Be Kind, Please Rewind

He has an Offline Presence. He’s the…

Vidiot

Week of August 21, 2015

Online is totally harder than real life. First up…

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Unfriended

The comforting thing about unfriending someone from social media is that you were likely never friends to begin with.

Unfortunately, the girls in this horror movie were childhood companions.

Laura (Heather Sossaman) joins her friend Blaire (Shelley Hennig), Blaire’s boyfriend (Moses Jacob Storm) and three others (Jacob Wysocki, Will Peltz, Renee Olstead) on a Skype chat one year after she committed suicide over an embarrassing viral video of herself.

In response to Blaire’s numerous attempts to delete the unknown user, Laura uploads incriminating photos and videos that tear Blaire’s friend circle asunder.

Meanwhile, members of the online community begin dropping like flies.

While the first-person forced perspective can get tedious, and the tawdry secrets would’ve worked better in a dramatic script, this anemic slasher movie does get high praise for its originality and cyber-bulling relevance.

Incidentally, Facebook accounts belonging to dead people aren’t haunted; they’ve just been hacked by terrorists.  Yellow Light

 

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Citizenfour

The upside to the government monitoring your Internet use is they’ll have your passwords when you forget them.

Mind you, the whistler-blower in this documentary doesn’t see the benefits to Big Brother.

Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras receives an encoded email from Citizen Four claiming they have evidence the government has been monitoring American citizens Internet/phone use since 9/11.

Along with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, Poitras goes to Hong Kong to meet the informant who turns out to be an NSA employee: Edward Snowden.

As his identity is leaked to the media, Poitras is there to capture the epic fallout first-hand.

While its predominantly shots of talking heads and redacted files, it’s the content concerning the loss of privacy that makes Citizenfour the most important documentary in American history.

Incidentally, the only thing the government learned from spying on citizens was they lie on their online dating profiles.  Green Light

***Protest Subjects***

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We Are Legion:  The Story of the Hacktivists

Thanks to online anonymity you can now let your friends know that they’re fat sluts without having to lose their friendship.

However, fat shaming is far from the mandate of the faceless hackers in this documentary.

From its early inception on image-based message boards to its impact on the occupy movement, the polemic collective of online hackers known as Anonymous has always put freedom of speech first on their list of demands.

Claiming to have hacked numerous email accounts and websites belonging to governments, politicians and movie executives, the faceless rabble reinforce their rule when civil liberties are threatened.

Speaking in-depth with masked/unmasked members (Anon2World, Gregg Housh) as well as curators of online media outlets that tout its exploits, We Are Legion may be biased but it does divulged incredible insight into this unorganized organization.

Furthermore, it’s nice to know that those masks they wear don’t mean they’re all Juggalos.

He’s a Nondescript Writer. He’s the…

Vidiot