Source: this article is mostly copied from an interesting Hackernews article. Also here and here
Max Headroom – the character
The best article is the 2015 article by Bryan Bishop
For context: Max Headroom on wikipedia. Max Headroom is a fictional AI character. He looks like he(?)’s drawn with a computer, but the original was not done with computers:
“the computer-generated appearance was achieved with prosthetic make-up and hand-drawn backgrounds. Preparing the look for filming involved a four-and-a-half-hour session in make-up, which Frewer described as “gruelling” and “not fun”” – wikipedia
But it sure looked like magic at the time.
Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future
If you have never seen the original 1985 British film that introduced “Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future”, you are in for a serious treat. It is so much better than I ever expected – and it’s only 55 min long.
Influences
The movie (not the followup Cinemax TV music/interview show) was a pioneering work of cyberpunk.
The series incorporated elements of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer (which coined the term “cyberspace”), post-apocalyptic films like The Road Warrior and Blade Runner, and the then-ascending MTV. It was part British science fiction caper and part Videodrome. There are tube television sets strewn everywhere, predicting what happened after flat screens appeared. – denofgeek.com
Gibson’s Neuromancer had only been published a year earlier, and some of the tropes in this movie (“I need an operator!”) would show up later in The Matrix and other works.
The Verge did an interview with the creators:
https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8285139/max-headroom-oral-...
Dystopian media influenced oppressive states, a nation placated with purile entertainment, an underground of those who ‘really know’ what is going on fighting to restore humanity, watched over by a slightly crazed AI …
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dr_dshiv 1 day ago [-]
It’s a story about AI, media monopolies and the dangers of new forms of advertising.
Implications include the need for heroic journalism and cyberpunk media channels.
Max Headroom is now more relevant than ever. If you haven’t watched the TV series, stop what you’re doing and get the binge over with.
The dystopian future predicted in this series is well and truly upon us - a case of fiction predicting future truths.
We need Max Headroom to guide us out of the disaster of the modern Internet. Alas, we have Zuckerberg instead ..
We are close to accidentally creating an attention-democracy where whoever is able to keep the attention of the masses has the most influence over politics. It could be argued that whoever is able to get the most attention is also the most in tune with what people want. Since centralized filtering of news is an important part of the political meta-game of building opinion, perhaps it is not wrong to formalize this process. Enter Max Headroom.
Signal intrusion event
Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion - Wikipedia
It’s amazing that the identity of the signal pirate has never been leaked. Doubly so since there were at least two people involved. Surely the statute of limitations has passed. Perhaps everyone involved passed away before they ever felt comfortable going public with their story.
Long ago I read a (4chan I think?) post from someone claiming that it was very possible he knew the people who did this hack.
He said he wasn’t 100% sure, but that there were strong reasons to believe so.
He explained that he used to hang out with 2 brothers, one of which had some mental issues, perhaps autism or something similar, that acted strange at times, and that seemed to have skills with radios and other tech. He also remembers that a girl which is very briefly shown in the hacked video stream looked like the girlfriend of the other brother.
Also recalled that the voices in the stream sounded familiar and I think he even mentions remembering that they had a sheet of metal similar to the one in the video, and that his theory was that the brother with autism was the one with the mask, while the other one rotated the sheet of corrugated metal, while the girlfriend was recording them.
Anyway, I don’t remember the exact details and of course I’m not saying the story is true or anything…
But it did have some interesting air of mistery even if it were false. The poster didn’t seem like he was trying to lie to anyone, just that he genuinely thought he kew the people responsible for the hack.
And then the story he was telling suddenly portrayed a very cool and odd piece of tech “history”, if it were true.
To me, this always sounded a little bit like real-life cyberpunk stuff and every time I remember about Max Headroom I’m reminded of the hack and the story I read by random chance, on a random forum like 4chan, thinking, what if it was real and I was just reading there a post written by someone that knew the Max Headroom hacker…? I wish very hard for that to be real.
Well… I’m rambling here, but I guess that’s the magical internet a lot of us feel drawn too?
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8ig8 1 day ago [-]
Maybe Reddit?
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eeb6e/i_believe_i_kno...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnsolvedMysteries/comments/3oaxi5/n...
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saganus 1 day ago [-]
Ahhh, I guess the story was taken from the reddit posts talked about in the vice article posted below and perhaps spiced up a bit.
Further appearences
- Max Headroom also hooked up with The Art of Noise, to perform Paranoimia! (extended remix:)
- Matt Frewer, the guy who played Max Headroom, also played Carnage in Altered Carbon
- And a really obnoxious time traveler in Star Trek: TNG
- He appeared as guest on David Letterman frequently
- The Screen Savers interviewed him on Tech TV in 2002
- He never made the cover of The Rolling Stone, but he did make the cover of Mad Magazine and Newsweek
- And who can forget him reciting the alphabet on Sesame Street, and blonde cleft-chinned Link Hogthrob as Max Hogroom in Muppet Magazine:
- And honestly, who hasn’t gotten stoned and binged out on a whole box of delicious Max Headroom candy from Topps
- And of course his digital visage also appeared in Doonsbury as Ron Headrest, a parody of Ronald Reagan:
- Ron Headrest is a fictional character in the comic strip Doonesbury.
- During the 1980s, Garry Trudeau thought it would be fun to do a political parody of the television program Max Headroom (of which he was a fan). He combined the concept with then-president Ronald Reagan, to produce Ron Headrest, the world’s first electronically simulated politician. (The name “Headrest” was a humorous allusion to the frequent and lengthy naps that Reagan was notorious for.)
- The idea was that Ron had been created to serve as a backup president during the long periods Reagan spent on vacation. He appeared as a stylized version of Reagan’s head and shoulders on a television screen, complete with sunglasses. Because he was electronic, he would have no memory troubles, and his sense of humor and attitude were designed to appeal to young voters.
- It ends up being a disaster: Headrest is stuttering and incompetent, and openly mocks the administration he is designed to serve, and causes nothing but trouble. During the first week of his appearance he flashes the White House’s phone number on his screen and tells children to call if they wanted “rock-solid information on safe sex.” (Because the number printed was accurate, the real world White House got calls which jammed their switchboards. Eventually they got revenge by giving callers the number of Trudeau’s editor.)
- In the continuity of the comic strip the White House staff is less creative, and simply try to turn Headrest off. But like his televised counterpart, Ron escapes into the airwaves and begins causing trouble wherever he can find a television and someone to listen to him. He takes particular delight in tormenting Mike Doonesbury, whom he calls “Y-Person” (meaning yuppie). Headrest also seeks the 1988 Republican Party presidential nomination in his own right, but withdraws from the race, promising to go into reruns instead.
- Ron appeared regularly throughout the Reagan and Bush presidencies and then began to show up less frequently. He only appeared a few times during the Clinton administration, and then disappeared entirely. The real Ronald Reagan had retired and left the public view, and Max Headroom’s program was long gone, making the character far less topical than he had once been. Although Doonesbury characters rarely disappear, as of May 18, 2019, Ron Headrest hasn’t been seen since November 6, 1994.
- The same effect was used in the “80s Café” scene in Back to the Future II with Reagan, Michael Jackson and Ayatollah Khomeini:
- I most recently spotted him on the show The Magicians
- Frewer also played a CSIS officer in the underrated series Intelligence, which had an interesting take on Canada vs US CIA/DEA and Chinese spying/geopolitics.