The Last Action Hero

What AI, Democracy, Hollywood, Videogames and Tom Cruise have in common.

Mission Impossible is coming to a close. This morning I watched a ‘making of’ video with Tom Cruise putting his hands all over camera equipment, scuba gear, tumbling SUVs and biplane wings. Oh yeah, and he runs. In London, in the Arctic, in mines, he runs. But he’s not a exactly a soldier, or a spy, or a diplomat. He’s the most expensive vehicle for all of those things; he’s a Hollywood action star. He’s the last of his kind. Nobody will spend as much money for this kind of film, ever again.

Balaji says that the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity. In that one sentence is a reason to understand why the success of even moderately intelligent ubiquity will be revolutionary for mankind.

From these two inputs, I am going to make a case for XRepublic, my project to build a virtual parliament.

In the 80s, Tom Cruise got away with Risky Business because he had a Hollywood hit. That was all anybody knew about how to become the coolest kid around. The dream of becoming a star of the big screen, whether it be a director, producer, leading actress or stuntman all munged down through the diamond encrusted funnel of the Hollywood studio system. Some of us in the audience even made stars of stars talking about their stardom by watching late night talkshows about Hollywood made in Hollywood. How does one become famous and rich? Duh, Hollywood. Why? Scarcity.

In 1982, nobody from Hollywood would spend a nickel on a computer generated ‘film’, except maybe George Lucas. The very idea of a ubiquitous technology that would allow tens of millions of people from around the world to record their own stories was unthinkable when Tom Cruise was sliding across the set with no pants on. Which was why something as pedestrian as losing one’s virginity was something, in the 1980s, we left our houses, drove across town with friends, stood in line and paid to watch somebody else do. Hollywood, and Tom Cruise have been milking us ever since. But who could have predicted Mr. Beast?

There’s nothing special about Mr. Beast. Every neighborhood with boys has such a boy. There’s nothing special about an American boy who dreams of swimming in scuba, flying airplanes, shooting bad guys, driving fast cars and risking life and limb for the prizes of heroism. You might have noticed a phenomenon known as the First Person Shooter. By the 1990s some technologies made these experiences less scarce, with one important difference from the Hollywood formula. You have your hands on the controls of videogames. Ever since Doom and Wolfenstein 3D a clique of garage nerds who ultimately got funded, worked to make a different kind of simulation appealing. Immersion is the key word. Make it feel like you are there.

The illusion of immersion can be clunky. But the illusion of control is even more seductive. As the technology capable of simulating any situation matures, so grows the confidence of the player of games. We are a long way from the videogame that first provided me with that mindblowing experience of being among the tank traps of Omaha Beach. The realism is even greater.

Such 2005 technology now seems primitive by our standards 20 years and 2 generations of game hardware later. Similarly the ability to make feature films and television shows has spread beyond the old Hollywood studio system. Apple, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have changed the world of entertainment. Scarcity has been overcome. We are up to our ears in filmed and streamed entertainment both of the sort provided by these new jacks. That pales in significance to the money made by videogame studios.

Rockstar Games, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games have dwarfed Hollywood film studios essentially by putting their audiences in the driver seat. Watching Tom Cruise is nothing compared to being ‘Tom Cruise’.

I think you get the picture. But what has any of this to do with XRepublic? Indeed. I’m glad you asked. The answer is simple. If you ask anyone on Capitol Hill if there could possibly be a way to use technology to provide more and better democracy than we have today, they’d laugh at you the same way Harvey Weinstein laughed at his pretenders a decade ago. How could you possibly crowdsource Sex, Lies and Videotape?

Here’s what we all know like we know little boys who desire to be boys. Little Americans want to grow up to be big Americans. They want democracy and when it comes time to get their share, they will sit with their families or friends and watch it on CNN, Fox and MSNBC. They will read about in the Washington Post, New York Times and several hundred pundits, analysts, lobbyists, academics, public intellectuals all munged through the well-funded diamond encrusted funnel of mainstream media. And occasionally, just as there are independents who crack the marginals there will be a TED talker or somebody at the 92nd Street Y who gets to talk politics.

That’s the technology we have, along with that thing that used to be the blogosphere (now here and 2 whole years old) and it all provides the illusion of immersion. But you know and I know that like Tom Cruise, the stars of the system get all of the first generation, highly professionally manned technology of some of the same directors and producers of Hollywood. There’s only one Whoopi Goldberg. There’s only one Joy Behar. There’s only one Anderson Cooper. They are not you.

So where, you might ask, is the equivalent technology like videogames that allows you to be in the driver’s seat of actual democracy? Not like a trip to the best theater in town on opening night for a limited time where you line up to pay your ticket, sit down and be witness to some stars exploits on the big screen, but when you fire up your own networked machine and do it yourself with friends in realtime.

Well, like little boys wanting to be heroic, it’s all in your imagination. I’ve been one of those little boys for a long time, and I understand something about that technology. I’m dreaming along with you. It may take a decade, just like it does between real wars and Tom Cruise films, but we should be ready for the change.

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Citizen driven realtime democracy is an impossible mission. Until it isn’t. It’s time for little Americans to grow up. Or you can just let Hollywood do it with AI for you.

On the whole that’s a pretty weak call to action, but I’m not an elevator pitchman. You read me here. You know that. But the vision is clear and it is the integrity of that vision that matters. I’m just little Abe reading the classics in my log cabin. Where might we be four score and twenty years from today?