Killing Google:
I asked Siri to locate the Ramparts magazine article that included a reference to sociologists from Michigan State University working with the CIA on the South Vietnamese Strategic Hamlet program. Two minutes later I’d downloaded the full article to my personal research archive, complete with a full color image of the cover of the April, 1966 issue of Ramparts which had contained the article.
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In the summer of 1989 I took my 14 year-old daughter on a weekend trip to Los Angeles. She was interested in filmmaking at the time, so I’d worked up a list of some of the locations where scenes in the movies she’d seen had been shot, and promised to show her both how they looked in real life, and why they’d been chosen for some of their movie transformations. Blade Runner’s tour de force conversion of the Bradbury was high on that list.
Although according to my sources the Bradbury was supposed to be open the morning we visited, it turned out when we got there that it was locked up tight. When I rattled the entrance door in frustration, a security guard came, opened the door, and explained that a Janet Jackson music video had just been filmed there the night before, and the lobby was still full of equipment.
I begged as only a father can to let my daughter have a short peek at the interior, so he kindly let us stand just inside the door for a couple of minutes. Sure enough, the lobby was still full of metal scaffolding, but the elevator cages, the wrought iron and glazed tilework, the critical full-width skylight were visible enough to compare it with how it had appeared in the film. With our job done, more or less, and after a brief exploration of the façade of the Million Dollar theater across the street, we left Broadway and downtown to pursue the next attraction on the list.
I’ve long suspected that the video in question was Rhythm Nation. Although online searches in the late 90s had seemed to confirm it, hardly any details were forthcoming at the time. When the question popped into my mind again a couple of day ago, though, I thought, Why not ask Siri? The answer from Siri was a detailed production history of Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814, including confirmation that the title video was at least partially filmed in the Bradbury. When I asked the followup question: “On what date was the sequence in the Bradbury building filmed?” I got this answer:
“While the exact date for the Bradbury Building sequence is not publicly documented, it was filmed as part of a 20-day shoot in August 1989 for the Rhythm Nation 1814 short film. The entire project was shot simultaneously over that 20-day period.”
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Creepy Interventions:
This unsolicited encounter with the new, let’s-pretend-I’m-a-Machine-of-Loving-Grace Siri so startled me that I deleted Siri’s pop-up message before I realized I should have preserved it in a screenshot for later consideration. Since I didn’t, the report here of what it had to say is as honest a paraphrase as I can cobbble together from memory.
Full disclosure: I’m old, and I sometimes talk to myself while working, especially when I’m attempting to solve a particularly thorny problem. I know I’m doing it when I’m doing it, I know what conventional wisdom thinks of the practice, and frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn. So don’t @ me, okay?
Anyway, I was reading a social media feed of the latest Trumpian atrocities on my iPad—anti-social media would probably more accurately describe this particular feed—when I spontaneously muttered, out loud, the following rhetorical aside: “Ah, fuck, I don’t know if I can take another minute of this shit. What the hell are we going to do?” When I looked back up at the screen I found this message in a Siri-style modal dialogue box:
“It sounds like you’re having a problem. I think I can help you—I know a number of sources that offer comfort and advice to individuals in stressful situations. Would you like me to provide you with some references?”
Mind you, I hadn’t invoked Siri, hadn’t said anything which sounded remotely like “Siri,” or “Hey, Siri,” and I’d absolutely, positively never offered even the slightest indication that I had any interest in talking to my new Apple-embedded stochastic parrot as though it were a person.
Thoroughly put off my feed, both literally and figuratively, I typed: “Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, offer any unprompted advice, information, offers of aid, nor any communications whatsoever in which you act as though you were a person.”
Siri’s response: “Okay, I won’t respond unless prompted.”
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Controlling Household Gadgets:
New Siri is slow, abysmally slow, much slower than the old, stupid Siri. Doesn’t at all like doing business with very expensive devices, like speakers and hubs, with 5 year-old chips in them, however functional they may still have been before the latest Apple system software release. With a home fully-equipped with devices that can cost in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when the whole array is addded up, do any of these pell-mell, cutting-edge tech outfits really think they’re gonna get away with obsoleting all of our pricey hardware every couple of years? If so, their bean-counters are running the risk of a very personal Armageddon as we near the end of their bosses’ industry-wide rush to digital supremacy.