Imagine a world where all the updates, information, advertisements are visible through your eyes walking down the street or drinking a coffee at the bar ...
A database system stores your good and bad memories and, upon request, everything can be viewed by the police. No, it's not Orwell's 1984 but it's Anon , a film written in 2018 by Andrew Niccol.
The film talks about some of the typical themes of the sci-fi genre, not least that famous disturbing vision from the killer point of view, which had characterized and made famous the 1995 film written by James Cameron "Strange Days". For those who have not seen Strange Days, the murderer's victims, before being killed, through a complex system of virtual reality (of the time), live the direct experience of the murderer himself.
The complex mirror system, in addition to being disturbing, introduces the concept of being hacked in a certain sense.
And it is the elegant concept taken up by Anon , where a very prepared hacker manages not only to erase the traces of his clients' uncomfortable memories, but (without spoiling) to enter the "code" of the victim's mind and project his vision into direct while killing him.
Anon is a film that on the one hand is fairly linear in its not too complex noir plot, but on the other hand, it touches on very interesting issues and raises some questions about the future of man and technology.
As in an episode of the famous Black Mirror, in fact, here the film investigates, in its subtext, whether to be completely traceable through technology, in every single memory is lawful and safe.
- You did not understand. The point is not whether I have secrets to hide, the point is that I don't want them to be shared - claims the hacker protagonist of the film.
In fact, Anon is in a certain sense full of ideas for those involved in cyber security and hacking, since the future described is not so different from the one we live in: very often, without making too distant examples, ransomware threatens us asking for ransoms for our secret and precious data.
Just as our accessibility and presence on all social networks makes us vulnerable to attacks.
Niccol's film therefore opens a Pandora's box that makes us see a step further, as if we could peer five minutes ahead of us, in this near future, but now almost present, where total accessibility to ourselves becomes a danger.
Anon, this is the name of the girl protagonist, sounds like Unknown, because as a hacker she manages to live by hiding all traces of her identity by having it deleted.
And therefore the need to keep safe what is now the virtualization of ourselves in the network, is no longer just the product of a 90s science fiction but it is a tangible need, our data and our lives will have a path intrinsically linked to ours. privacy and our right of confidentiality.
