Jurassic Park 1993
Aug. 2nd, 2025 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unbibiumI saw Jurassic Park in theaters when I was a kid, and haven't read the book yet.
The movie came out in 1993, a great year for movies, and I wasn't looking for meaning in an action film. I was a product of the American public school system and corporate media, and all my rebellious thoughts were safely recuperated into the manufactured corporate counterculture that neoliberalism provided me. And I was already on the Internet, a text-based shell account, and had a front-row seat to the first tech hype cycle. I was the perfect stooge, and would remain so for a very long time.
So when I saw the film, I took all the dialogue at face value: the billionaire acted like a nice grandpa so I believed in the purity of his motives. He said he spared no expense so I believed that too. The lawyer guy was the only one talking about profit, clearly he was the bad guy, so I cheered when he got ate, and when the disloyal employee Nedry got ate too. I walked out of there thinking if Nedry hadn't betrayed everyone, the systems would have been online and the security protocols would have worked and everything would have been, if not fine, then at least a much-needed humbling.
And I remained a stooge through many iterations of the tech hype cycle. Sure, I hated Bill Gates and the way he ran Microsoft, but I wasn't opposed to the concept of billionaires getting rich in tech, especially since young me was one of the smart tech-savvy ones who might ride their coattails to riches one day, or even start my own company in a garage one day! And I certainly didn't see the danger of an unchecked ego with unlimited resources, even as I watched as this kind grandpa built a big billion-dollar mistake and ignored every consequence until an hour into the film. Meanwhile, I was ignoring the consequences of a lot of things billionaires were doing to our society, that only later became impossible to ignore.
it takes more than a T-rex to snap someone out of the spell we were under...
The movie came out in 1993, a great year for movies, and I wasn't looking for meaning in an action film. I was a product of the American public school system and corporate media, and all my rebellious thoughts were safely recuperated into the manufactured corporate counterculture that neoliberalism provided me. And I was already on the Internet, a text-based shell account, and had a front-row seat to the first tech hype cycle. I was the perfect stooge, and would remain so for a very long time.
So when I saw the film, I took all the dialogue at face value: the billionaire acted like a nice grandpa so I believed in the purity of his motives. He said he spared no expense so I believed that too. The lawyer guy was the only one talking about profit, clearly he was the bad guy, so I cheered when he got ate, and when the disloyal employee Nedry got ate too. I walked out of there thinking if Nedry hadn't betrayed everyone, the systems would have been online and the security protocols would have worked and everything would have been, if not fine, then at least a much-needed humbling.
And I remained a stooge through many iterations of the tech hype cycle. Sure, I hated Bill Gates and the way he ran Microsoft, but I wasn't opposed to the concept of billionaires getting rich in tech, especially since young me was one of the smart tech-savvy ones who might ride their coattails to riches one day, or even start my own company in a garage one day! And I certainly didn't see the danger of an unchecked ego with unlimited resources, even as I watched as this kind grandpa built a big billion-dollar mistake and ignored every consequence until an hour into the film. Meanwhile, I was ignoring the consequences of a lot of things billionaires were doing to our society, that only later became impossible to ignore.
it takes more than a T-rex to snap someone out of the spell we were under...
