Cyberwars: The Movie UPDATED December 1997 (small intro; mentionings of the movie script with predictions implemented)
The Cyberwars will be an unprecented explosion of information utilization and exchange. Thousands of political factions and sub-factions having enormous data bases with information of their issues organized not by alphabetical order or chronological order, but it a three - dimensional graphic hive according to doctrine and arguments of the ideology. Everyone interacting with these hives will have gone through a personalized test that builds a search and surfing tool personalized for that particular person; as this technology continues, and use of it becomes more frequent, the personalized engines will become more detailed and precise. People will get to what information they care about the most, in the format in which they understand it the most, and in the least amount of time. Every time there is an issue up on some debate forum, the debaters can access data bases of the issues previously discussed and see the argument layed out visually like strands on a spider web. Hundreds of people could be watching you and "flag" you with their touch tone phones or computers if you missed a point on which your opponent is beating you. Never again will issues seem so big and pointless to discuss because you don't have a Ph.D. or an active statistical abstract.
When this explosion happens, there will be a considerable less amount of people not knowing what kind of career to pursue and a severe drop in political apathy. Ideas and actions will be meticulously kept track of (almost impossible with today's means) and the mess in Washington as well as in local governments will be tremendously lowered.
Problem #1: The problem with the computer industry (with respect to its growth) is that it has been treated like a distinct and seperate field. It is not. It is a LEVEL to which all fields can be taken. It is something that can enhance anything, but is nothing by itself. Anyone knows that not everyone can be an expert in everything, so from elementary on to college, education systems try to give students a "core" background and curriculum. I'm sure that most people would laugh at me for saying this; it seems so arrogant to say that "we need more computer education" as if this is some sort of breakthrough realization. The real point is that these machines, with their ever growing ability to transmit and process information, can be a help to ALL people in ALL fields. That is the difference. I'm sure you've all seen the TV commericals where some first grade kids are huddled around some computer getting instant information from being hooked up into some planetarium or science institute. All people will pretty much agree that this is a good thing. The trick is to make this a more active process, as opposed to a passive process, so that massive computerization in our education system doesn't just flop into happening 20 years later than it should.
There is also a social aspect to this problem. Perhaps the least obvious one (at least to the corporate interests who puch these commericals showing that a PC is the "second coming" to a child education) is the fact that the slow integration of computers into schools are NOT responsible for our current education problems. Let's say that computers weren't a reality today; or that we were just getting a unit with 1K memory the size of a building; we would still have our main education problems today. Kids don't have focus and drive today. Learning must be something you feel in your heart; not something that is spoon fed to you. Some countries have kids eating dirt three meals a day and dying of sicknesses that we get over in a weekend; we have such a surplus of life conveniences that we have the problem of not milking the educational opportunities that are overflowing for us. But our social problems are what's killing us. With the generation gap, the crowd has more say and influence; it's more stressful to go against them; your parents are distanced further and further away from your reality; kids stay at school awake as long as they stay home awake; it's just not "cool" to learn anymore. Because of things like this, home life and academic achievement is put on the back burner.
Problem #2: All of the ads with all of the great and practical everyday uses of computers are a joke. The average Joe Sixpack doesn't care about his stock exchange information being updated every fifteen minutes, nor does he need to schedule a flight one year in advance to the Hawaii, or get help with his golf swing, or all of these little tidbit pointless things that are supposed to be the greatest thing to have happened. There's no USE for these contraptions! My father and I were discussing the ZIP disk and the fact that it can hold 70 times as much as a 3.5 inch disk (100 Megabytes). He then asked, "Yeah, Kirk but what can you DO with all of that?" I'm still working on an answer.
Problem #3: Few people know how to use them and/or have resources to produce them, which rides up the cost. There is no such thing as a toothbrush service open 24 hours a day coming to your house to clean your teeth holding a basin under your mouth and scurrying back in their van, charging you $50 an hour!! It is because everyone knows how to do it! You give people a reason to use these machines (like making cyberspace the new and final political battlefield for the 21st century) and you will see an explosion in the field!! After all, with all of the buzz words like "cyberspace" and "super information highways" and TV commercials showing everyone under the sun using a $4000 computer system, we easily forget that the situation with computers has already evolved into the "have's" and "have not's".
Problem #4: There is already a severe saturation in the software market. Companies are laying off their programmers! We hear today so much that computers are the future and your life will be set. But the truth is that the computer software market (and maybe I dare say hardware, and the higher essence of it not easily labeled under hardware or software) is just like all other markets in the United States: We develop a good thing with capitalism and good old fashioned rugged individualism and then when it grows and gets more complicated, we just let it cake up over itself and corrode. I am convinced that with our social problems today, kids don't get enough drive and specific, detailed direction at the age they need (some never at all) and with our education system, they are being left in the dust behind the mutating market and the demands and needs of the post-industrial world. You can't take good raw old fashioned lemonade-stand-on-the-street-corner capitalism and expect that to give anyone a paycheck in 1996!
The trend or knack or whatever you want to call it in the cutting edge business (and maybe even life) today is the standard. The businesses that supply us with bare nature essentials like food, shelter and so forth are "just there". There are no big struggles to arrange to get food and shelter to people in the nation as if half of the nation is in some famine or extreme poverty. The trend is now services and channeling activites in certain ways (a format, or standard) where the real meat is in money and survival doesn't seem to be tangible goods, but in things require vision and education rather than just a strong back. Kids need an incredible amount of fine-tuned molding for the 21st century and they are not getting it! Here's what the year end of 1995 TIME magazine had to say about why Bill Gates of Microsoft is worth $15 billion (give or take some change):
Nobody navigates these turbulent complexities better than [Bill] Gates, who understands as few do that the great lever of wealth and power in the digital age is not hardware or even software but control over the standards to which others must adhere.
Many charge that he is the Anti-Christ...
But I hope that you see my point. It's about what direction we should apply our services, with actual physical goods being a low rate formality; it's about the format and the standard we should adopt. That's where the future is: every aspect of a kid's life related to giving them specific, detailed direction at an early, impressionable age. One way that this can be done is by closing the gap between education and entertainment. I get into this further in the "Implementation" topic below.
In summation, we are going 100 miles an hour in second gear. Our needs have insanely surpassed our ability to deal with them, in the business world and in our private lives in social problems and issues.
"dump phones":
[A] - They have no reason to have them high on their priority list. They'll need something like controversial issues brought forth in something like... I don't know, a presidential campaign to give them a reason to invest in some dirt cheap machine like a dump phone.
[B] -- An elaborate, interactive information hive on every vote, bill, speech, interview and especially a computer graphical representation of your argument struture, with all of your opponents stances (and your responses to it).
Carrying a fish in a bucket of water to keep it alive...
Put bullet holes and marching soldiers on your web page to show your degree of defiance...
Use catch phrases, buzz words and emotionally tinged dialect to get a point across...
Relate a complicated or fuzzy concept to something simple...
In reference to the mentioning of this nation's sub-culture fragmentation earlier on this page, I would like to build off of that. This loss of cohesion isn't so clean cut, as if this mess is just a matter of people having different lifestlyes. They are starving for solidification and clarity WITHIN the lifstyle of the particular sub-culture to which they belong. There may be a certain type of clothing, slang, dress, general mindset and bulk values that may indicate elements of your persons and even be somewhat therapeutic in dealing with the fact that you have lack of direction or drive, but that's about as far as this goes (at least for most people and at least right now) The trick is with this is that in solidifing (which is something that SHOULD be done in the home, but with the modern world distancing today's youth and with the generation gap that doesn't seem likely too soon), it must be an ACTIVE process as opposed to a passive one. I'll have to use a real life example for this to be clear (again, it is under the "Implementation" topic)
The main idea here is for people to be solidified under their own niche to be effective when envisioning a career, and when interacting with others, to be aware of themselves enough so that the people with which they are communicating takes them in the intended context, so that they receive the full impact of their message.
Imagine being a pro-lifer and posting so on your credit card, (I hate to use that example - I am against a cashless society) bank checking programs and so forth that when you pick up an item that has been determined to be supporting things like fetal tissue research or ru486, a computer instantly tells you that it is linked to these people and you don't buy the item!! Any industry that that uses nudity or overly suggestive scenes in thier commercials like the recent shampoo commercial showing naked women covered only by their hair whipping downward (As I had seen one time). Can you imagine an intricate, totally seperatist movement like that? That way those not agreeing with an industry that seems to be either pushing or advocating a moral agenda with which we diagree could not be responsible for pumping money into these liberal slanted, interests that seep through all of our aspects of life!!! The machine that supports activities like these hide like worms in slimey rock crevaces; it wouldn't make us censors to say "If your gonna have something like this, I don't want to support it directly or indirectly! So show me where you get your money so I can make sure not to put my money there."
(I'll use my own life - hey why not?)
That's the premise that I use when I say that this movie will violently inject a picture of our culture into the audience. The battlefield will be three-dimensional computer graphic software, and the opposing forces will be two leading factions of the nerd sub-culture (which is in a state of civil war). From this movie, I will depict a method of recourse to our growing onslaught of social problems: the intergration of the solutions into our past time and pop culture. Apply the long standing conservative ethic! Privatize all of the operations! Nerds are classic at it, and proof that it is possible for people. Look at how they learn about computers (just like I did); they stay cooped up in their room and stay up until all hours of the night with FAR more passion than any schoolwork (Samuel Clemens - Mark Twain - said to never let school intefere with your education) and attacking aspects of the programming and the machine through the manuals, and experimenting. They come up with their own learning patterns by conducting observations that they determine. They learn according to their OWN format, move at their own pace and deem what THEY feel important to further investigate or completely omit. Their learning, drive, directon and passion are all rooted in their soul, and nothing is forced upon them. THAT'S how real education should be and the only way that it can be in order to be beneficial in a student's life.
The next obvious response from anyone reading this is "easier said than done" and "nice rhetoric, but what about specifics?" Okay, two obvious start questions would be:
The social aspect is that the nerds are pushed outside of the mainstream by nature of existence and as a punishment for not living the way that the regs live. This is designed on having society looking at itself through the eyes of those who look at them from a distance. Nerds see all of there mistakes from the outside which is the best perspective. And since under cultures tend to see things that the more mainstream doesn't, the turmoil and malcontentment in the nerd sub-culture is a result from how bad things are for the mainstream. The stress of the exile and oppression of the nerd mindset and lifestyle or enhanced exponentially due to the fact that the regs or now having lives stressful and unsatisfying as well. The nerd sub-culture is reflective of their state of moral decay. And in this heat of chaos, there is a fragmentation into two nerd factions: the conts and the bains. The conts have left the battle and concluded that this war has just been too much and it's time nerds stop feeling sorry for themselves like little helpless damsels in distress and get on with life by trying to have a life like the regs. The bains have concluded that this ethical drought is an omen that they are the chosen guild to implement some revolutionary change in society, and that they are the ones that must dedicate their lives in this, since it takes a life commitment to overcome the accquired stress due to non-conformity. As you might see, the factions both consider each other the sell-outs and cowards that they are sworn not to be. The leader of the conts, Delta 5, is former friends and now arch enemy of the leader of the bains, Theta Q. The movie is a mesh between this social struggle and the computer software used as a battlefield in these social wars. From this, I will make the case that anyone's every day life can benefit from this, such as political warfare and scientific research: the organization of information by theme and ideology. People grow when dealing with these issues, and that makes the air better, their food better, their braething better, their idle time better, their rogue thoughts more channeled, their level of consciousness higher, their direction in life clearer.
Now, just as you can clearly diagram a sentence, each of these sub-cultures have an elite group of leaders that construct a visual representation of their cults themes by which they live, and just as there are standards by which you label verbs and adjectives, there are universal standards by which you label understood points, conclusions, related issues, unrelated issues, points of conflict, points of hypocrisy, precedents (having been set and that WILL be set due to that established point) and express these as 3 dimensional figures in computer software. These images interact with and react to each other. A new belief (a plank) can be added to the standard hive, or a point or old belief can be challenged, when the new object (configured by the standard specifications of that group as an emotion, a need, a pleasure, a vice, a whatever...) is placed (or attempted to be placed) into the main structure. What happens, happens. This is a tool used in the exploration of the agenda and idelogies of the particular group.
The point of all of this is because of the information explosion (our information presently in this nation doubled in publication every 18 months) has resulted in an absolutely impossibile handling of issues adequately, or fairly. You never have the whole story; there's always a point of conjecture! There's always a rebuttle. Look at FAIR magazine and Rush Limbaugh going at it back and forth about condoms, feminism, the environment, health care... It never stops! Every time that there's a stat that seems to be irrefutable, the opposer always comes around it and turns everything around! So, in this movie, people try to use old fashioned diagramming and philosophical illustrations of classic, simple arguments, to give life to their ideologies. Keep in mind that there IS an absolute figure or "essence" of all issues and ideologies; the trick is getting them to be expressed. When this is done, people can just glance at this 3D configuration and get to what information they need. Also, keep in mind that these just won't be information hives, but databases of logical and debating techniques as well. That's another reason for the information explosion: not just raw research, but commentary! If you want to look for "liberals using emotion to circumvent the issue", just look at the particular branch or level that is one the tree of your conservative computer graphic structure. Do the same thing if you want to search some teeny bopper magazine archive that has been reconstructed by YOUR faction to find "equating sex with candy" or "regarding relationships as a nuisance, rather than a priority" or "holding parents views in contempt", just roll down the archived categories and there you are! In short, the information would be organized according to actual ideological stances and planks, rather than just words, subjects, or topics.
Now, of course, the ones that are the masters at this (expression of the themes and core ethics that make the sub-culture) are the nerds. They are the ABSOLUTE and final pioneers of this!!!! When the camera pans and shows the other groups interacting with the software and with each other, it is evident that there is a rapid and fulfilling exchange, which has a saturation point; life goes on, but for the NERDS, they LIVE this! THEN you see how psycho this madness can really get! These guys just don't get helped by this, thet are so into it, that EVERYONE wants to be a leader and a pioneer. This group has the highest disagreeability rate among members in it (because it's that way in real life). Tensions run high and this is more of a commonwealth than an organization. Maybe, as the movie unwinds, it will be more and more clear that they have a less and less cohesive agenda; that they are put together by society and not by themselves; that the label "nerd" applies to many different kinds of people with FEW similarities. The fragmentation adds to the uncertainty in the movie. There is a strong atmosphere of never being able to win. These are the ones that are the most malcontent with life. Like that line in:
Passions run high and conflict is deep! Maybe this is the ultimate expression of the technology because of these malcontents; the cold nature of the computer. I have much of the movie outlined and a good bit of written exchanges and scenes. It will be awesome; cutting edge!
(I will expand on this later)
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