Strange Days In Cupertino

Memory, imagery, and truth in today’s consumerized digital unreal

by Christine Gerardi // Illustration by Carly A-F

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I ‘ll never forget the launch of the first-generation iPod Nano. Live on stage in 2005, Steve Jobs pulled a tiny white rectangle from the small front pocket of his jeans and my world changed forever. When I finally got my hands on one, it lived up to the magic it promised: the way it felt in my hand, the quality of the materials, the incredible tactility of the scroll wheel. The device did only one thing really well—played music—but to me it represented the boundless possibilities and optimism of Silicon Valley. It’s part of what inspired me to become an engineer.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s pretty much where my experience with consumer technology peaked. These days, Apple’s product announcements are slicker-looking and a lot less exciting, consisting of pre-recorded teleprompter spiels selling increasingly boring updates to an existing lineup of products.

During their Worldwide Developers Conference announcements this past June, Apple seemed to be partly aware of the tedium of the proceedings. When displaying the iPad’s new ability to have two timers running at the same time, software chief Craig Federici quipped, “We truly live in an age of wonders!” In another instance, though, he seemed oblivious to the absurdity of a new iPhone feature that appeared to backsolve for a technology that has existed for centuries: “When you wake up, it’s easy to see the time—with a clock!”

In the midst of this exercise in borderline self-parody, there was the unveiling of an entirely new product: the Apple Vision Pro, an augmented reality (AR) headset. Not much about Apple Vision Pro is truly new; AR and VR have existed since the Nineties, and Apple’s iteration of the concept is ultimately an ultra-expensive platform for their existing ecosystem of software. However, there was a specific moment in the announcement that jumped out at me.

A presenter claimed that the device “redefines how you can relive precious moments in time”: it can record high-definition video from a first-person perspective, which can later be played back. The immersive visuals and “spatial audio” allows one to “feel like you’re right back in a moment in time” and “experience it all over again for years to come.”

This use case that Apple is proposing is a near exact replication of a technology imagined in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 dystopian sci-fi film Strange Days. In it, a man becomes dangerously obsessed with his own past due to his unregulated immersive viewing of his own first-person recorded memories. Strange Days isn’t a title that even dedicated film fans are likely to remember; but what critics and audiences couldn’t have seen at the time was the film’s incredible predictive foresight, not just in terms of specific technologies like Apple Vision Pro, but of the broader technological trend of capturing, sharing, and viewing images at an ever-increasing rate— specifically, images containing memories of our lives.

The woman that Lenny conjures in his home every night doesn’t exist anymore.

The premise of Strange Days itself demanded technical innovation that mirrors what Apple would achieve with their Vision Pro: Bigelow and her crew had to come up with an ultra-light, multi-faceted camera to create the feeling of footage captured literally through the characters’ eyes. The film’s opening uses this camera in a relentlessly kinetic first-person sequence of a robbery gone wrong—it’s classic Bigelow action, from an entirely new perspective.

This is where we meet Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a charming ex-vice cop who peddles an illegal technology called SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device). The SQUID transmits immersive VR-like recordings called “clips” directly into the user’s brain—not only visuals and sounds, but also physical sensations. Lenny pitches potential buyers on what he sees as the technology’s human value: its ability to open up their worlds to new experiences. Lenny has one ethical line he won’t cross: he doesn’t sell snuff clips. Everything else is on the table: sex, violence, danger (like the robbery we opened on), or even being a different type of person entirely.

Lenny’s own use of the SQUID, however, brings him much closer to home. After a long day of selling his illegal wares, Lenny kicks back and jacks in, viewing a clip of an intimate afternoon spent with his ex-girlfriend, Faith (Juliette Lewis) from years in the past. For Lenny, this serves as a form of time travel: he’s literally re-living the moment, just as in love as he was when it was happening.

But the woman that Lenny conjures in his home every night doesn’t exist anymore; the real Faith resides squarely in the present. Her new boyfriend is Philo Gant, a ruthless record executive who provides opportunities to advance her singing career. These benefits come at dangerous cost: Gant’s own excessive use of SQUID makes him paranoid, violent, and controlling. Lenny is convinced that Faith is still in love with him, and trapped with Gant. When Lenny sneaks into her dressing room at Gant’s club, Faith forcefully disabuses him of this notion. She knows exactly what’s happening to Lenny: that he’s caught in an endless emotional Loop.

“You know one of the ways that movies are still better than playback? ‘Cause the music comes up, there’s credits, and you always know when it’s over.”

This is perhaps the most shockingly prescient dialogue in the movie. What Faith is describing here, years before the term existed, is an important delineation between art and what we now refer to as content. Art provides discrete, meaningful experiences. Content doesn’t end.

Free platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube quantify their value as advertising venues by time spent on their apps. They have collectively discovered that the best way to maximize this metric, and therefore maximize profits, is to simply never stop showing the user images—to provide a literally unending stream of content. To feed that machine, companies need more and more photos and videos. And while you can find content pertaining to pretty much anything, we humans have one huge, overwhelming interest: other humans. So, to a large degree, online content consists of us—our own lives and memories, curated for consumption.

Facebook and Instagram trade in the currency of the digital self.

Facebook and Instagram in particular trade in the currency of the digital self—selective personae presented to the world in the form of images. Viewing online profiles has become a primary means of forming social judgements and selecting social bonds, often before any real-life contact occurs.

This digital disembodiment impacts our emotional lives as well as our social lives. What Lenny is going through is not far off from the typical experience of heartbreak in the internet age. The digital version of a person almost never becomes inaccessible, even when the real person physically leaves. Not only are the images ever present, they’re idealized and idyllic, just like that impossibly golden day that Lenny captured with Faith on the SQUID. 

But it’s not just the digital selves of people we know that we have access to: we can bombard ourselves with images of people we’ll never meet, lives real or imagined that we can’t actually access, and bodies that we can’t inhabit. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has attempted to downplay their own research that indicates their product increases depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia in teenagers. Like the cigarette companies of the past, big tech will deflect and deny responsibility for these ills until it ceases to be profitable to do so. Snapchat and Instagram’s use of the word “story” couldn’t be more of a semantic distortion. Stories teach us how to live, content stops us from living. Stories create empathy, content gets us so deep in our own heads that we can’t see others clearly.

But like Lenny and Gant, most of us are “strung out.” Not only is online content addictive, but participating in the platforms feels like a prerequisite for accessing the real social world. In light of these realities, the question becomes: can we choose our relationship to new technologies, or are we inevitably subject to their impact on our psyches?

Strange Days makes a compelling argument for the former. This arrives largely through Angela Bassett’s character, Lornette “Mace” Mason—a high-security limo driver and old friend of Lenny’s whom he enlists to help “rescue” Faith from an unknown killer who has been making clips depicting the rape and murder of women.

Mace is the story’s equivalent of the modern-day digital minimalist—she treats the SQUID as a “not-even-once” level of dangerous drug. Importantly, the only flashback sequence in Strange Days that isn’t portrayed via a SQUID clip is from Mace’s perspective: we see her child’s father being arrested on drug charges. In the midst of the hurt and chaos, Lenny displays the kindness of comforting her young son, reading to him while the other vice officers make the arrest. In sharp contrast to the hyper-real SQUID clips, Bigelow films this sequence with the typical cinematic markers that indicate memory: blurred slow motion and echoey sound.

An arrest is not a highlight of anyone’s life—no one would record it, much less share it. But for Mace, it’s deeply important. She doesn’t need any technology to remember what’s still relevant about that moment: how Lenny made her feel, and who Lenny actually is beneath his addiction to playback. Before the final push of his misguided mission to rescue Faith, Mace attempts to break Lenny out of his illusory cloud of wasted emotions.

“Memories are meant to fade, Lenny. They’re designed that way for a reason.”

All feelings have a half-life, but being re-exposed to the moments that created them interrupts their natural fading process. Time can’t heal when we’re tricking our brains into thinking no time has passed. When Apple’s spokespeople wax poetic about the way the Vision Pro captures memories in hyper-real verisimilitude, they assume the positive value of their product—but when we view the technology critically, as Mace does with the SQUID, we can understand that its use could become just as dangerously disordered.

The ending of Strange Days is foreshadowed by a moment in its beginning: as Lenny cruises around Hollywood the night before the turn of the millennium, we hear several call-ins to a radio station. One decries the dystopic state of things, one portends the apocalypse, but another emphasizes the agency we have in authoring the history of our time.

“See, for the man, no news is good news. He’d like to keep it the way it is, but we’re gonna take it and make it new, make it our own. History’s gonna start right here, right now.”

Ultimately, Lenny is able to make himself new—with Mace’s help, he is able to let go of his past and embrace the real love in his life.

We may think, with justifiable caution, that to stand against any new technology is to stand against progress. But there is nothing progressive—and, in fact, nothing technologically sophisticated—about our overconsumption of imagery.

It’s important to realize that tech companies operate on a set of values, whether they are spelled out in their mission statements or not. These presumed (but rarely proven) human goods operate as a justification for their profit-maximizing actions, however harmful. Tech companies do not, and never will, have our best interests in mind. It’s our responsibility to critically examine what they sell, take what’s useful, and discard what’s harmful. If we don’t decide our values, they will decide them for us.

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