Terrorist or freedom fighter, Satan or saint, monster or victim? When they have white skin, they get to have it all.
Cory Doctorow: Skynet Ascendant
As I've written here before, science fiction is terrible at predicting the future, but it's great at predicting the present. SF writers imagine all the futures they can, and these futures are processed by a huge, dynamic system consisting of editors, booksellers, and readers. The futures that attain popular and commercial success tell us what fears and aspirations for technology and society are bubbling in our collective imaginations.
RT @ggreenwald: Pentagon spending tens of millions of dollars on sci-fi super-hero “Iron Man” suit for troops
The U.S. military command in charge of special operations is betting tens of millions of dollars on a science fiction suit that would wrap troops in high-tech body armor and effectively afford them superhuman abilities. Back in the real world, SOCOM is offering up its own high-dollar prizes to the private sector — as well as academia and Hollywood special effects designers — to deploy exoskeleton-clad super soldiers against the United States’ enemies around the world.
“notre Kyle Reese, il s’appelle Edward Snowden,” @jerezim
"notre Kyle Reese, il s’appelle Edward Snowden," @jerezim
The CIA and the Myths of the Bin Laden Raid
The Frontline documentary includes a clip from Zero Dark Thirty in which a CIA torturer yells at an al Qaeda prisoner, “When you lie to me, I hurt you!” A repurposing of that line would hold true for the government and the American public — when it lies to us, it hurts us.
RT @trevortimm: “Zero Dark Thirty Was Filled With CIA Lies” | @FrontlinePBS documentary tonight details how the CIA seduced Hollywood
The documentary portrays the Kathryn Bigelow movie, which purports to be a definitive account, as a skewed view that was heavily influenced by the CIA and its press office. The agency had given the filmmakers extraordinary access to classified details about the operation that they didn’t otherwise hand out to journalists. “A lot of other people who covered the beat like I did in that search for bin Laden—we didn’t get close to that kind of cooperation from the agency on telling the inside story,” veteran Washington Post intelligence reporter Greg Miller told Frontline. The documentary is short on news and revelations. But it concisely lays out the the dueling narratives between the CIA’s version of its so-called “rendition, detention, and interrogation” program, and the Senate Intelligence Commitee’s years-long investigation of the same. The committee’s findings conclude that the agency tortured detainees and failed to come up with useful intelligence about terrorist attacks. If you haven’t been following the minutiae of this now-decade-long controversy, the documentary will bring you up to speed.
How science fiction influences thinking about the future
Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products. “I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”