S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Gambles of Television

By now, my four or five regular readers (hi guys!) know that I'm a bit of a Netflix fiend. I don't have cable and I almost never watch network TV. I am surely one of thousands for whom a simple cost-benefit analysis demonstrated that subscribing to Netflix, providing as it does a wealth of readily available viewing goodness (and shittiness when the mood strikes), without commercials, is an easy choice versus a usurious cable subscription, mandating as it does tuning in at a particular time and putting up with advertising that you basically paid to see.

And I also cannot be the only person who's been a Netflix subscriber for enough years that I've developed an allergy to commercials that's so acute, I can no longer listen to the radio and do my best to tune out the trailers in front of movies on the (increasingly rare) occasion that I go to the theater.

I began to wonder just how commonplace I am in the above ways while I was watching the series premiere of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. last night. The show itself? Eh, kind of promising. Much of it felt…routine, unexpectedly, but the casting's good overall and the occasional Whedonish touches were noticeable. I do have my doubts about the degree to which fanboy enthusiasm for the Coulson character in Marvel films will translate to small-screen viability over an extended period.

Which brings us to the thing that really fired my imagination as S.H.I.E.L.D. ended and I switched off the opening moments of The Goldbergs. It wasn't wondering about Lola's background, or Mike's destiny, or whether the techie characters with the heavy accents would make it past the pilot. Instead, motivated by this rare hour of commercial exposure, I imagined what the future might bring for TV—and the adaptable little mammal to its overspecialized dinosaur, the Internet.

Days of Future Past

I just watched the Deep Space Nine two-parter "Past Tense" again recently. Though it's not DS9 at its very best, and it's preachy even for Star Trek, it's always affecting—and it seems like every time I watch it, it becomes more plausible.

I'm not referring, of course, to the "chroniton envelope isolating the Defiant from the changes to the timeline" business, or even the idea of "changes to the timeline" making sense. If time travel is possible, nobody but the time travelers would ever perceive "changes to the timeline," because the act of traveling into the past would spawn divergent timelines that cannot be re-merged, but instead only be made to seem identical…but that's a discussion for another time. (Maybe when I finally get around to watching Primer, that can be part of my review.)

No, the plausible part is all the 2024 Sanctuary District stuff. The last time I watched "Past Tense" was probably four or five years ago, and what felt plausible then is no less so now:

"It's not that they don't give a damn, Doctor. It's that they've given up. The social problems facing them seem too enormous to deal with." - Sisko

"We had to cancel our trip to the Alps this year because of the student protests in France." - the female party guest

"Jobs. You guys want jobs? When are you going to figure it out? There are no jobs! Not for us, anyway." - B.C.

Map My Brain

I basically never pay more than the very slightest attention to the State of the Union address, but this time, something jumped out at me:

Obama to Back Brain Mapping (NYT)

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Mere Cyberocracy Is Loosed Upon the World

Let's take it as a given that we are currently living in, or very fast approaching, a "cyberpunk present"—a state of social and technological affairs predicted more or less accurately by the cyberpunk genre. (If you need evidence, consider such facts of our lives as the might of multinational tech companies in comparison to the traditional nation-state; reduced relevance of the electorate in historically democratic societies; surveillance that's effectively invisible and potentially ubiquitous; the world's leaders being basically unopposed in, and having no qualms about, using that surveillance in ways they alone determine to be appropriate; and the ragtag alliance of secretive, tech-expert rebels who hide on the 'Net and occasionally score massive coups against "the Machine" that give hope to the like-minded but fail to gain much attention from the general public.)

As far as I can tell, the only criterion for a "cyberpunk present" that we haven't yet met is widespread (or even niche) fusion of tech and the human body. It's coming, though—whether in the form of Google Goggles or elective surgical brain/body enhancement. And that's assuming pharmaceuticals and performance-enhancing substances don't already qualify.

So let's call the present the Early to Middle Cyber Age. To some degree, its cyberpunkish traits are owed to the cyberpunk authors themselves—they developed concepts and terms that inspired development of groups and technology that are parts of our lives now, even if the affectations, like black leather and mirrorshades, are dated. (To say nothing of the tech specifics. If you want a good laugh, watch the movie Hackers sometime.)

I Am, I Think (To No One There)

All truth is conditional, all knowledge mutable. It doesn't take a lot of reflection to arrive at these simple, yet significant, conclusions. Where you go from there is more complex.

Consider truth. I'll use an example inspired by a movie I saw recently. We can say it is a "truth" that humans have the capacity to directly inflict on one another suffering so monstrous as to defy description—but (the condition) in reality that capacity isn't realized except in unusual situations, e.g. extreme external social pressures or extreme internal mental disorder. We can say it is a "truth" that death is inevitable, but that too may only be because medical science hasn't advanced enough. Already, multiple research avenues toward medical immortality are beginning to yield fruit, and that doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of purely electronic means of death avoidance (brain uploading).

Now consider knowledge. Any day now, physicists or astronomers could make a discovery that overturns much of what we hypothesize about the universe, or even of the history of our own planet. Or, on the more mundane scale, that close friend or dear relative who you "know" could never do such a thing? You really never know. (As others will tell you after the fact.)