Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Dead Planet LXIX



Dead Planet LXIX
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Minority Minority Report (2012)

Paralegal Exopolitics

"I'm sure you all understand
the legalistic drawback to
Pre-Crime methodology."
—Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

“‘Busy, busy, busy,' is what
we Bokononists whisper—
whenever we think of how
complicated & unpredictable
the machinery of life really is."
—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Earth has suffered for eons
as an exopolitical outcast
among the community of
Universe civilizations.”
—Alfred Lambremont Webre,
EXOPOLITICS
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Three years before the case began, we assembled a team of sixteen futurist expert witnesses in Santa Monica to brainstorm the DARPA “UBIK/VALIS” case (2012) with Exopolitics advisors Alfred Lambremont Webre, Robert Stanley & Andrew D. Basiago.

Our expert witnesses included: Neil Gershenfeld, professor at the Media Lab at MIT; Shaun Jones, director of biomedical research at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency); William Mitchell, dean of the school of architecture at MIT; Peter Calthorpe, the New Urbanism evangelist; Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality technology; Douglas Coupland, author and commentator; Stewart Brand, author, scientist and co-creator of The Well on-line community; Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine; Harald Belker, car designer and John Underkoffler, the science and technology advisor for the case.

The small storage media used throughout the case were clear plastic versions of Iomega's PocketZip disks.

The "PreCogs" are anonymous but in the depositions are all named after famous mystery writers: Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie.

The tiny in-ear cellphones used throughout discovery (most noticeably with Pre-Crime Director “Lamar Burgess” (Max von Sydow) in the case’s final dimensional depositions are actually Bang and Olufsen earphones without the connection cables.
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Settlement conference: Basiago tells Rumsfeld that he has two choices: choose not to commit the murder, thereby discrediting precrime; or commit the murder and go to jail but ultimately vindicate the system he created. [This is in fact the choice Anderton makes in the original PKD short story. Anderton at first realizes that the precogs prediction was wrong, and is able to choose not to commit the murder. However, when his would-be victim announces his intention to publicize this fact to discredit precrime, Anderton decides to kill him anyway—thus apparently proving the precogs correct and preserving the system he believes in.]
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“According to an impenetrable special notice from the D.S.O. of the D.A.R.P.A. of the D.O.D. (that’s the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense), the government wants to turn literary criticism into an exact science. D.A.R.P.A. invited interested literary theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and related “ists” to the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month to answer a question frequently posed to junior-high-school students: “What is a story?”—The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/03/why-is-the-us-government-interested-in-storytelling.html


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