{"id":345,"date":"2023-10-14T15:45:13","date_gmt":"2023-10-14T15:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/?p=345"},"modified":"2023-10-14T15:45:13","modified_gmt":"2023-10-14T15:45:13","slug":"person-of-interest-s4e13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/log\/2023\/10\/person-of-interest-s4e13\/","title":{"rendered":"Person of Interest S4E13"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Notes for season 4 episode 13, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/personofinterest.fandom.com\/wiki\/M.I.A.\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/personofinterest.fandom.com\/wiki\/M.I.A.\">MIA<\/a>&#8220;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>01:06 Finch mentions that when communicating beyond the bounds of the &#8220;Five Boroughs&#8221; mesh-net they have to speak with discretion &#8211; which suggests they&#8217;re talking in the clear, rather than using an app with an encryption layer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>03:30 Anthora coffee cup in shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>04:11 Dani Silva returns, in what we might assume is as a trial run as a series regular if Shaw doesn&#8217;t return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>6:00 The Maple police department has a Dell 2009W monitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>13:18 Finch is accessing the &#8220;Gang Portal&#8221; website, featuring a heatmap of gang activity in New York. We presume this is an NYPD system, rather than a niche service for gangs. He then accesses &#8220;LinkedWeb&#8221;, and LinkedIn analog. Finch states &#8220;the restaurant employs one waiter with gang connections&#8221;, and there&#8217;s a brief second when I assumed the guy had listed gang membership on this LinkedIn page?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>19:20 Fusco namechecks real-world website Craigslist, when speculating how someone becomes a contract killer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>26:00 The Carrow CEO reveals that she too is just a gig economy drone, under threat of death, picking up and moving things as directed by email, with no real knowledge of what the company does. &#8220;Even if she was just following orders, she&#8217;s responsible&#8221; fumes Reece. It&#8217;s an interesting point about an individual&#8217;s culpability for mandatory participation &#8211; as employees, citizens, consumers &#8211; in systems for which they have no effective control. This point is massively undercut by being expressed by a former professional killer, aided by another former professional killer, in search of a third former professional killer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>26:57 &#8220;The blond woman told me, a few must be displaced so that the majority may thrive &#8211; everyone rewarded to their abilities&#8221; Mashing utilitarianism with <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs\">a slogan of socialism<\/a>, it sounds like Samaritan has gone full Jeremy Bentham in its governance plan. Feels like there are themes here that get picked up later in Westworld &#8211; especially in season 3. We presume the &#8220;blond woman&#8221; was Rousseau, and I now wonder if her name was intended as a reference to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau\">Jean-Jacques Rousseau<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>27:23 Finch determines that Samaritan is using the town in order to perform psychological experiments on humans in order to better understand human nature. I suspect this episode was inspired by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2014\/jul\/02\/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2014\/jul\/02\/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users\">2014 revelations about Facebook secretly performing psychological experiments<\/a> on its users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>30:39 We see the labels for packages from Carrow. They have a bunch of numbers on them, but nothing is specified as &#8220;SSCC&#8221; (Serial Shipping Container Code) the minimum requirement for a standard US shipping label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>31:00 The transponders Carrow are making are essentially a sci-fi version of Apple&#8217;s AirTags. Almost mundane now, but sinister in the context of total AI surveillance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>34:40 Carrow&#8217;s secret research project is revealed as an implantable neuro-interface &#8211; ostensibly to control seizures, but probably just as an extension of Samaritan&#8217;s studies of humans. Brain Computer Interfaces have been around for decades, both as subject of research and as a standard of cyberpunk fiction. Triggered by the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/BRAIN_Initiative\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/BRAIN_Initiative\">DARPA BRAIN initiative<\/a> in 2013, there has been an significant amount of research on these devices in the past decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>39:40 Samaritan-front Carrow abandons the town of Maple. Perhaps foreshadowed by its name, which means &#8220;itinerant gambler&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Notes for season 4 episode 13, &#8220;MIA&#8220; 01:06 Finch mentions that when communicating beyond the bounds of the &#8220;Five Boroughs&#8221; mesh-net they have to speak with discretion &#8211; which suggests they&#8217;re talking in the clear, rather than using an app with an encryption layer? 03:30 Anthora coffee cup in shot. 04:11 Dani Silva returns, in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes","tag-person-of-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexkey.co.uk\/lee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}