Surely the statute of limitations has passed. Doubly so since there were at least two people involved. It’s amazing that the identity of the signal pirate has never been leaked. Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion - Wikipedia Since centralized filtering of news is an important part of the political meta-game of building opinion, perhaps it is not wrong to formalize this process. It could be argued that whoever is able to get the most attention is also the most in tune with what people want. We are close to accidentally creating an attention-democracy where whoever is able to keep the attention of the masses has the most influence over politics. We need Max Headroom to guide us out of the disaster of the modern Internet.
The dystopian future predicted in this series is well and truly upon us - a case of fiction predicting future truths.
If you haven’t watched the TV series, stop what you’re doing and get the binge over with. Max Headroom is now more relevant than ever. Implications include the need for heroic journalism and cyberpunk media channels. It’s a story about AI, media monopolies and the dangers of new forms of advertising.
The Verge did an interview with the creators:ĭystopian media influenced oppressive states, a nation placated with purile entertainment, an underground of those who ‘really know’ what is going on fighting to restore humanity, watched over by a slightly crazed AI …
Gibson’s Neuromancer had only been published a year earlier, and some of the tropes in this movie (“I need an operator!”) would show up later in The Matrix and other works. There are tube television sets strewn everywhere, predicting what happened after flat screens appeared. It was part British science fiction caper and part Videodrome. The series incorporated elements of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer (which coined the term “cyberspace”), post-apocalyptic films like The Road Warrior and Blade Runner, and the then-ascending MTV. The movie (not the followup Cinemax TV music/interview show) was a pioneering work of cyberpunk. It is so much better than I ever expected – and it’s only 55 min long. If you have never seen the original 1985 British film that introduced “Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future”, you are in for a serious treat. Preparing the look for filming involved a four-and-a-half-hour session in make-up, which Frewer described as “gruelling” and “not fun”” – wikipediaīut it sure looked like magic at the time. “the computer-generated appearance was achieved with prosthetic make-up and hand-drawn backgrounds. He looks like he(?)’s drawn with a computer, but the original was not done with computers: Max Headroom is a fictional AI character. The best article is the 2015 article by Bryan Bishopįor context: Max Headroom on wikipedia. Also here and here Max Headroom – the character I would totally crowdfund a 2-and-a-half hour remake starring Michael Fassbender & Mackenzie Davis in a heartbeat.Source: this article is mostly copied from an interesting Hackernews article. (Granted, the reverse side of that is it was pretty over-stuffed and incoherent at times, though less than you might expect for what they managed to stuff in.) They somehow packed so much mythos into just shy of an hour that it felt more like a Hollywood sci-fi epic than a TV special. This movie felt longer than it’s runtime, but in the best possible way. The scathingly tongue-in-cheek tone worked really well for the material. The directing, writing, acting, production design, everything. I came in expecting something much more shoddy-this being a TV movie origin story about a “computer generated” TV host-but honestly it was brimming with style and confidence on every level.