Looking at 2057 (updated)


The technology is amazing, but the society is strictly controlled
With everything that has been happening, I got "behind" on my TV watching. The Discovery Channel showed a special called 2057 a couple of weeks ago and I taped the first two episodes. I haven't seen the third one yet.

The shows were divided between speculating what will happen in 50 years of tech advances and a storyline showing how those advances could work in real life. I loved the possible tech advances, although I think they were on the conservative side. But the stories made me wonder.

In the first episode, The Body, insurance companies constantly monitor and test every individiual. One man fakes his mandatory screening to hide the fact that he got drunk at a party. He has a heart attack, and his insurance is cancelled so his heart can't be cloned and replaced. Enter the brave doctor who breaks the rules and arranges for him to get a new heart.

In the second episode, The City, a young boy's ex-hacker grandfather constantly tweaks the boys toys. The boy decides to tweak one a little further on his own and accidently launches a fifty-year old computer virus into the city computer grid which starts to fail. Despite the appalling computer design (centralized networks instead of distributed, fifty year old computer virus STILL dangerous to existing computers), the local police force launches a SWAT type search and destroy and the boy and his grandfather desperately try to fix things. The final confrontation ends with about a dozen laser sights trained on the boy and the grandfather before the police commander calls things off. Oh, and the police commander is the boy's mother and daughter to the grandfather, it was her access that allowed the virus to crash the system.

Notice that in both cases, there is a conformist near totalitarian society that can be severely disrupted by not following the rules, and the only way to fix things is for a "wiser" and compassionate individual to break the rules again.

Doesn't say a whole lot for the society of the future, or freedom.

All three episodes will be shown again on the Discovery Channel on March 3. I plan to tape number three and see if the collectivist culture is carried over. With a title like The World, what do you think?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - March 1, 2007 at 02:29 PM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved