I'm Not a Robot

 

Ellen Parren in “I'm Not a Robot.” Image via IMDb.com

You may not know the name.

But you've had the experience.

It's CAPTCHA, the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Whether the acronym is coincidental or intentionally designed to trigger paranoia, it does sound uncomfortably close to capture.

It refers to the squiggly obscured letters and numbers, or the sign-in photo grid on a lot of websites, telling you to click all the boxes with bicycles, bridges or stoplights to prove you're not a robot. 

You know what I'm talking about, right?

But what happens if you fail the test?

That's the premise for “I'm Not a Robot,” a joint production from the Netherlands and Belgium that just won the Oscar for best live-action short. Hauntingly acted and elegantly filmed, it's a story of a young woman (Ellen Parren) who can't convince CAPTCHA that she's human. What follows falls somewhere between the blackest of comedies and a nightmare that in the last century would have been labeled Kafkaesque.

While the film feels a little slight (hey, it's a short), its theme couldn't be more relevant. Or urgent. Or terrifying.

My pal, filmmaker Tom Vendetti, once had the honor of interviewing the Dalai Lama. Setting up his video equipment for the session, Tom nervously kept running into glitches.

As he muttered something about the damn technology, His Holiness responded with his trademark belly laugh.

“I think it's the operator!” he said.

When it comes to technology, operator errors are frequent occurrences among people of a certain age. My age, actually, and the age of most of the readers of this blog. It's not our fault. We're immigrants, we come from a different millennium. We speak high-tech as a second language. It intimidates us.

People fluent in high-tech have taken charge, most recently of the levers of government. Do a handful of arrogant 20-somethings find sadistic glee in knowing that for a thousand year in Venice, Italy, Doge was a title bestowed on rulers for life, many of whom wielded their absolute power ruthlessly? 

Or maybe the techno-bros don't know much about history. Or care. 

What they do know is how to eliminate Social Security payments for all registered Democrats in one fell swoop.

These are scary times for all, but especially for those of us once known as baby boomers who think that being able to Google answers to medical questions represents the pinnacle of high-tech prowess.

True, one member of our generation has managed to make himself the Biggest Kahuna of all time, the guy in charge of everything. He's not real great at high-tech, either. (Groveling and flattery from Silicon Valley doesn't mean they don't know how needy he is.) Doesn't matter. He's the one who figured out that a natural-born liar with a flair for television and Tweeting is all it takes to utterly undermine the foundations of American justice and democracy.

Now outlets of the “fake news” he claims to despise bombard us daily with his face. All the posters of Lenin in Soviet Russia and Chairman Mao in Communist China would be green with envy.

When we were in college – jeez, was it really 60 years ago now? – dystopian fiction was in its infancy. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was as good as it got. English author George Orwell's imagination couldn't compete with today's Hollywood green screens for showing authoritarian horrors, so he focused on more subtle subjects. Crimes against language, for example. Or the perpetual rewriting of history to replace collective memory with permanent amnesia.

In his wildest dreams he couldn't have imagined so many of the essentials of modern life we now take for granted. Laptops and iPhones would have been the stuff of pure magic.

Who could have foreseen that one day our laptops might hold the CAPTCHA power to determine whether or not we're still human?

When the actual year 1984 came and went, some of us assumed we had dodged the bullet. We didn't realize the long shelf life of Orwell's concepts.

Crimes against language took root in verbal contortions like “virtual reality.” “Reality television.” “Creatives.” Professional “influencers.” Or now, “artificial intelligence.” 

Is anyone beside me bothered that our current obsession with “being authentic” is not just redundant, but a charade?

And as for rewriting history? How long do you think it will be before Jan. 6 is proclaimed a national holiday?

The Dalai Lama was no stranger to political tyranny and persecution in his Tibetan homeland. Somehow he learned to laugh anyway.

It's a lesson we might try to learn from him. It won't solve the problem, but it might help us make it through the night.