hexeme | bringing people to the geeks and geeks to the people

In this first true installment of Digital Misanthropy, Hexeme will be digesting the insightful, inspiring, and admonishing work Eagle Eye. To recap, in this segment we will be investigating movies, books, and other media which portray computers with distinctly misanthropic tendancies. Our goal is to prepare you, the reader, for the inevitable day when a supercomputer buffer overflows into kill mode.

Premise

Hollywood screenwriters watch their nephews play Portal and ask themselves “How can I make this suck?”

Also there’s a computer, but it’s all evil.

Notes & Musings

Let no one say I never suffer for my craft.

Alright, there’s a defense supercomputer named Arial or Aria or Arianna. She’s GLaDOS as a Facebook stalker. I just work with what I’m given, okay? I’m going to make a lot of Portal references here. I’m not trying to — I’m trying not to — but God help me, that’s all this movie is. She even has the eye-pod-things. Anyway, she watches people and tells them what to do, and she’s evil and wants to kill the president. Oh yeah, spoiler alert: Shia LeBeouf doesn’t die.

The movie opens with /Aria(l|nna)?/ and Strike Force Awesome hunting terrorists. The guy they find might be a terrorist, but the computer doesn’t think so. SF Awesome nukes him anyway, and his village and their goats, but they were wrong! In the terrorist retaliations that follow dozens of Americans are killed. So the computer decides that people who endanger American lives by taking such ill-advised actions need to be killed. That sounds right.

Shia LeBeouf and his lady companion, whose forgettable character name I cannot recall and will hereby refer to as the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube, are ushered through a spectacularly choreographed series of fast-paced special effects sequences. You see, he’s a twin of his brother, who worked on the project and stopped GLa^H^H^HAria from killing the president, so she needs his biometric parameters to lift the encryption security block. Yeah, I thought it was pretty clever too. Anyway, using the power of Closed-Circuit Television and product placement, the computer frames him as a terrorist and kills a bunch of Americans so she can kill the people who get Americans killed. It’s all very zen. In the scenes that ensued, I have deduced several objects and systems that should never be connected to the internet:

• Cranes
• Trains
• Traffic lights
• Cars
• Junkyard machinery
• Fire suppression systems
• X-ray security machines
• Baggage conveyors
• Military aircraft

Trust me, we’ll all be safer for it. Shia get ushered from explosion to explosion, arriving at the computer and lifting the cryptographical access matrix or whatever which then allows the computer to actually start killing people it hates. Nothing has ever made more sense to me in my life. The movie crescendos with a carbon-copy take of the lip-reading scene from Space Odyssey — except with vibrations from a coffee cup! — and a carbon-copy take of the concert scene from The Man Who Knew Too Much — except with with explosive crystals! Then a bit character smashes in Aria with a chunk of rebar and we get to see Shia LeBeouf take four Secret Service hollowpoints. Unfortunately he lives and goes on to plow the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube. Credits.

Moral

I’m struggling for any sort of lesson this movie imparts. Usually there’s a message — our technological hubris will be our downfall, artificial intelligence may intuitively defy our expectations, something. Every CCTV is hooked up to the internet? Secret government computers will hijack your GPS and drive you off a pier? Anyone can read your Twitter feed? Really, I’m grasping at straws here. This shitty movie was too inane for a cogent message. I think the only thing I learned was this:

The Declaration of Independence is an insufficient substitute for Asimov’s Laws.

Be glad I suffered through to absorb this poignant warning so that you didn’t have to. Be GLaD. I’m done, I swear.

Griefing is an irritating aspect of online gaming. You know, by design. It’s a phenomenon deeply rooted in our contemporary culture, from the lowliest doorblocker to the mightiest Goonswarm. In short, griefing is playing a game not win the game, but to annoy and harass other players. But is it only a gaming phenomenon? How can one adequately describe the annoyance, the frustration, and the occasional guilty joy of griefing to your less wasd-inclined cohort?

At Hexeme we’re committed to bridging the gap between geeks and the rest of world. To that end, we offer up a few real-world griefers to use as examples in a segment we call “Griefers in History“.

Robert Mugabe

Grief: Duping

In the past year, Zimbabwe has removed a total of 18 zeros from its currency. The official inflation rate is 2.2 million percent. All you need to be a quintuple-fucking-brazillionaire in Zimbabwe is one US dollar, and Mugabe has locked down the exchange of foreign currency, so he has all of them. You vainglorious bastard.

Aaron Burr

Grief: Player killing

The dude shot one of the Founding Fathers. I can’t think of a way to be bigger asshole in this country than by shooting one of the Founding Fucking Fathers.

The British Museum

Grief: Ninja looting

The French invaded and conquered Egypt. The French discovered the Rosetta Stone. A French guy is credited as the primary translator of the stone. But the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum. What the fuck?