The Fare

The Fare (warning: spoilers at wikipedia, imdb) is a movie consisting solely of a time-loop where a taxi driver is stuck picking up the same fare repeatedly. It was recommended to me quite briefly with the additional comment "I cannot say anything else without spoiling the movie." and I stand by that.

I can say a little bit else. It's very interesting to see a piece of art work within clearly delineated constraints. The time loop is short and the taxi driver must do all his acting and expressing from behind the wheel while driving, so this is a movie of microexpressions. The audience and the characters are given a lot of ideas to think about but the expressivity of the movie is so constrained that each individual shot from anywhere BESIDES the straight-on from-the-front-windshield shot feels significant. The framing of a time loop means that we get to see the same interactions play out repeatedly, with great significance given to tiny variations. The setting is vaguely dreamlike and really emphasizes how insular the plot is, it feels like there is almost no one in this universe except for the driver and his fare.

This was great, I'd recommend it and I would recommend that you NOT look at any other descriptors about this before watching.

This post's theme word is pismire (n), "an insignificant person." If there are only two people in the time loop, how can either of them feel like a pismire?

Opt Out October

At last, an alliterative monthly theme worth following! Welcome to the EFF's Opt Out October, with a sequence of tips "to trim down the amount of data that's collected about you or available online, throwing sand in the gears of corporate surveillance."

If you haven't thought about opting out of data collection, please follow the link and read about it.

There is one facets of the internet that big, data-collecting corporations only selectively understand. When it is time to judge whether they are a monopoly, even Facebook frames its total addressable market as "all human interaction", in order to claim that it is not a monopoly. The flip side is competition: if you make your website heinous enough, if you make your data-collection unpleasant and your interface obscures my access to resources, then I can just leave. I can get off the internet. I can go to the library. I can go outside. I can interact with people who are physically near me, mediated only by the real world, without the middle-man of any technology between us.

We can all go outside and impede surveillance cameras in the real world!

This post's theme word is withsay (v tr), "to contradict, deny, oppose, or refuse." We can collectively withsay corporate manufactured consent to data collection, probably via opt-outs and new legal rules.