Computers in the mid 80s were nowhere near ready to do it for real yet.Įven without explicitly predicting the iPhone, the web or social media, the series anticipated – and pre-parodied – some of the media realities we deal with today: Intense competition for control of audience behavior, the unabashed remolding of news information for political purposes, the shrinking attention span of viewers attention down to matters of seconds (the Blipvertesque rules of preroll apply) and the idea that we need not use a real person, and the liabilities of a real person, as a celebrity influencer.
And to point up just how long ago this all was, even Max's glitchy digital face was merely prosthetics, lighting and editing made to look like low-polygon rendering. And now, even that crazy future as fully come to pass. At least, unlike AIs and Deepfakes, Max had the common decency to be identifiably synthetic.
#Max headroom streaming tv
In that series (and I was probably one of few turbogeeks who watched it), the premise was that in the near future, TV networks wielded political power (sound familiar?), that media had the power to watch and record your behaviors for their own intel (sound like any entertainment device you used today?) and proposed that advertising would be reduced to hyper-short-duration bursts (called Blipverts) devised to keep you from switching away from the publisher's content – and, as all good sci-fi predicts, be a powerful vector for mind control.Įven the Max Headroom character itself was a prediction: that we’d one day have fully digital media influencers. Because way, way back in 1987, someone thought it would be a good idea to take the then-well-known fake-synthetic, wise-cracking 80's style icon and expand it to, of all things. But few remember the short-lived sci-fi series on ABC, also called Max Headroom.
He showed up in ads during major sports events, even made the cover of Newsweek. If you’re over 40, you might remember 1984's digitally-stuttering, MTV-VJing/New-Coke-pitching version of Max Headroom.
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