A movie called “The Net” came out In 1995, the year I moved to America. God. Almost twelve years ago. Before Google, before Wikipedia, before iTunes and Amazon; in the heyday of dial-up America Online. HA.
The Net was a Sandra Bullock vehicle: Sandra, post-crashing buses with Keanu and making mind-love with Sly, but PRE-crashing cruiseliners with Jason Patric and exploring the ripe comic potential of a manly woman in a beauty pageant. (TALK about a FISH out of WATER! SO hilaaaaaaaaarious!) It was a delicate time for Sandra, but The Net was masterful, and it pulled her through.
‘95 was kind of a big year for computer/internet movies. “Hackers” came out that summer, too — and while it’s hard to imagine now that Angelina sexing up SickBoy could be anything but a smash hit, I’m pretty sure that at the time, The Net was a bigger box office draw. In it, Sandy plays a disheveled, withdrawn, but still-fairly-attractive-in-a-hermitlike-way hacker-type person. Then … oh, I forget the details, but basically, mysterious, technologically savvy evildoers steal her identity and make her life hell, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to clear her name and stop some larger catastrophic event. I’m almost certain there was a final showdown at a computer convention, complete with one of those scenes where you see a copy/download progress bar on a computer screen slowly fill up to 100%, which it needs to do, while the bad guys are getting closer and closer and closer.
The reason I bring this up is simple: I did all my Christmas shopping today, in two hours.
Online.
There was this scene in The Net, right at the beginning, where they are establishing that Sandra truly is a hermit: sitting sullenly at her messy desk, she orders HER PIZZA via the INTERWEB, with just a few clicks of the button. THEN we find out she does lots of magical things online, like banking and getting groceries delivered. It soon becomes clear that the entire movie is a hysteria-tinged warning, a vision of a dystopic future where it will be possible for people to practically withdraw from society, to lose their very humanity. She does everything online! She never sees people! THIS IS WHY IT WAS SO EASY TO ERASE HER!!!!!
I remember, at the age of twelve, being particularly impressed by the pizza thing. It seemed wildly futuristic at the time. Now I do it on a weekly basis, sitting at my messy desk.
What worries me most of all is that I just don’t have Sandra’s mad hacker-type skillZ to get my identity back when they erase me. I have no big floppy disk with which to upload/download something pivotal at a convention while angry, burly men close in upon me. I don’t even know where I would find a computer convention. Why do they even WANT my identity anyway?? So I know my way around Amazon.com, so what? IS THAT SUCH A CRIME? Why ME?? WHY???
Maybe tomorrow I will go properly introduce myself to the deaf old lady who lives next door. Just so SOMEone will know the difference when they replace me with a streetwise hooker named Ruth and give me her identity instead. (You know. Cuz Ruth is probably real good at what she does, so she’ll be able to fool people like family and flatmates.)
Yes. That’ll foil the wily, eraser-wielding bastards. They’ll never see the deaf old lady coming.
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