My Drivers Don't Need Updating! -- On Conspiracy

That Scottish bloke John Buchan said that "Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences." A fairly dystopian thought, John, but you do make a point.

Yesterday I watched A Scanner Darkly -- the movie based on Philip K. Dick's novel from the 70s about government plots, a new addictive drug (Substance D), and ultimate paranoia. It was pretty good--not mind blowing--but a well-made movie. It uses digital rotoscoping, which essentially is going back and drawing/cartooning over the lines of real film shots to give the final appearance of a shifting and dream-like visual experience. It is the same stylistic mode of Waking Life.

Anyway, the movie involves this Substance D pill that 20% of the population is addicted to, and as the plot unravels we learn that it is created from an organic compound of a small blue flower. In response to the addictive problems, the goverment has contracted the services of a rehab clinic, which takes brain-dead ex-addicts and gets them to not only beat withdrawl, but also to supply labor. The final revelation is when the main character is assigned to farm work and he realizes that the rehab company is commiting ultimate irony -- they are using the zombie-like ex-addicts to secretly farm the very same blue flower that makes the Substance D drug that got them there in the first place.

So, it's really quite a tangle of spying, misidentity, and paranoia. And, all today, I have been researching laptops to purchase before I begin graduate school, and a parallel struck me. For all the laptop notebooks, you have options for anti-virus software. Software that offers updates as often as three times a day!! In order to keep up with all the viruses and bugs being created. This is nuts. Who is creating these havoc-bringing digital demons? Why must anti-virus software be so expensive?

I propose that the Anti-Virus Software companies (McAfee, Norton, &c.) are subsidizing themselves, in a way. They have a side-team of people working to create these little bugs, just so you have to pay extra for their software to stop the damned things. Three updates a day makes little sense unless you consider this covert cohort scheming away so that the corporate software retains its worth. It is a sort of self-subsidizing master-plan. I know your secrets!

Does anyone read this blog anymore?