Argo…yourself

Part of the Great Distraction Plan for the run-up to the UT game (we need a name for that, honestly) was a trip to the movies – and of all things, a screening of Argo at 9:55 PM on a Friday night.  As a forty-year-old, I can barely wrap my head around the fact that in college, we routinely went to movies that started at midnight…but I digress.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: this will be nominated for Best Picture and Ben Affleck should be nominated for Best Director. Everything was perfect, from the casting to the cinematography to the selection of toys in the bedroom – hell, they had the standup Cylon figure with the silver chest plate missing, just like actually happened to everyone who owned it in 1980.  The color palette was straight Instagram, the fashion egregious in the extreme, and the whole feel of the movie was that of an America still reeling from Vietnam, bewildered and outraged at being geopolitically stalemated by a bunch of hopped-up holy-roller student “AY-rabs”, looking around and asking itself if this was the end of the American era. Anyone who watches this movie should never again wonder how Reagan managed to blow Carter away 489-49 in the Electoral College.

More to the point, though, Argo shows a different world. No cellular phones.  No internet access.  Hell, the only use of a computer in the whole movie was for flight reservations, and in real life the Canadian ambassador’s wife had booked three sets of tickets on three different airlines and they went to the airport with physical boarding passes already in hand.  Burning and shredding box after box of physical records?  I’m sure there are still plenty of those, but these days, a couple of bullets through each hard drive would take care of most of your secure data needs.

Think about it: how much of Argo would even be possible in a high-tech world? Where anybody who even thinks there might be Americans hiding out with the Canadian ambassador can tweet it once and have a flash mob on hand in minutes? Where passing around pictures of wanted suspects isn’t a matter of photocopying a woven-together packet of paper shreds and handing the results around in person, but a simple matter of two clicks in email? Where cellular records are as close as marching into the local carrier’s office and demanding they pull the logs?  Where passports come with RFID and biometric information and can’t be just filled in from blanks? And most of all – where the announcement of a new science-fiction movie would get picked over endlessly at io9 and Ain’t It Cool News and Defamer, and where it might become apparent sooner than later that this “project” consists of two guys, a phone and a hastily-arranged cosplay party?

To be honest, a lot of those conditions still obtained as late as 1992. It’s the same argument that says two-thirds of Seinfeld episodes fall apart in the presence of cell phones. We live in a world where a small handful of changes have fundamentally altered what it means to live in a modern industrialized country. Internet access means knowledge at your fingertips. Mobility technology means the ability to manipulate it anywhere.  It means that I’m in a marriage that literally would never have been possible before email and IM and unmetered long-distance phone calling.

For that matter, twenty years ago, there were exactly 140 Starbucks IN THE WORLD.  Think about that.  Think of a world without the ubiquity of white peppermint mocha in December – and without the influence that drove McDonalds to make a big deal of their coffee offerings.  Hell, to have coffee offerings other than “200 degrees and flesh-melting”.  This thing that’s a cliche and a stereotype and a hallmark of American life wasn’t hardly there at all two decades ago, and now there’s no getting away from it.

It’s a different world.  It sort of makes you wonder whether there wasn’t a nodal point somewhere around the late 80s, early 90s…all the more reason to be on top of your William Gibson.  Because if you know where the uneven distribution is, you can live in the future now.

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