Programming Note: Summer Lightning will be on a break till the new year. Thanks to everyone who has supported my writing in the last year. This is the 57th and last edition of the newsletter for 2023. I will pause paid subscriptions, which will resume in January 2024. You can find the archive of posts here.
Who needs a Trojan Horse when you’ve got Postmates? - The Killer, 2023
I often complain about the last 15 years of the internet never occupying the central narrative in movies and TV shows. I am discounting shows like Black Mirror, which are more of an extrapolation of contemporary technology and not about how it changes storytelling.
In the 2010s, movies and written stories reduced the internet to a series of text bubbles. During this time, the 90s archetype of a hacker sidekick was updated to be a social media maven sidekick. Both these trends have since been taken to their campy, post-internet extremes. The social media maven sidekick became the main character in the Netflix show Emily in Paris. In full credit to the show, it embodied the experience of browsing social media by falling squarely into the ambient TV genre - something to play in the background while you do other things. God forbid there was a moment of silence in the house. The novel Several People Are Typing, set entirely within the office messaging platform Slack, took the internet as a text bubble plot device to its logical conclusion. As someone who met most of his friends online in the last five years, I've found these plot devices and stories quite unsatisfying. But, in the previous week, I've come across two examples of storytelling that depict how the internet changes the type of stories we tell.
The first example is the final season of Billions - a pulpy TV show about hedge fund billionaires and their adversaries. The show's finale hinges on a group of people co-ordinating in a two-hour window to wipe out the entire portfolio of a rival hedge fund billionaire. This is made possible by the speed with which individuals can plant stories online, and the convenience with which they can carry out transactions or trades. The speed and convenience of the internet can be weaponized for coordinated action, as we have seen in the case of the Reddit-Gamestop story and the bank run on Silicon Valley bank. This was the first time I saw it in a fictional story. In the show, the conspirators have to set up their rival to go to Camp David to meet the American president so that they can buy two hours to execute their plan. The sequence, as campy as it sounds, shows how hard it is to get people away from the internet. This segues nicely into my next example - the David Fincher, straight-to-Netflix movie, The Killer.
The movie opens with an unwittingly prescient opening shot, where the contract killer, played by Michael Fassbender, is inside an empty WeWork (I just got the WeWork Chapter 11 Bankruptcy notice in my email as I was writing this post). The killer weaponizes everyday apps like Amazon and Postmates to do his job (of killing). He orders RFID programming tools from Amazon to duplicate key fobs and invade homes. In the third act of the movie, he says, "Who needs a Trojan Horse when you’ve got Postmates?" as he uses the time window of a Postmates delivery to invade a wealthy adversary's well-fortified home. The Killer shows that the permeance of internet platforms is such that the same platforms are shared by contract killers, ordinary people, and millionaires. It is a well-executed movie with a straightforward storyline that would be familiar to regular moviegoers. The sole update to this standard, lone competent man story is that the killer weaponizes the permeance of everyday internet platforms. A lot has been written about how anxious our society has become, but if the everyday platforms we use can be weaponized against us, and life moves at a dizzying speed that is hard to keep up with, perhaps anxiety is the correct response. Accepting that may be the first step towards something new.
Both these stories made me think that someone could make a career out of updating 20th-century stories for the current era. For example, how would you remake the 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate for 2023? The 1962 version is about a brainwashed American Army veteran returning home from Korea. He has been programmed by communists to be a sleeper agent who is activated if he sees the queen of diamonds in a deck of cards. He is then utilized by political candidates in a plot to assassinate the president. The 2004 remake of the movie has two updates: the villains are no longer communists - it's a private equity firm named Manchurian Global. The activation of the sleeper agent is no longer through a deck of cards but through a chip embedded in the back of the neck. I imagine a 2023 upgrade where the plot is executed in 8-12 hours. The antagonists are no longer communists or private equity firms but just a guy with a massive audience on an internet platform. The activation is done using a fast information cycle of tweets, analysis, and debunking designed to instigate action - not among one Manchurian candidate but several thousand. Instead of a mission, it becomes a quest to find some "Truth" that has been kept from the Manchurian candidates.
I was looking for other technologies in the recent past that have come to occupy our stories - the one that came to mind immediately is cars. In the early years, cars were plot devices to show the status of a character or to add more drama to a scene in the form of car chases. Only in the 70s do we see an explosion of movies with cars and their effect on us being central to the narrative. Steven Spielberg's Duel(1971) revolves around a man driving through rural California being chased by a mostly unseen semi-truck driver. Jacques Tati's Traffic(1971) is a social satire about people in cars moving around a lot without accomplishing anything significant other than movement. Of course, the most famous example is Taxi Driver(1976), the premise of which writer Paul Schrader described as ".. this yellow metal coffin floating through the sewer of the city with this boy trapped inside who can't get out who looks like he's in a crowd but he's desperately alone.” Perhaps technologies only make solid entrances into our narratives in their late stages. The arrival of stories with the internet as a central narrative then signals that we live in a post-internet world.