Felipe CairelloStudent ID 43792154Culture and Technology Short EssayMinority Report keeps science in its placeI am analyzing Steven Spielbergs film Minority Report, released in 2002 and adapted from a short story by Phillip K. Dick. The story takes place in 2051, when a new development in the police and crime system takes place. The system is called Precrime and it brings homicide levels in Washington D.C. to zero as it visualizes and avoids crimes before they are committed. With the help of three physics or precognitives who foreshadow the murders in their dreams, special agents examine these images through a complex display system and set up an arrest operation capturing the criminals before the murder takes place. The film stands out by its glaring representation of technology and its penetrating impact on our society, shaping it into a degraded form of societies of control. The authorities surveillance and precisely targeted advertising, characterized by the use of scientific and latest technology advances, threatens against peoples private lives and their free will right. The film raises the question of whether our actions can be based upon a virtual reality and if individuals who have broken no laws can be condemned to arrestment. This makes us reflect upon our modern justice systems that sometimes persecutes and imprisons citizens of which evidence has not proven guilty. It also opens debate on how much invasion from post 9/11 American governments is needed for citizens protections.The infallibility of the Precrime System becomes question as John Anderton, starring Tom Cruise, is predicted to commit murder. This event triggers a multitude of actions where John escapes the police surveillance and tries to prove his innocence at the same time. The acknowledgment of the precognitives word as ultimate truth had been thrown into question, just like photographs were once questioned and later denied as evidences in a court of law. This introduces the concept that in recent times the real and the virtual have fused into a single existence, and we have become subordinated to visual fantasies and delusions which shape our reality. These images of murders yet-to come provide the means to Precrime officers to stop homicides from killing another human being, making the accused person different than the portrayed on the visions. The virtual image is set above reality, to the point of incarceration of the civilian. Just as Jean Baudrillard has expressed in his essay Simulacra and Science Fiction, the real and the unreal have dissolved into the hyperreal, mirroring the hallucination of the real conducted by the media. [] The difference between lived experience and its technologically mediated hallucination has been erased. The issue raises a variety of questions, such as how have our circumstances of visual existence and our subjugation to the media been shaped by authoritative regimes which might need to be reassessed and redefined. Minority Report presents a society handled by technology, where marketing is the main tool for social power. The film illustrates Gilles Deleuzes description of the passage from sovereign societies to control societies, by changing the type of machines adopted by these civilizations. While the first ones make use of simple machines, such as levers, pulleys and clocks, the second ones are equipped with a third generation of machines consisting of information technology and computers, which are also able to control the earlier machines. As Deleuze states, the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination. This technological development is more deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism. Visual technologies are one of the most powerful dominating tools in the societies of control, exemplified in Minority Report in the pervasive advertisement messages shown throughout the film.The movie highlights the increasing talent of advertisers to identify consumption habits and target consumers. The retinal scan advertisements allow sellers in the movie to single out costumers to advertise products in which they are interested, based on their previous purchases or practices. This activity acts as a mixture of surveillance and advertising, as the kind of consumer tracking performed by internet vendors today. Probably, it could be a way of bringing the internet into the everyday street life, rather than placing it in a purely virtual space. In the film these techniques are displaced onto the future as if they had not already happened. Today, Google uses both contextual and audience targeting tools to match ads with websites and people who are most likely to be interested in what is being sold. IBM is also developing interactive billboards which can identify age and gender of the people who are passing by them, and deliver customized advertisements in which they might be interested. Spielberg expressed his ideas about the advertising technology portrayed in the movie during an interview before the films release by saying:The Internet is watching us now. If they want to, they can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.The controversy over invasions of privacy performed by diverse technological devices is also brought to light in the film by introducing the retinal scanners spiders. These machines are shown breaking into homes crawling over couples making love, fighting relatives and screaming children, interrupting whatever they are doing in order to scan their eyes. This future world corresponds to a waiver of public space, cornering the private spheres submitted to state and corporate powers which are at liberty to violate that privacy. Discussing about this topic Steven Spielberg also explains:Big brother is watching us now and what little privacy we have will completely evaporate in twenty or thirty years, because technology will be able to see through walls, through rooftops, into the very privacy of our personal lives, into the sanctuary of our families."In modern times many states authorities dubiously keep their citizens under close surveillance, and even, as a last resort, suspects are held because they might be connected to criminal activities. Linking the issues in the film to the issues of today, the idea of imprisoning people before they break the law has already been put into practice. Faced with a constant flow of terrorist threats we find ourselves on a repressing Minority Report society. For example, IBM's new Blue Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History (CRUSH) program uses predictive analytics, digging up years and years of incident reports to forecast criminal hot spots. Without going any further, prisoners are kept and tortured on an everyday basis at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, where most of the convicts have been imprisoned without any formal charges or trials.The final outcome of the film displaying images of the Precrime system breaking apart, families being reunited and living alone in their private houses, indicates that simple life triumphs over the mechanistic nightmares. It shows technology has its place, and we need to keep it there. Minority Report portrays a world filled with technology, but in a way where human behavior also has its place and, therefore, human beings still have their place in an expanding motorized world. Some of the advantages of technology might need to be abandoned in the short run, in order to live in a free world that can appreciate technology as a development rather than incarceration.

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