有趣的话题讨论

Okay, so I finally got around to watching the 1995 movie *Strange Days* last night. I know, I’m like 30 years late to the party.

My film-buff friend has been nagging me about it for ages, and I just never got to it.

But holy cow, why did no one sit me down and force me to watch this sooner It’s set in the last two days of 1999, and the central tech is this thing called the SQUID.

Basically, the SQUID is a headset that can record a person’s complete sensory eperiences—everything they see, hear, and feel—and then someone else can play that recording back and live through it eactly as it happened.

They call these recordings “clips. ” People get totally addicted to it, buying and selling clips of everything from robbing a store to, well, more intimate moments.

It’s a black market for pure, raw eperience. And this is the part that blew my mind and honestly freaked me out a bit.

The way people are glued to their SQUID decks, completely checked out of the real world, chasing the net big thrill. . .

doesn’t that feel incredibly familiar We’re not there with full sensory playback yet, but the *principle* is the same.

We live through our phone screens, we chase viral videos for a quick hit of dopamine, and social media is basically a curated clip of someone else’s “best” eperiences that we consume and compare our own lives to.

Watching this movie from 1995, it felt less like science fiction and more like a documentary of our current mental state.

The main character, Lenny, is a guy who deals in these clips, and he’s hooked on reliving old memories of a past relationship.

There’s a scene where he’s trying to sell a clip, and he’s describing it like a drug, and the buyer is just desperate for that feeling.

It’s a brutal look at how this tech, which could be amazing, just becomes another tool for escapism and addiction.

It made me think about my own screen time report last week and how many hours I spent just mindlessly scrolling. The parallel is just wild.

What really gets under my skin is how the movie uses this tech to talk about empathy, or the lack of it.

When you can eperience anything—even violence or tragedy—from a safe distance, as a spectator, what does that do to us There’s a particularly harrowing sequence involving a clip that’s recorded from a victim’s point of view during a violent crime, and it’s one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever seen.

It forces you to confront the ethics of being a passive observer to horror, which is something we grapple with today every time a violent video goes viral and we have to decide whether to click play.

I feel like this movie got buried because it was maybe too dark and too ahead of its time for 1995. People weren’t ready for its bleak, paranoid vision.

But now, in 2024, its message hits with the force of a sledgehammer.

It’s not just a cool, gritty cyberpunk thriller; it’s a serious, and seriously disturbing, warning about the human cost of our relationship with technology.

So I have to ask: am I the only one who thinks *Strange Days* is a massively underrated classic Has anyone else seen it and had their mind similarly blown by its predictions Or maybe you think I’m reading too much into it Let’s talk about it.

What’s another “old” movie or show you’ve seen that predicted our modern world in a scary-accurate way