Wednesday, December 08, 2004

New York Times Sues Google

...in 2011. Check out this fairly disturbing animated mockumentary about the as-yet-fictitious EPIC. EPIC — not to be confused with the pro-digital-privacy group of that name — is the future information system that will supposedly bring the New York Times and other purveyors of printed news to their knees. Thanks to Zacht Ei for the link.

Elsewhere, fellow blogger Matt offers this cogent comment on the film's unabashedly apocalyptic vision:

It's funny to see where the super-old-school thinking and the super-new-school thinking bend back around and meet up. (And crash, and lie inert, secure in the knowledge that this exact future will never come to pass.) When we presented this to the editors, it was always, "Oh, no, nothing like this would ever happen. The sensible citizens of America are far too enamored of our beautiful agate type to ever pay much attention to those dreadful noisy light-emitting contraptions." And some of the most thought-out responses from the technopagan crowd have been along the lines of, "Come on, this is nothing like the future. This doesn't even take into account last year's Quantum Fluthinger API, which outcalculates Google's Helsinki7 algorithm by a factor of 10^23."
Dec 8, 2004 1:46:33 PM

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