July 6th, 2007

I'm not sure what flavour of childhood-hearkening insanity possessed me to look for old episodes of Six Million Dollar Man with my peer-to-peer file sharing software. I usually only download public domain stuff and peoples' personal letters and résumés. (Go ahead, search, you'll dig up all kinds of little personal dramas.) But search for Six Million Dollar Man episodes I did and lo my search was fruitful.

And then I watched a few.

And now I have to say this:

Dear Steve Austin,

I wanted to be just like you when I was growing up. I believed the Oscar Goldman lie … that truth and honesty would prevail. I believed that when the going got tough, the forces of good could pull out physics-defying robotic arms and bonk the incompetently-shooting bad guys (wanting to thwart the world with their evil plans) over the head, tie them up, and hand them to the voluminous thin-chested police and MPs. I fervently convinced myself that people did these things while flashing devilishly good-looking grins, and wearing matching brown corduroy pants and sports jackets (and brown leather boots).

I wanted more than anything else to believe that weak G-rated jokes told while crushing guns and bending open metal doors were actually funny, and that I was the only one who didn't get them (and everyone else would laugh). Steve, you and Oscar told me that an honest eye-meeting look was akin to humanism, and a social IQ of 60 was all you needed to prevail as long as you were on the side of the Forces of Good.

Well, we both know you were wrong, don't we? Jamie Summers divorced you for a Toyota robot who can dance, and Max the Bionic Dog tore the head off of a paper boy, and had to be crushed under an industrial hydraulic press. Oh wait, that was The Terminator. Ah yes, this must be where my adult confused disillusionment comes from: The Terminator turned out to be closer to the truth. For, without a single IQ point more in smarts, it showed a cowering, fringed, squalid future at the hands of the embedded mechanics and electronics.

You had it right that cyborgs wouldn't fetch our slippers and make us dry martinis, but you missed the mark when it came to the intentions behind that embedded technology: It's coming to get us. It wants to squeeze the life out of us, it wants us to bow and kneel before it ... in the financial sense. Technology is not being used to fight the forces of evil, it's being used to cleverly and incessantly (and inexhaustibly) crush us until we bleed money. This is the problem with all technology, isn't it? No matter what Rudy thought it was being designed for, it ultimately ended up assisting the forces of evil in trying to extort our hard-earned pay from our clutches.

Steve, you became a tool of the evil you thought that you, Rudy, Jamie, Oscar, and Max were all fighting against.

Yours truly,

Brian

PS: But those fembots were pretty sexy, eh? I wonder what one of them would set you back ...

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