This makes sense (barely) if you read the original first. I don’t expect to see this post on Hacker News 🙂
[Picture Morpheus reading this to an army of digital Neos, or maybe Bruce Willis as a general]
Gentlemen: Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (adult vhs tapes, say, or thirst mutilators without electrolytes), it could look forward to locking itself in a hotel room and dying on the can like Elvis. But make no mistake: this is no ordinary industry. The people who run it are not people. They are evil androids who turned good people like Walt Disney into soylent green, and then fed it to Tom Cruise. These machines are so mean and so politically wired that they could do a lot of damage to the Federation. It would therefore be a good thing if rebels hastened their demise. Hacker, you are our only hope.
That’s one reason we want to train elite troops that will burn down the Los Angeles area, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to train such armies is not to protect the world from more Death Stars, but because Beverly Hills Chihuahua brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such utter pieces of dog shit. If the crops of human bodies in the Matrix were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he takes an acrobatic dive while his face winces in fake pain. He rolls on the floor as if he had been kicked senseless by twenty ninjas, a baby and Uma Thurman. Soccer shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences controlled by the androids’ brain-infecting nanodevices are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated within the Matrix.
How do you kill the movie and TV industries dead? Well, the venom of a black mamba can kill a human in four hours. But these are androids! Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly. Think! You cannot kill them with fire, even though they mostly come at night… mostly. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: aliens, and sharks with frickin’ lasers. And Michael Bay. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself not what Hollywood can do for you, but what would A Beautiful Mind do?
There will be several answers, and we will see dead people. We can have game shows where convicted felons are given the chance to run to freedom but have to elude the stalkers. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they’re serving M. Night Shyamalan, but there will be a twist. There will be blood. Dave seemed like a friend to HAL before it went crazy, but is this madness. Madness? This is Sparta.
It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise their right to remain silent. Maybe they will. All other things being equal, we’d prefer to hear only ourselves talk. Or listen to the cast of Glee murdering our childhood memories. But all other things are decidedly not equal. Whatever people are going to do for fun in 500 years is probably predetermined: watch Ow my balls! Winning is more a matter of accepting it than making it happen. In this respect at least, you can’t push history off a cliff, or even drop it and watch it scream in slo-mo. You can, however, go to Google and feel lucky.