They Live, We Sleep: How the Control of Data Allows an Invisible Government to Rule in Secret
In the prescient and unsettling-but-realistically-surreal alter-reality 1988 cult classic They Live directed by John Carpenter, there are many clues about the real life police state scientific dictatorship we’re all living under today.
Before the pivotal, iconic turning point when Rowdy Roddy Piper first puts on the Hoffman sunglasses and sees the very first subliminal billboard to “Obey,” there is another subtle message for the police state technocracy to come…
The regular billboard – before revealing the hidden message “Obey” – carries an advertisement for a company called “Control Data” and reads, “We’re creating the transparent computing environment.”
Via Wikipedia: “Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well-known and highly regarded throughout the industry at the time.” Continue reading