Tech Paladin

I finally saw District 9, courtesy of Netflix’s awesome live streaming feature. Many of my friends had talked a lot about when it first came out, so I already knew that it was a pretty obvious allegory for apartheid. heck, it’s even set in South Africa!

Now first of all, real South African apartheid was a morally repugnant system because black people are in fact the equal of white people. There existed no good reason for the state-imposed discrimination against them save for fear and racism.

District 9 seems to completely miss this crucial point by portraying the aliens not as the intellectual and cultural equals of humans, but as animalistic child-creatures. In fact, the aliens are even introduced as having been found aboard their own vessel malnourished, impoverished, disorganized, and generally unable to fend for themselves. And yet we’re supposed to believe they somehow constructed the metropolis-sized spacecraft they inhabit? Then when the aliens are brought to the surface, ostensibly due to compassionate and humanitarian impulses on the part of the South Africans, they demonstrate no real understanding of their situation or even the ability to communicate effectively with one another, let alone any leadership or work ethic.

Really, aside for two aliens we meet who are intelligent, have goals, and use technology, 99% of them are portrayed as little more than vermin. They have no desire to better themselves, can barely understand one another, and they spend most of their time squabbling over trash and fighting with Nigerian gangs over cat food. Seriously!

And yet they have weapons of such titanic power that greedy human corporations are rushing to try and figure out how they work. Who made these weapons? It clearly isn’t the bestial creatures we see playing with tires and getting tricked by semi-literate teenagers. So who did? Who made the spaceship itself, for that matter? Where did all the high tech gadgetry come from if most of the alien species is hopelessly primitive?

Perhaps this the alien society is supposed to be a caste system with wise leaders who guide the unwashed masses. This is supported early on with the revelation that the vessel’s command pod detached and plummeted to Earth while it was floating over Johannesburg. Now it all makes sense! The leaders were separated from their people and their technology, leaving the masses virtually powerless. As soon as they’re re-united, the alien society will begin to re-cohere!

Wrong again. Though the two intelligent aliens we meet are indeed from the command pod, when the remaining aliens are flown down to Earth, the intelligent ones appear to have no influence over them at all. I found myself wondering how the alien society ever managed to evolve past the “hitting each other with rocks” stage of cultural development considering how primitive and disorganized the vast majority of it is.

Over two decades, the aliens’ conditions worsen. I found myself incredulous, as later on in the movie, we see the aliens’ martial technology in action: bio-mechanical battle mechs and devastating energy firearms, both of which can pretty effortlessly disintegrate entire platoons of South African commandos. Soooooo…. why don’t the two intelligent aliens use the weapons to improve their situation? For that matter, why didn’t the stupid ones? They seem to like fighting a lot, so why don’t they ever turn their hellcannons on the humans? The movie specifically makes the point that humans can’t use the alien weapons, so the aliens are at an enormous technological advantage for the entire movie and never use it. Feh!

All in all I was extremely disappointed. With so much of the movie’s underpinnings making no cultural or logical sense at all, I found myself frustrated by the excellent CG and high-tech action scenes.

I saw The Book of Eli the other day and thought it was pretty good. I’ll admit right off the bat that what attracted me to it was the trailers that showed it to be about Denzel Washington kicking ass in a Fallout-style post-apocalyptia, and on that count I was not disappointed. There’s plenty of excellent post-apocalyptic action and a great deal of effort was put into making the world feel realistic.

That said…

** WARNING: ** This next part contains spoilers! Click to read. Although if you don’t, this post will probably seem very short.

Spoilers

Okay, so there are some pretty gaping plotholes. But the movie manages to redeem itself to me through the rest of it. Maybe it’s because I’m totally in love with the Fallout universe, but seeing Denzel Washington barter for electricity with salt packets and shoot goggled biker thugs with a sawed-off shotgun just makes me happy inside. The world they all inhabit is indeed pretty derivative of Fallout’s but I don’t care because I love that world, and they manage to infuse it a great deal of detail and life.

So yeah, it’s flawed and you’ll have to suspend your disbelief a bit toward the middle, but I had a good time and didn’t feel ripped off by the outrageous ticket price.

I’m really digging Boxee, a free, open-source media center program. Basically, it’s a piece of software that turns your computer into a TV by aggregating online videos and such from places like YouTube, the Onion Online (which is hilarious, by the way), ComedyCentral.com, and other places that have lots of awesome free content. It also plays your own local videos, no matter what format they happen to have been encoded in. All you have to do it hook up the computer to a TV, and you’ve got a pretty compelling living room entertainment center.

I have it on my media center/gaming PC and it’s pretty wonderful. It loads at boot, so I only have to look at Windows XP’s ugly mug for a second or two before it opens. I have access to my ripped DVDs and quite a few intertubes worth of content, and the user interface is quite nice too. Alas, it has a pretty silly logo:

Well, it is open-source! [rimshot] In all seriousness, there are some quirks and things you have to do for yourself, such as figure out a way to control it from your couch. That was actually one of the biggest issues I had with it for a while. I would lug over my big ol’ 104-key keyboard, which sort of breaks you out of the illusion that you’re not actually sitting in front of a Windows box. Luckily, there’s a free Boxee app that basically turns your iPhone into a remote control! Problem solved.

Beyond that, I really only have only good things to say. It’s obviously not for your grandparents as it requires creating on online account and manually installing and configuring it, but anyone who can use a web browser and Word can accomplish it all easily enough. And did I mention it’s free?

Yeah, pretty much:

Video:

Ars Technica is reporting some disappointing data on the web’s so-called “democratizing” effects. They report that political participation using web-centric methods such as emailing representatives or donating using paypal.

Here’s the money quote:

The depressing take-home from Brady’s talk was that, at least when it comes to participation in politics, the Web isn’t quite the democratizing force that many of us had hoped it would be—in fact, it makes things worse.

Basically, the less educated you are, the less likely you are to be politically active enough to use technology in service of it, or technologically savvy to use it for politics, or else some combination of the two.

No duh.

Is this for real? Did anyone really expect that the web was going to magically erase inequality? It’s the most logical thing in the world that poorly-educated people don’t take advantage of technology — they don’t take advantage of many things, like the opportunity to get an education, for example.

But moreover, why is Ars using the word “democratize” to mean “eliminate inequality?” The hallmark of anything democratizing is that increases freedom and opportunity, not equality, and that’s just what the web has done. But the mere existence of freedom guarantees nothing — in this case, even after controlling for broadband availability, the study still showed that the less educated you are, the less you take advantage of the web. Not that it’s not available to you, not that you’re prevented from doing so, just that you choose not to.

As usual, education is everything. So many things flow from it; lack of political participation and tech-savvyness are already heavily correlated to low levels of education. The web can’t address the symptoms if the cause is going untreated.