CLASS: "Blog Post #3 - Digitalized Diaspora..."

Well. Somehow I managed to forget to post this on time. Managed to read Troilus and Cressida, but forgot to post. Bummer for me.

I might be the only one to think this, and I hope that's not the case, but the first thing I could think of when I saw the Data Thief was, “Johnny Mnemonic” (y'know, that so-so movie with Keanu Reeves?) with a bit of old-school 3D glasses mixed in. Otherwise, I actually took notes this time, so I'm prepared to comment. But before that. Y'all remember the apocalyptic-looking yellowish background? I don't know where exactly that is, obviously, but it reminded me of something I saw on the History Channel some time ago. The “Lake Peigneur” incident – what happens when you dig a salt mine under a lake, then use an oil derrick to accidentally dig a hole into it? You get this (YouTube + History Channel = Awesome, by the way). Not sure if it's actually what they used in The Last Angel of History, of course, and if not, I just gave you an excuse to take five or six minutes out of your busy life to get your History Channel fix. And I wasn't quite sure, but it looked like the NASA-demo-video stuff on the moon was from a proposal to harvest Helium-3 (it's been a while since 2^nd-year Physics, but the sun plants it there, and has been planting it there – the sequence was probably used to make it feel sci-fi-y).

Now! The main thing that didn't sit right with me was the mere idea of a “Data Thief”, which to me seems like an oxymoron (a word I always have trouble pulling out). You can steal just about anything else, and be the sole owner/proprietor(?) of that particular object, but unless you go back and delete their Data, how can you thief it away from them (and why would he need to, now that Wikipedia is gracing the Internet with its presence)? Just a thought. But it kinda relates to the Oankali, a bit, and how they didn't quite steal human data and yet kinda did, depending on which character is talking. Someone notes at some point in the documentary that WWII computers (and they really did have computers by that time, though not under the popular definition of the word – it took 40+ years to prove that it was a computer, though, for reasons better explained by Wiki than I ever could) were for military purposes, and yet here we are now, posting what one poet (he was on NPR not too long ago) once referred to as a newspaper with 7 printings a day. And, he continues, they can now be used for music (electronic music has been used since the 60s – see here, then here [creepy and atmospheric] and here [more reassuring - if Earth is in trouble, look for an old police box...] – and there is the famous case of the IBM 1401; what the article does not note is that, when the 1401 was next to a radio, and the conditions were right, it would "play" a certain cello-esque sound over the radio, possibly making this the first computer-generated sound). There's also the “Alien Abduction = Slave Trade” connection made by Eshun at one point. Nothing special about it by now, other than to actually hear it in his voice. Having read Mumbo Jumbo for my 498 class, I was surprised to see Ishmael Reed – in my mind, he was more of a Question-type person (JLU-era). I was also surprised to see Nichelle Nichols – not that her presence in a documentary tying blackness and the future together is surprising or anything. She's still hot. And finally, I was struck by the irony of the suggestion of a “Digitized Diaspora”, not because it still doesn't have a Wikipedia entry (though there is one for “postcyberpunk” - they are probably related), but because we watched it all on VHS, itself an ironic format for this sort of work.

That's really all I can think of. Honestly, I had trouble taking it seriously (that the special effects reminded me of a certain late 80's BBC sci-fi show might have been part of it).