This week*, Duncan and Mark review 2002’s Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise along with Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow (a regular on this podcast) and Neal McDonough. This is a film loosely based on Isaac Asimov’s short story The Minority Report. Seriously, by loosely we mean that the film’s treatment of problems with techno-authoritarianism in the hands of the police competes for screentime with Steven Spielberg’s focus on slapstick-comedy action sequences and often the latter wins out. Kind of a metaphor for the post-9/11 world really. But for all its faults, Minority Report shows us a future in which Elon Musk is still the biggest loser ever, hahahaha. In one sentence: Minority Report has aged waaaay faster than its main star Tom Cruise has in the last 20 years (he still looks 40). Seriously, please don’t watch it.

Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today is sponsored by the Carmichael Centre within the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute.

*A note from your podcasters: between covid and dogs eating laptops, it’s been a challenge to get episodes out regularly the past couple of months. We also lost an episode which may or may not be recovered – hopefully we find it, it’s a good one.

So this may be the final episode of Season 1 and we’re grateful to all our listeners for the support! We’ve gone truly global (we’ve got listeners in 4 countries). So we hope we can keep doing more podcasts in 2023. Until then, stay safe, enjoy the holidays and always treat technology as political.