Love this post. The Conversation captures something primal about surveillance anxiety, but what strikes me now is how the paranoia has flipped. Hackman's character was worried about conducting surveillance and its consequences—but we've collectively decided the trade-off of convenience for constant monitoring is acceptable. That willingness to forfeit privacy for ease is exactly why Bitcoin matters. We've normalized letting intermediaries see and control our financial data in ways that would've seemed dystopian in 1974. The film is great cinema, but it's also a prescient mirror: we're living in the world it warned about, except we asked for it. The restoration in 4K is worth watching for that reason alone.
Love this post. The Conversation captures something primal about surveillance anxiety, but what strikes me now is how the paranoia has flipped. Hackman's character was worried about conducting surveillance and its consequences—but we've collectively decided the trade-off of convenience for constant monitoring is acceptable. That willingness to forfeit privacy for ease is exactly why Bitcoin matters. We've normalized letting intermediaries see and control our financial data in ways that would've seemed dystopian in 1974. The film is great cinema, but it's also a prescient mirror: we're living in the world it warned about, except we asked for it. The restoration in 4K is worth watching for that reason alone.