Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General Is it too soon to be talking 2020?

Well that's also digital. The HD digital switchover wasn't just about over the air broadcast. I'm sure you already know this but the entire concept of television was drastically changed.

We didn't just swap our NTSC for ATSC, we abandoned all analog recording formats altogether, and we've now even abandoned analog photochemical (motion picture film) along with it.
The movie industry was so sure for so many years that film would be preserved as an acquisition format.

It wasn't.
Here's a dumpster filled with Panavision motion picture film camera bodies.



Here's me with the very last camera I used on a professional commercial shoot, a "Panavised" Sony F5 digital cinema camera, in 2016.



Simply put the film business IS now the television business, because there's no difference anymore between the two except for some overpaid moguls and an old outdated "studio system" that can't even maintain a hold on theaters anymore, because the theater is now in your living room for a couple hundred bucks.

And that's okay because it appears that theater patrons don't even know how to be civil in a theater anyway.
But movie theaters are about to die a long and painful death anyway.
Premium Video On Demand with same day or a ten day release window is the end of movie theater exclusivity.

Congratulations. You escaped.


Soon we won't have to leave our cubicles for anything! CGI will replace reality and eventually we will all just be digitized and fed into the system. Wetware will become a thing of the past...

And AI is going to be able to create any VR adventure you want in real time. Being a movie or TV star will just be replaced by computer models of your body, your movements, and your voice. Instead of being paid a million dollars for a movie role, you will get one dollar a million times from viewers who license your data for their own VR experiences.

Want a romantic interlude with Judy Hopps? No problem: Costs you a dollar to Disney. Want to see Brad Pitt and a young Elizabeth Taylor in a remake of The Wizard of Oz? Danny Devito and Miley Cyrus in The Last Tango in Paris. Anything you can think of, the machine can make for you. The censorship aspects become impossible to enforce, because CGI images are not real people.

There's a good book I read awhile back called 'Snow Crash' that had a reality not unlike what you're describing, PIA. I think it was called the 'metaverse' but it was more like a 3-d internet where you walk around in it with your avatar, not unlike a video game. You were 'goggled in' and could hook up with friends and pretty much anything was on tap to do.

Wetware!

Yeeesh, that sounds so dystopian.

Loved Snow Crash! Did you know there's a sort of a parody of it called Head Crash? It's a 'must read' if you liked Snow Crash.

Snow Crash was okay, but some of Stephenson's later books are fantastic. I especially recommend Cryptonomicon, System of the World, and Seven Eves.

Wow, his later stuff gets better? cool.
Head Crash! I'll look for it.

It also got mention in a book called 'I Hate the Internet'. Not a great book to be reading at that time as it seem to predict what was coming in our society and made reference to 'Snow Crash' as being all to prescient. A good book to read if you got the time but depressingly unsparing as it strips away the veneer of our current society.

His Baroque Cycle trilogy(of which System of the World is part) is pretty much a 1600 page prequel to Cryptonomicon.

You get to meet and hang out with Isaac Newton and many other of the early Enlightenment thinkers and architects, You get to be familiar with the Sun King Louis XIV! And the adventures of Half Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, will take you all over the 17th century world. The history of computers and money...

If someone ever asked me what the best books I ever read were...
Neal Stephenson is on the very top of the list.

Headcrash is available as a used paperback on Amazon for around $5.

They didn't just "goggle in"

A proctoprod was part of the immersive experience...

His second book "Zodiak" is a hoot too.

Didn't like Zodiak all that much, which kind of turned me off of Stephenson for a while. Then I read another later book and I was hooked. I meant the trilogy when I said System of the World. Great stuff and it will keep you busy for a while.

I always call the trilogy System Of The World too. I had to look it up. It's really a more fitting title for the story.