In the history of casual comments that sound like they could mark the end of civilization, there’s a staggering contender in “The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution” — all the more so because it comes from an investor who sounds reasonably intelligent. The movie, the latest documentary provocation written and directed by Ondi Timoner, is about the new era of lone stock traders — many, though not all of them, millennials — who grew up playing video games and now experience investing at home as a literal extension of that thrill-a-minute world. The new trading apps, designed as visual candy, are meant to give you the rush that gamers get (and also the high that people seek out from slot machines). Trying to sum up the lizard-brain appeal of it all, an investor named Mitchell Hennessey explains, “Even if you lose on the trade, confetti pops up, and it almost feels like you’re leveling up.
- 3/21/2023
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
There’s a word that keeps popping up in “Screened Out,” Jon Hyatt’s must-see documentary about screen addiction in the age of mobile technology. The word is dopamine. That’s the neurotransmitter that sends signals to other cells, along pathways linked to pleasure and reward-motivated behavior. The idea that smartphones trigger our pleasure centers isn’t news, but “Screened Out” is all about the ways that the devices have been designed to do that very thing. That’s why we’re addicted to them. That’s why they’re rewiring our brains.
Since this is a review of a documentary about the insidious effects of technology-as-diversion-as-social-consumerist-engine-as-mind-control, it seems incumbent upon me to say something like, “Here’s a movie that was made for the pandemic, because we’re all trapped at home now, mediating the world through our screens.” Well yes, we are, and yes, if you’re looking...
Since this is a review of a documentary about the insidious effects of technology-as-diversion-as-social-consumerist-engine-as-mind-control, it seems incumbent upon me to say something like, “Here’s a movie that was made for the pandemic, because we’re all trapped at home now, mediating the world through our screens.” Well yes, we are, and yes, if you’re looking...
- 5/28/2020
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
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