Cory Doctorow on technology in film

From this Onion AV Interview:

So I would go see these techno-thrillers, and the technology was totally wrong. You wouldn’t make a movie about ancient Rome in which people were driving hot rods, unless you’re Mel Brooks or something. It just doesn’t make any sense, right? If the movie is a historical film about Victorian England, you wouldn’t egregiously stick a bunch of televisions in the background. But there are all of these movies that are putatively about the technology we all use. In all those Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies and so on, there’s technology that we all use. And presumably, from the last word of the screenplay being written to the last cut of the edit being made, hundreds and hundreds of people look at this film who use computers every day. And none of them seem to know that computers actually don’t emit a soft chime every time you type. It’s like they’re running Hollywood Operating System.

It’s not Windows, it’s not Mac, it’s Hollywood OS, and Hollywood OS not only doesn’t exist, it’s kind of dumb. And they’re doing it to create these artificial moments of plot tension, and you don’t need it, because technology is incredibly, inherently exciting. So wouldn’t it be great to write a techno-thriller that really just tried to talk about technology as it is, or as it plausibly could be, and still made it thrilling?

It’s like none of these people know anything about computers, and yet they’re purporting to—you know, M*A*S*H at least had the decency to hire doctors to advise them on medical terminology. It’s like these guys can’t even bother to go out and find a 12-year-old to tell them how computers work.