-By Cernan Cabriesy
Despite the star power of The Circle, the movie disappoints on so many levels. The story follows Mae Holland (Emma Watson) who gets the opportunity of a lifetime for a dream job at a massive internet company called The Circle — which resembles Facebook on steroids — collecting every piece of data the world has to offer, making it available for every user. Whatever data the company can’t collect from other sources, it collects on its own by distributing millions of tiny satellite cameras to users across the globe to be placed everywhere.
The movie explores many of the ethical questions regarding personal privacy, business occultism, and the ability of major corporations to aid society by catching “bad guys” on the one hand, while destroying the lives of innocent individuals on the other.
Perhaps it explorers too many of those ethical questions at once. So many, in fact, that the movie is unsuccessful at resolving any of them. Just as Mae decides to become “transparent,” as it is called in the film, by wearing a camera all the time and allowing the company to record her every move, conversation, and action, likewise this character’s arc becomes so transparent that any less-than-astute observer will be able to figure out the climactic twist before it happens.
The only lesson we are left with at the end is that the invasion of oir privacy will continue to get worse, there is no one to stop it, and there will always be someone at the top holding the keys, so they had better be “ethical,” whatever that means.
Every character in this film is gray. There are no real villains, there are no real heroes. All of the other high-powered stars like Tom Hanks and John Boyega could have easily been replaced by unknown actors.
Worst of all is that liberal Hollywood gets lost in this spider web by apparently deciding to trivialize the most serious of ethical issues our future faces, mostly by turning privacy on its head and making it the villain. It’s one thing to take down the CEO of a company who makes everyone else’s life transparent except his own. By doing so Hollywood still gets to “Stick it to the Man.” That’s right out of their playbook. But they get completely lost in all of the other issues and problems addressed throughout the film. I am guessing this is the case because most liberals are ethically stunted to begin with.
Perhaps we will have to wait for some indie filmmaker to tackle the real issues properly before we get a good film out of these topics.
[Editor’s note: Looks like Hanks’ The Circle is doing poorly at the box office, too. Tom Hanks’ latest movie is his biggest bomb EVER, lowest opening box office in his career.]
After rolling in the mud for nearly two months desperately trying to find some reason, any reason… you know, other than facts… for their November 8 loss, Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and their handmaidens in the Old Media complex have finally found their perfect scape goat: It wuz the Russians wut dun it.
I have been seeing more and more reports that writers, reviewers and bloggers are by and large useless where it comes to real news about the tech industry and this failed reporting on the iPhone ap Meerkat is a perfect example.
Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President, People Operations, has publicly spoken out about the “lack of diversity” among Google employees. Despite Google’s far left-wing company culture, he is apologetic and wants users to know that there are reasons that Google isn’t “diverse” enough.
Oh, he thought that just because he had billions of dollars, all he had to do was flit into a New Jersey school system, spread some of his cash around, and voila kids would get a “good” education. But reality was a different thing as when Mark Zuckerberg tried it, he found that the greedy teachers union stole all the cash and his millions didn’t help the kids at all.
Started in 2004, the left-wing propaganda website Media Matters for America has been spreading lies about Republicans and conservatives for a decade, now. Naturally the site has always claimed the center-right coalition is “anti-worker” for opposing unions, but this organization itself has never been unionized. Now the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) is agitating to organize Media Matters and the propaganda outfit is fit to be tied over the union’s efforts.
I received this absurd email in my inbox today that I thought maybe some of you may find amusing. It is purportedly sent by the new head of the Fed, Janet Yellen, of all people.
This month the blog commenting system Disqus changed its system with neither a warning nor an explanation, eliminating the ability of page visitors to see the tallied number of down votes to any of the comments. Apparently the blog service felt that Americans were getting their feelings hurt so badly by a down vote that it had to eliminate the capability. And thus the feminization of America continues.
At long last we get a proper ruling on the First Amendment status of bloggers, one affording them the same legal status as “real” journalists; this from the Ninth Circuit Court in California, no less.
Everyone loves to use their iPhone or other smart phones to snap photos of family and friends, to take pics of places you’ve visited, and to upload those photos to the internet via services such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. But did you know that there is hidden data in those photos that can tell crooks and sex criminals exactly where those photos were taken? Alarmingly, your safety and privacy is at risk every time you upload a photo to the Internet!
Again showing how easy it is to have conservatives blocked or removed from Facebook, the new video campaign ad for Dan Branch, the Republican candidate for Texas Attorney General, was removed from the social media giant for “community standards” violations.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that the Internal Revenue Service should do more to warn taxpayers that they could have some tax liability over their holdings in Internet-based “virtual currencies” like Linden Dollars or Bitcoins.
If you are a Twitter user you know without question that the social media service often becomes little else but a massive fight club with lots of name calling and foul language and a survey of the Twitter accounts of some well-known journalists and media types shows that they are just as prone to the fight club mentality as everyone else.
The hand-in-hand nature of this White House and some of the nation’s biggest corporations is seen in yet another incident as Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign data team is now moving from team Obama to team Google.
A new study of the most controversial entries on Wikipedia, the crowd sourced, online encyclopedia, shows that in the English language entry the most fought over is the biography of George W. Bush.
In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, senior Illinois Senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, expressed his doubt as to whether bloggers deserved Constitutional protection for their work online.
Yahoo, Inc. has announced that it has cleared the way to purchase the social website Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion.
The 3D-printable gun craze is just beginning as the blueprint plans for the new “Liberator” plastic gun were downloaded nearly 100,000 times in just a two-day period this month.
Citizen journalists in China have succeeded in getting a wasteful government official fired by reporting on a lavish party he threw paid for by government funds.
According to many at the 3D Printing Conference and Expo, 3D-printed guns are inevitable despite the efforts of some 3D printer companies and politicians to try and stop it.
Reddit has officially apologized for users’ assumption that an innocent and missing Brown University student was a likely suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing.