Seven mistakes the movie Minority Report made about the future

When making the 2002 film Minority Report, about a policing system in the future Washington, DC, that use psychics to stop murders before they happen, Stephen Spielberg famously invited a group of experts to speculate on what the United States would look like in 2054, technologically speaking.

Certainly, the gesture-controlled screens used by Chief of PreCrime John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) were right on the money, even though the witnesses to Anderton’s swiping skills seem a little too impressed, considering the technology would have been around for more than 40 years by then. It’s like today being agog by someone’s effective microwave use.

I love the movie and rank it up there with Spielberg’s best and most philosophical. But with the hindsight (or foresight?) we have in 2015, it’s clear that many of the movie’s guesses are a little off.

• Where is the geopositioning technology? PreCrime gets the names of victims and potential killers, and the time of the crime, which is very convenient. So most of its work is finding and getting to the location of the future crime. The widespread use of geopositioning in smart phones, coupled with the increasing use of drones, means that, by 2054, finding someone might be the easiest part of any criminal investigation. In Minority Report’s opening scene, the investigators work their asses off to figure out which Howard Marks is about to kill his wife and her lover. Even in 2015, they could have used Facebook to quickly find which Howard Marks was married, where he lived, whether he hung out and which had signs of unhappiness in his life. Getting to the crime? Gotta love jet packs. Waiting for them to be sold at Canadian Tire.

• Much has been made of Minority Report’s depiction of personalized advertising, where ads call out the names of consumers from digital billboards. Again, smartphones have changed the course of marketing. Marketers don’t shout at us in public now and they likely won’t in the future. Instead, they whisper to us with flashes and beeps and vibrations from our phones, fitbits and maybe our watches or glasses. And the messaging will likely be much less hamfisted than a GAP hologram calling out, “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the GAP! How did those assorted tanktops work out for you?” Through social media and other relationship-building interaction, retailers will likely know exactly how things worked out before a consumer returns to the store again.

• The GAP in 2054? Try H&M.

• Cars won’t have steering wheels. When pods are travelling along tracks, the most unsafe thing is to give somebody the sense they can control it, as we’ve already learned from Google’s Self-Driving Car project. Spielberg obviously thought things out and figured that cars would drive themselves on special roadways in high-traffic areas, but would be handled in an old-fashioned way in more rural areas. Again, geopositioning technology made such a two-pronged approach unnecessary.

• Moving pieces of plastic around to put images on screens. The transparent-hologramy plastic discs that John Anderton inserts into his home video projector are certainly cool, and the way he scrambles for them evokes pathos around his obsession with his dead son. When detectives pull larger plastic plates out of one screen-machine and stick them into another one, it conveys urgency and seriousness. But even today, we mostly move data through wifi, cellular data connections and, in a pinch, cables. In 2054, getting data from one place to another will be faster, less labour-intensive and require even less material—our concern about reducing waste should be manic by then. All John Anderton’s memories will clog up landfill.

• Newspapers and paper photos. The paper photo is already a dying species, yet they abound in Minority Report.  Spielberg does make newspapers and magazines interactive and updatable, but doesn’t really account for the fact that each periodical will eventually consumed on a single object like a tablet. It’s true that future tablets may look and feel like paper. But the art of newspaper design will have changed by then. Periodicals of the future, whatever form they take, will not emulate the typography and layout of today’s newspapers because they will be an adaptation of tablet content and use Internet-style layouts. Traditional newspaper design will be long dead.

• The need for psychic mutants to predict human behaviour. Big data, drawing from all the information we share about ourselves online, will make the world of Minority Report possible without a supernatural element (or the slavery element—those poor precogs!). Algorithms will interpret our posts and our pictures, using predictive patterns to figure out who’s going to go off the rails and, perhaps before the police are called in, subtly nudging possible perpetrators back from the edge of criminality. The law won’t have to storm in to stop crime; it will manipulate our online reality—increasingly becoming our primary reality—to change our mindset, reschedule encounters and warn potential victims of what may happen.

The Like-ification of journalism

Bert Archer has a point here as he decries the outrage over Rolling Stone magazine's Dzokhar Tsarnaev cover, which, in an earlier era, might have been lauded as audacious, not criticized as offensive.

But I think the problem is more specific than a general decline in media literacy. People's expectations of how a story should make them feel--of their range of possible reactions--has narrowed dramatically.

I blame Facebook and its Like button.

Social media is a great way to pass stories around--and a great way for publishers to build audience. But the main circulatory system is Facebook's Like. People tend to Like things they agree with, that they think are interesting, attractive or aspirational. But a well-written story about villain or social evil--or especially stories that are morally ambiguous, that leave the reader uncertain about who is right and who is wrong and how they feel about it--doesn't fit into the structure of Like. People don't know what to do with their reaction.

If a reader appreciates, say, the writing but not the subject of a profile, if they savour the way the issues are explored, but not the conclusions offered by the writer, if they admire the subject but not the tone in which the subject was covered, will their Facebook friends understand the nuance? Probably not. So they don't Like. The story stands outside acceptable conversation circles.

Smart web publications know this. A great social media story has a single clear idea that generates a purely positive (or sometimes purely negative) reaction: Isn't this great! Or, with the addition of a comment, Isn't this awful? (You can Like the petition link.)

There are times when I think context (say, do nearby residents have problems with the otherwise admirable project? Will the prototype super-project ever be manufactured or be affordable?) is deliberately suppressed by some online publishers in order to fast-track the stories into celebratory social media. Ambivalence is the enemy.

That's how a story gets read nowadays--it get Liked.

But publish a cover featuring a handsome, "ordinary looking" young man who is an alleged bomber--a cover which doesn't use graphics or text to guide judgement--is to ask readers to react in a way that Facebook does not allow.... Isn't this great! No. Isn't this awful! .... Maybe?

To use a home improvement metaphor: The Dzokhar Tsarnaev cover story was a Philips screw, not a nail. But Facebook gives users only a hammer.

Of course, they get frustrated.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote about how technologies not only extend our capacity, they also amputate part of us. Automobiles allow us to travel long distances effortlessly, at a cost of restricting our bodily movements during the trip. Social media allows us to massively increase our ability to get a message out into the world, but it is amputating our range of possible emotional reactions.

Dressing for the ladies

I've been a reader of men's magazines (make that men's style magazines) for a long time. I was especially obsessed with the early 1990s incarnation of Esquire and then Details and more lately Men's Health, which shows you where my interest have gone as I have gotten older. Despite their differences, which show themselves mostly in their feature articles (art auctions or war? Mr. Mom or CIA conspiracies? toxic meat or George Clooney?), they all have the same kind of simultaneously snobby-chummy tone throughout their service sections.

The men's magazine snobby voice is the kind of know-it-all who would be insufferable if he wasn't so helpful. (I realize he's in a newspaper, not a magazine, but The Globe's Russell Smith is an current best-practices standard of this genre.) And then there's voice of the ordinary Joe who, like you, starts out knowing nothing about fragrances or high-end watches but through a process of discovery is, by the end of his 250-word blurb, able to make very specific recommendations for every reader. These two modes of conversation are quintessentially guy-magazine-y, and they're anchored in the two ways guys talk to other guys.

So when Men's Fashion (published by the equally generically titled women's fashion magazine Fashion, which is published by the slightly more specific Toronto Life) fell out of my Globe last week, I was intrigued. (Notice the ordinary-Joe lead-in to the topic at hand; perhaps I should have thrown in a "Gee whiz.") Here was a men's style magazine edited and written mostly by women, perhaps in their spare time while they were waiting for Fashion's proofs to come back from the printer. Of the four men shown on the contributor's page, two had worked on the magazine's sole photospread--shutterbug and stylist--one had written on grooming ("Men may prefer washing up just once a day..." starts the article but not on the page cited by the contributor's blurb) and one wrote a feature article on defective sperm.

The rest was pretty much written by women. As someone who believes that anybody can write about anything, the strange thing was--I could tell without looking at the bylines.

From the sexual connotations of the cover headline, "Playing Around With Justin Timberlake"--it would be hard to believe a straight man would have produced the same text--to the first-person lecture on sharing a bathroom--"Do men even want this space?"--there was something of a nagging wife/girlfriend throughout the magazine's pages. Even the cover line for the sperm article pointed an accusatory finger at the reader, "Actually It Is You." Hard to image a buddy, or even a know-it-all, speaking that way to a friend.

There were moments when long pent-up stereotypes about men seemed to have finally found a place to be joylessly unleashed: "For many men, shopping is a necessity rather than a hobby--something that needs to be done when old clothes no longer fit or look right." And moments when men were merely afterthoughts: "In the world of perfume, a great name is worth its weight in gold. So if women enjoy Pleasure and Joy, guys now have an outlet with Play and Play Intense."

It dawned on me that this wasn't a magazine for men but a magazine for women about men. They're the ones the editors are assuming are doing the clothes shopping, so the editors have merely cut out the middleman and gone straight to the decision maker. It makes sense. That's why the "That girl" pin-up is so modestly dressed; she's been styled threatless to the core readership.

But then there was advice about avoiding zits by showering regularly. And the spotlight on cars emphasized little other than power. Power, muscle, power. Wouldn't these female readers who are so eager to get their husbands to spend money on Ben Sherman coats and John Varvatos sweaters want to rip out these gasoline-fueled pages before their significant others saw them and were tempted to siphon of some of the disposable income slated for Harry Rosen?

That's when the light went on. There are no readers in mind for Men's Fashion. Only advertisers. Once the thing is sold by the sales team, it hardly makes a difference what fills the gap between the Audi ads and the Paco Rabanne, neither of which would be interested in buying into a catalogue that's just that, a catalogue.

Red wine's got him gaga

My admiration of Sasha Frere-Jones’ writing on music for the New Yorker, though enough in itself, also makes me feel a little smug to see that he’s fallen into the much derided “red wine” trap in his analysis of Lady Gaga. The cri de guerre at the beginning of “Just Dance” certainly sounds something like “red wine/got me/gaga.” It's what I sang for a long time until online flamers set me right. The spoken phrases are actually the part of the song where its architects are announced: Red One/Konvict/Gaga. I’m sure Lady Gaga is more of a vodka drinker; red wine is for the bourgeoisie.