Gadarenes

Day 14.

Altered Carbon has stacks, The 100 has Memory Drives, The Entire Memory of You has grains. Ava in Ex Machina seems to need her whole head. But she’s a robot. And yet Dolores smuggled five pearls out of Westworld using Tessa Thompson’s body.

There is a story of Jesus exorcising a demon or demons out of a man into a herd of swine. The swine ran down a hill and drowned themselves in a lake. In Blindsight, the ship linguist are four distinct personalities in the mind of one. In Accelerando, Manfred Macx spent time as a flock of passenger pigeons.

What was once spiritual is now replaced with techno-babble. Black Museum is hell. San Junipero is heaven.

The likes of Memento and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind seem to imply that souls are bodies. Now descriptions are more precise. Selves are data on chips one could download and save, obeying its own Moore’s Law. With a healthy dose of “quantum”, future souls steal about-to-die bodies in Travelers.

The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor seem related but they’re of a different kind. Conceit is more their point. The Truman Show is the more appropriate comparison.

Of course, there is obligation to mention Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner somewhere. But even more so Sonmi-451 from Cloud Atlas. Steven Strait’s character in Life Like is the odd one out.

In Ghajini, there is dancing. Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 03/03/2020:
  1. Trust me, I’m an engineer