge, that was a huge fear of this time period. You don't know who you're talking to. You don't know who's on the other side of the conversation. The anonymity of it was, It's still true, but we've just gotten used to. We just don't care about any of these things anymore. We don't care.

Yeah, we're like, lost identity theft, anonymity, the becoming a person who lives from completely online, these were the concerns and the possibility of destroying somebody's existence in a certain way, this kind of existential fear of it, is present in a lot of these films? Where am I trying to get out of this? So, but what's interesting is, like, we kind of have gotten there,

but not in the same way. It's like now we're worried not that people will be erased, that your identity will be stolen, but people's identities will change so much through being on the computer, right? Like online radicalization narrative and people whose families get into Q&ON and become different people or stuff like this.

The fear now is that it makes identity not that's erasible, but too malleable by people's own, not inertia, but ability to just fall and to go down a rabbit hole, as we now say. I would even say, yeah, I would even say it's more, it's like the opposite problem, I don't know, I've never once worried the internet was going to erase my identity. it's it's the it's it's it's definitely that we feel as if the internet knows too much about us and not even are just the facts but like you're saying like you change who were you you you know are you like your ability to kind of evolve and grow and become your past choices become part of

the universal memory versus like being there in hard copy you know it's just such it's just so interesting that the fear and the frame around the internet is completely the opposite of what this movie imagined, right? Right. It's a lot of elderly people, not to knock them, they're, we all love. They're great. We love the old. A lot of elderly people are still very afraid of identity theft as the biggest thing on

the internet. They're like, oh, then a lot of these are almost scams that are sold to elderly people, like protect yourself from identity theft. I mean, it does happen. I'm not saying I've had people, you know, are victims of scams. But I think the real thing is actually the sale of it, not the theft, but, identity sale or the marketplace of identities is more the problematic of the internet now we're worried with some good reason about what people can become so what would you make a

thriller now it would be somebody who I don't know gets on the computer and becomes a Nazi or something like that or like or becomes psychotic in some way or or there is a you know some kind of conspiracy to turn people that was a big fear one around the election right of 2016 with all of these um what was that company that everyone was worried Cambridge Cambridge Analytica yeah that was very kind of a thriller type plot of a different sort which was that they could manipulate you through the internet to you could be brainwashed this is not there's not that doesn't appear in these or it's not that brainwashing is possible it's like destruction of it the world can be materially changed your identity

can be removed. It's not that they can really screw with your interiority in some way or change people's behavior or brainwash people. That's way more than that now. Disinformation, right? Propagant. The internet is like a soul distorting force. It's much scarier in a way. I mean, like, oh, totally. That's way worse. I mean, what has happened is worse. Yeah, there's, there's, there's a funny way in which with the net, the fear is kind of a very old one, right? It's like a fear of statelessness, right? That somehow that you are no longer a member of any kind of political community,

which is a thing that does happen to the character, right? She has to apply for a visa to get back into the country and basically it's like lie about who she has to do it. She's a citizen of nowhere. Right. That's sort of like the fear that the net is like the fear of the net is the internet makes it easier to render you a citizen of nowhere, and that's very scary. But like, as you guys have been discussing, the real thing the internet has done in addition to maybe being able to shape

people's interiority is basically made it impossible for you to not be tied to your past. It is the opposite thing. Exactly. And in the same way, I mean, Josie, you mentioned Minority Report earlier, which I love Minority Report. I think it's a phenomenal movie. If this podcast goes long enough, people eventually get to it. And what I think, among the many things I think minority report gets right is both sort of recognizing that, no, this stuff is going to be used for ads, right? Sort of like the eye scanning technology and minority report is used to serve even more personal ads to people. But also, like the whole pre-cog thing is kind of like, I think, more of a modern or a contemporary fear, that it's not so much that you'll lose your identity,

but that there'll be so much of you in the internet, in these algorithms that you could potentially predict what the person's going to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, and then, and then, and then act based off of that, of that, off of that prediction. Yeah, that your life is no longer, you, you really have no kind of control over your own actions because you become so predictable. It turns out you're much more predictable than you think you are. Right.

And so you can, you know, they can, you can use your phone to see where you're going. They can see what you watch, see what you read, what you search for, all these things and build like a model of you as a person that then, you know, in this dystopian role, then be used to say, well, this person's likely going to do this. And so we're going to do something, you know, we're going to arrest them before they do it. And we're going to do it, do it ever. Yeah, it's interesting. I just, I can't get, I think like this movie is not about the internet on some level. I think it's about this movie. It's called The Net.

Yeah, the Net. It's not about, it's about, there's more and more a phenomenon in the 90s is, first of all, there's, you know, this has already taken place over the previous generation. There's many more women in the workforce. There are many more women who are not choosing to form families who remain single into their 30. You have the precarious situation of a woman who chooses not to attach her life to a man or a family structure. and she almost falls through the cracks, right? So it's always like, oh, she's not a part of like the big other,

like the whole network of symbolic arrangements if she doesn't have a relationship, right? She's completely vulnerable to being erased in this way and not having some kind of like structured identity given to her by family or her relationship with a man. so that's kind of like what's going on here and the anxiety is like oh well what are these lonely single women going to do and it's interesting because i would expect you know like a more conventional hollywood plot would actually be like in the course of this adventure she forms a she's able to form a romantic bond but she doesn't form a romantic bond she ends up with her mother at the end um so that's kind of interesting and it is interesting that all of the male figures in the movie there's no good guys.

I mean, Dennis Miller, he dies, but he's a, he's a, he also kind of broke his fiduciary responsibilities to her by, by going from therapists to like, you broke all the ethical, all the rules. Yeah. Everyone is kind of predatory, right? It's a world. And she has to maintain a certain dignity and self-respect in a world that's basically completely

has no place for her in a weird way. Like she's very good at her job. But every interaction she has with a guy they're hitting on her, they're harassing her in some way or they're trying to seduce her. There's nobody who like, she has relationships with. There's actually nobody she has any relationship with

because her mother can't remember her. This is a person who's totally isolated in a certain way. She also doesn't have a job, really. She has a good talent. No, she's a freelancer. She's exactly, she's a person. But she doesn't have a co-worker. She doesn't have, right, exactly.

Yeah. It's a question about who are these, and this is somewhat more contemporary, I would say, like, who are these lonely people we ask and what do their lives mean? And are they even real? And I think that that's interesting question. In the movie, she kind of, you know, she's a hero. She's a hero of her own kind of an. unrecognized hero and the question is how can you have a dignified life in these narrow

horizons and she seems to be satisfied with her she's a little lonely the question is is she lonely but she doesn't seem interested in forming she's not like law it's unclear whether she's longing for more bonds with people or her loneliness is just like this is who i am at the end she's like okay i live with my mom you know that's all i wanted she's not like oh finally now people like me An interesting thing that this movie, I think, inadvertently explores is the idea of what community even is because this idea for, like, being in these chat rooms and talking to these people. I mean, I guess it turns out everybody in this chat room is scamp part of this, like, nefarious, you know, nebulous thing. But it's also like, she actually does have relationships. I mean, they seem ridiculous and, again, predatory.

But, like, that's the thing I keep coming back to is I'm like, even the insoles have. relationships. Their relationships may be pretty much online, but we joke about people in their basement on their computer. It's like, that's actually also a relationship. Like, you know, these are, yeah, like they're not, like maybe they're not the interiority of them is not the same as some other relationships that people have. And maybe it's good to have both. But the truth is that like a lot of people are, I don't know if, I don't know what percentage we're talking, right? but it's not unusual to build relationships that at least start online and maybe move up. Like, this is, people will meet these ways now.

Look at me and Jamel. Yeah. I mean, that's how we get in Jamal. I mean, yeah, like it's, yeah, exactly. What's interesting is just that we think about this as being new, but in some sense, it's not really that new, right? You read, you read about people in the 19th century and they would carry on long friendships over years and they made letters to each other.

And they see each other once every blue moon, right? Like once every few years, if that. But the relationship was carried on through the post. That's different in that it's like a different technology. But like the essence of it is actually pretty much the same. Yeah. I think it's unclear still to us. And this is the question kind of implicit in this movie.

This movie is very, I think actually quite pessimistic, not pessimistic, but it offers a very limited way out. It's like basically you can have a dignified life and on your own, but doesn't give that much, you know, most of the whole network and most of society is somewhat nefarious or predatory in some way. I think we're still trying to figure out of like the internet is actually community, like this is the concern people have now. Is the internet community building or community corroding? and it's it's both in a weird way like or is it is it it seems to me and maybe this is a little bit ludite that a lot of the communal bond it allows for pathological well they always existed but for instance you can find people with your interests which is wonderful right but you can

also find people with your similar pathologies that get reinforced and one time you know one So it would be like, oh, well, I'm just a lonely creep. And now I find out there are many other people who have the similar ideas and are reinforcing it. And it becomes a whole worldview or ideology. This, like, there's pathological community. Not all communities are good. There's certain people we just don't want to get together. But like there's, there's, yeah, so there's pathological identity formation and community formation.

Yeah. I think that's totally right. I think, and I think this, that's like an interesting part of this, right, is that her use of the internet's pretty utilitarian. It's kind of like, like, it doesn't, I mean, it just, the people making this movie could not have imagined where the internet was going. You know, the idea, like, who could have seen it going to where it's gone, right? Like, in terms of how it shapes community. I think they, like, something else that's really interesting about this movie is that even like five years ago, it would have seemed more ridiculous. But in the advent of AI and the conversation around

AI, which is like, oh, we're going to build this thing that can hack any system. It can divert planes. Like what happens if, you know, this random guy and like some country in, you know, the nefarious East, like wants to take down Delta. Well, AI is going to let them do it. Like, it's all of this kind of imagining of the internet that feels really almost harkens back to the beginning of us thinking about what the internet would be in a way that we were like, who knows? What's it going to do? I have no idea of what, what I don't really even know what AI is, much less what it's going to do. But it does feel interesting that this, you know, when it's like the plane crashes and then her hotel reservation gets deleted and all this stuff,

which is like, that's not how the internet works. But I feel like we are now at a point where there's a lot of conversation about like maybe that is what technology could do soon, right? I think what it does is, or what the fear is, is that our location and whatever, symbolic order we live in can change so rapidly as to be psychotic and disorienting like and this is what everybody's afraid of is like well jobs will disappear like who are you then like what will what will we be as human beings it are it is and like what are we turning into now that we're like spending all of our days on this computer so and so forth are we individuals anymore are we melding into some kind of extra human system and and like becoming kind of this

transhumanist cyborg things. All these things are cropping up. And all, you know, there's all this stuff about, you know, anxiety about gender. All of our locations in society are much more rapidly changeable through technology than they've ever been before. Who we are and what we do is much more liquid. And what we know. Yeah, what we know is also, you know too many people, you know, we know too many people's thoughts

is certainly true. Yeah. That's disturbing, actually. That's what it starts to feel. Like, I would say in my experience, I mean, I spend far too much time online, but there are signs where it starts to feel a little crazy to me, which is when I, I think, and that's one of those experiences, like, when you're like, okay, this is starting to feel psychotic. It's like when you feel like you have so much access to people's thoughts that you're just

like, this is overwhelming. I mean, I can't even process my own thoughts. I'm seeing everybody's, especially when it's some kind of, you know, situation that's, that's dire and anxiety producing to begin with. And then to be exposed to everybody else's thoughts all at once is wild. It's like this almost psychedelic experience of, you know, kind of being, you know, like they show it in all these early movies and these, they look silly to us, but they we're on to something of like somebody plugging into the net and then there's all these like shapes and colors and like there's this weird psychedelic mind-blowing experience but in a way we've just like slowly boiled the frog of that and we're like yeah that's what we do we got on

the computer we see a billion weird fucked up things every day we read everybody's thoughts we read a meta commentary on the thoughts about the thoughts like it's just plugging into this weird hive mind and and we like are like yeah this is completely normal this is just the life is now, and, you know, we can have families and still sort of, but it is, it is a much, when you step back and reflect on it, much weirder than this movie can imagine, and much we sometimes know. There hasn't been a really good net movie for a long time that gets the metaphors right, or techno thriller that gets the metaphors right of how weird it is to live today.

I can't think of one. I don't think one, I mean, at least no mainstream film. I can't think of it. I'm not sure it's been made yet. I mean, I still think the best movie about the kinds of mentalities that produce the world we live in is the social network, which captures the psychology of like Silicon Valley quite well. But a movie about the experience of being extremely online.

Right, being extremely online. I'm not sure that I've seen one. yeah or if it's been made it's interesting in a lot of films in that in tv and well and and books they go to a pre-internet or pre-phone time because it seems just easier to write about people like a lot it's hard to come up with like the interconnectivity makes plots difficult there was a big fear that the internet so there i think exactly the time this movie came out there's an essay by this philosopher hubert drypice and his theory his problem with the internet was the following It didn't, it allowed you to have zero stakes, identity, express opinions that would have

exactly zero stakes because they were anonymous and explore identity formations that had zero stakes and weren't connected to anything, right? So he's basically like, the rubber never hits the road. You're in this kind of nihilistic, implicitly nihilistic. Everything changes every day. It doesn't really meet what you post and what you talk about and what you explore on the internet what you look on your internet doesn't really have anything to do with your concrete life and that was the risk it was risking a meaningful human existence

i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's your experience but there's something to that in the sense that we see so many people whose identities are like like dude you're not like they read about they read about something online and then that becomes our identity like dude, I don't want to get the tankies after me, but there's not a real context in which being like a Marxist-Leninist a la, the Russian Revolution, makes sense in our modern world, but people read like the Wikipedia article about it, and then they're like, that's who I am, you know? And that's strange. I'm sure the world always worked that way, but that seems accentuated.

This process of identity formation that is completely in your imagination and doesn't have very much to do with your actual life experiences or it does in ways that we don't totally understand. I think there's a there's a degree to which people are unmoored from anything in their immediate lives or concrete ground lives that could provide an identity or at least like a satisfying one. And so the internet becomes a place where you can find one of those things. But of course, the problem is because it's essentially, there's no substance to it. It's just kind of like putting on a ball cap, except people do totally internalize it. And it makes them wild and crazy.

They can be violent. That's the thing. Even though it's fake, it's violence. That's the disturbing thing about it. Or it's, yeah. Right. I mean, this has been the case with so many. mass shooters, right?

Yeah, exactly. Just like alienated kids who internalize identities that speak to the alienation, but also sort of like, you know, open, you know, unleash a capacity for doing violence to others. But these thrillers, we didn't mention the Matrix in this context, but these thrillers in a way, in a weird way, are the problematic thing with them, is that they are the structure of thought of someone who is going through this kind of psychosis because they're like, oh, you're not crazy. The world is really set up against you.

Right, right. Yeah. And like the movie primes you for this because like, what if you were not crazy? You know, like what if this was the way things were? And this is the heroic narrative. And all of these people to, I mean, I think a lot of them are kind of embrace evil in a certain strange way. But a lot of them have a view of themselves as being of rejecting a dishonest, hostile social order that has no place for them or is oppressing them. It is an individual in some way, right?

Kind of like the characters in a movie very much like this one, who realizes that it's all a sham or that's all set against them. And they have to kind of forge their own identity as an individual fight back, you know? so I don't know as enjoyable as these movies are I wonder if they're the I don't know it's stupid to blame movies for No but I think I think

I mean it's not too much the movies or the problem but they do reflect something within American cultural life that is that is a problem It was interesting what you guys were saying about political identity because I was thinking

a couple weeks ago and I was watching the Penn America a lecture by Tanaasi Coates and he was talking about the need to be, I don't know what the word he used was, it's better than the word I'm used, but a little kinder to the young people. And one of the things he pointed out was like kids these days understand how bad things are in a way that so many other generations have not because they know so much. They're exposed to so much. They like they like you guys were just saying.

understand some of the sham of like the social contract in a way that you know we it took us maybe a little bit longer in a way that was maybe a little beneficial um and i feel like that's an interesting part of this movie is like there kind of is no political identity she has that's obvious not even partisan identity but like there's she seems to be doing this hacking and computers because she likes computers not because she sees it has any sort of power structure or, you know, way to create chaos or to up in the social norms. Like, she just likes, you know, her pizza app, which, by the way, it was great, I thought.

Yeah, that was cool. There was all these old hints of utopias that we lost from these old internet movies. Yeah, that is like the sort of absence of politics in it is interesting. But it's very much in keeping with this 90s feeling that what you have are individuals, the world, you know, it's a sort of post-historical, post-ideological thing. There's individuals pursuing their interests, and that's the way the world should be. And, you know, it's going to be people like this who are very talented, individuals who are very special and talented on their own can solve these problems.

That's a very Silicon Valley ideology and a very internet ideology. And I was just like, we're going to have all these, like, extraordinary talented people who, you know, are able to solve all these problems and they're going to be connected with one each one another. But it's like, yeah, there's no solidarity. There's no, she doesn't belong to any organizations, you know, or we can't really tell or, you know, it's a, yeah, that goes along with a kind of solitary life. But the movie's not that judgmental of herself. It kind of punishes her for it, I suppose. But, It's always like, you know, she's, she's an authentic person.

The movie presents her as an authentic person. Yeah, yeah, totally. Right. She's not like, oh, there is another life that you should be living and you're not living. Right. It doesn't even seem like she, like you said, she doesn't even seem like she really wants that. No. In a way that the, what the movie offers all the fantasy, her life, let's imagine the movie without the action, right?

she just is living her life and every day like all of us normal people the movie is her fantasy about what's at stake in her life it's her life as a solitary individual in the fantasy world is like

this struggle against or this struggle against a world that doesn't you know have a place for her in a certain way so it's like the the action movie is just the fantasy of a person who's like in this kind of alienating world but has a way of creating meaning out of it by turning themselves into this sort of hero up against people who don't understand her who are stupider than her you know I think that that's kind of like

what the movie provides to somebody and you can imagine somebody looking you know we all watch movies and identify with characters I don't know how much of a grasp this has on people's imaginations, but, but that's sort of what it could do is like, oh, a person who, you know, the same way like James Bond movies, you know, okay, everybody at that time, businessmen at that time, you know, have boring jobs they travel for, but then you can imagine you're James Bond and in a way, you know, like, oh, you're fighting the Cold War and you're dashing and seductive and your life is exciting, but you're just in the airport reading the novel or whatever or so on and so forth.

So I think that what this sort of movie provides for people with these sorts of boring or unsatisfying lives in some way is, you know, like, oh, what's actually happening on the level of fantasy is that there is some sort of meaningful, heroic struggle, something like that. And that used to be you are a member of political order, like you were like, you know, fighting the Cold War, fighting World War II, part of a struggle. Now the struggle is as an individual, how do you maintain basic sanity, basic dignity, a meaningful life, avoid the predations of the world, you know, and without any. kind of being slotted into any kind of organization that provides meaning or solid. You know, this makes me wonder, like, there is a maybe logical flaw that what you're saying

is bringing up for me in this movie. There are a lot of logical flaws in this movie. Some of them are technical and some of them are, like, emotional, I guess. And one of them, I think, might be that the fact that she, that none of these people try to bring her in on this scheme like here she is apparently this really talented hacker woman she has the thing she doesn't she seems to be a little disaffected she doesn't have any social community like today she's the profile of someone who like you try to get on your side right like if you she has the skills and the whatever she needs and you're part of the Praetorian or whatever

they were called and your cyber bob like what like why do this elaborate scheme with the Devlin and the guns and the whatever versus being like why not she's like recruit her like you can get a cut of whatever we're doing here or you know like it's an interesting us versus she's good she's good

she's good but we only know that because we kind of only know that because the bad guys come for her like there's no sort of like again she doesn't really have any sort of value system that seems really obvious off the bat where you're like, oh, she would never do this.

Maybe she wouldn't. Right. But seems like it would be worth trying. She seems like she has, she seems like she has some integrity. I guess the movie wants to believe that she's a lot. And I agree that that's the perception we're supposed to have. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure why.

The real, the real thriller, which would be more modern internet, is that she, and I think there are some movies that have this plot, is that she gets seduced into this, this elite group. of the cyber people and this corporation, they're like, you're very special, you're very talented, become part of us. And then she gradually realizes, oh, this is bad and I don't want to be part of this. But that would be, I think, a little bit more of complicated morality story rather than she's just like, I'm a fundamentally good person. It's impossible for me to be, you know, to get into bad stuff. And the world is, I'm so good. And the world is so good.

in the world is so easy, they're going to immediately try to kill me instead of corrupt me, or corrupt me, which is obviously the much, much easier thing to do. And more natural, that's just how society works to, you know, like people just form friendships and it seems nice. And why wouldn't, you know, in real life, what would happen is this is very dark and cynical. This guy, this evil guy would just either. keep up the pretense of the relationship with her or they would actually end up in a relationship with her and it would compromise her morality and she would say, oh, well, he's so good

looking. He's so interesting. I'm making so much money now. This is a life I always wanted. And the loss of self would be a lot more complicated. He wouldn't need to kill her. They would just need to get married. I mean, that's kind of an interesting thing about the friend who sends, so she gets this disc, this floppy disk in the mail from a friend who then that night has killed um right you know uh when his plane gets a bad you know a hacked signal basically and like it's interesting a friend's like press this button press here you can see it's not ticket master and then she's like what is she she's in some she's some some some organization department of energy or something like agency organization whatever and the friends like you can

basically get into anything with us and she's like oh okay she's like well why don't you fix it and he's like delete it yeah she's not tempted by it nor is she like what the fuck like she's there's nothing there's no nothing there's no nothing there you know right well that's interesting she is not tempted by and that's different from hacker and from sneakers because once they get the box they're like oh my god we have this incredible tool she's not interested in power at all she's only tries to defend herself and she kills at the end of the movie which i thought was really interesting actually i was like she kills the guy that's kind of why She's this gentle person.

I mean, she obviously does it out of self-defense, but she kills him in a violent way. It's not like, oh, he slips and falls. She hits him with the fucking fire extinguisher and kills him. And she has to kill in order to maintain herself, survive. A lot of movies are the lesson is that you have to kill somebody. But the, yeah, it's interesting. Her complete lack of temptation. because she it's even hard for the man the charming handsome man to seduce her because she's so

untempted by it she's not like he's not you would think it's not that hard it takes it's not that hard in the in the score of the movie but she's very she's not like she's kind of like skeptical of him well he comes up to her and he's like you're are you a hacker just like what this is so random although she doesn't that's true but she's not like she's not like oh this is fulfilling all my fantasies is so exciting she's like a little worried not like this is exactly what I want on vacation for to meet someone yeah she's and she's not super disappointed when he ends up being when she no she's not heartbroken at all she's of course yeah yeah well I mean they did not have that much time to form a bond disposed but still she's not like

oh you're right I got to get away of course you're right but it doesn't have to look emotional component in fact maybe not a lot of emotional stuff going on the movie but except for fear yeah Anyway, I think we should, I think it's a good place to wrap up. Okay. So any final thoughts on the net before we move on? I have one final thought, which is that you still don't know exactly when your package was signed for immediately. And the idea that FedEx, he got a note that four minutes ago you signed for that FedEx package. I was like, they still don't.

I still can't find that out. They don't have that technology now. That was my most. That's one thing that stuck with me. yeah you can't order a pizza like that yeah she also says she wants to meet captain america mixed with albert schwitzer which was a yeah she was like you deserve everything coming for you yeah yeah yeah all right that is our show if you're not a subscriber please subscribe we're available on itunes spotify stitcher radio and google podcast and wherever else podcaster

are found if you subscribe please leave a rating and a review it does help people find the And you can reach all of us on social media if you want to. I'm at Jay Bowie at various places. John, you are. I'm at Lionel underscore trolling. And Josie, you are. I am at Jay Duffy Rice. I need a cooler name.

And you can listen to Josie's unreformed podcast, which is really quite good. Can you say a little bit about it? Sure. It is about a time before the Internet. It is about the 60s in Alabama, a juvenile reform. institution for black children that was the subject of a federal lawsuit in the late 60s. And it's pretty interesting if I do say so myself. It's an interesting story.

It's a harrowing story. It's definitely worth listening to. So please check that out as well. You can reach out to this podcast at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. For this week and feedback, we have an email from Michael titled The Unabomber. and MK Ultra in a previous episode we were talking about the Unabomber who recently died, recently passed away.

Only killed three people. I mean, that's a lot. Yeah, but, but, but a very, very dramatic murders. And so, uh, so Michael writes, hey guys, long time listener, second time writer, he wrote asking for an X-Files episode not too long ago. Uh, I wrote an article about the Unabomber some years back. It wasn't very good.

So I'm not linking it here. But I did want to chime in more about the Unabomber and M.K. Ultra. Ted Kaczynski was not experimented on or not with psychoactive drugs. In its earliest phases, M.K. Ultra was developed by the CIA in its humanitarian whizkid phase to test Americans' propensity for standing up to authoritarianism parallel to the Frankfurt School's research into the authoritarian personality. The experiment was led by Henry Murray, a psychologist who worked for the OSS. Kaczynski was subject to personality test when he was at Harvard. since the idea was that the test subject should belong to the elite, future leaders.

Keep in mind, also, Kaczynski went to Harvard at age 15. These tests consisted of writing out his most deeply held beliefs and then going through extensive sessions where an interlocutor would more or less just tear them apart and then continuously mock the subject for believing anything so stupid, to see how well he'd hold up to that level of psychological duress. It was only later that the experiments got into psychoactive substances, which were tested for their effectiveness as truth serums, serums.

But by then, Kaczynski was already at the University of Michigan and right when the Port Huron statement was being drafted. There was both a book and an article for The Atlantic on the subject by Alton Chase, if you guys are interested. Keep up the fantastic work. I remain as ever your faithful listener, Michael. Thank you, Michael. That's super interesting.

That is horrible torture. I mean, like, for whatever. I know. For whatever reason they were doing it. But those, I mean, they're so stupid. I mean, I'm sure that didn't help. I know. When they're like, see how well they held up.

It's like, well, spoiler alert. Who would need to develop a complex ideological justification for themselves in solitude and then violently acted out to prove that they mean maybe somebody who was like had all of their views attacked? It's like, you know, like, you know, it just seems, it just seems like, yeah, that's a pretty natural way of, like, I need to, like, come up with the ironclad, like, thing that they'll never be able to break down and I'll show them all. It does make sense that you would move to the woods, not talk to anybody and send letters with bombs on them. I mean, that doesn't, you can kind of see how you get from me to Z either. So it's interesting. Once again, a recurring theme, CIA, in addition to often doing evil stuff, also stupid stuff. Just, that's, that's so interesting.

So, yeah, so dumb. Thank you for the email, Michael. This is very interesting. Episodes come out every two weeks. So we will see you then with an episode on the 1994 adaptation of the novel, Fatherland. We were supposed to do this earlier, but I couldn't find it. But it's now on YouTube. Oh, great.

So we can, we can watch it on YouTube. Here is a brief plot synopsis, a fiction. account of what might have happened if Hitler had won the war that is now in the 1960s and Germany's war crimes have been so far kept a secret. Hitler wants to talk peace with the U.S. President, but an American journalist and the German homicide cop stumble into a plot to destroy all evidence of the genocide. I read this book years ago. I kind of like the book quite a bit. So I'm looking forward to this movie. We'll have a guest for this as well. So stay tuned. Stay tuned for that, folks. And I think, I think that's it for us. Josie, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Thank you. Thank you. This is great.

And if you need someone for Minority Report, I'm your girl. Yeah, come, come again. Predictive policing. Consider yourself already on deck for Minority Report whenever we get to it. I'm ready. Our producer is Connor Lynch and our artwork is by Rachel Eck. For John Gans and Josie W. Rice. I am Jamel Bowie and this is unclear.

present danger. We'll see you next time.