Tech community desperate for 'Independence Day' more than 'Star Trek'
Technically Incorrect: New research suggests that those who work in tech most crave the end of the world.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
Will it have a happy ending? What about the world?
Do blockbuster movies really bust people's blocks anymore?
Is there an insatiable craving for more noise and killing, one that is synonymous with the American summer?
Hollywood is becoming concerned that people might be tiring of all these episode twos, threes and lost-count-of-how-manys.
But which big movies are still enchanting minds?
I have before me exclusive research that asked people which big movies they were already desperate to buy tickets online for.
You know that buying online assures you a seat without having to move from your seat. This is what Americans call freedom.
Your world will be entirely unshaken when I tell you that Americans are most looking forward to buying online tickets to "Star Trek Beyond," which will surely go beyond where any other sequel has gone. Or not.
Close behind is the new Jason Bourne movie. Its title perhaps tries to conceal it's another Jason Bourne movie, as it's simply titled "Jason Bourne." That sounds like the original, doesn't it? Clever.
But this research of 2,406 adult Americans -- performed last week by ScaleArc, a company that claims to be "the leading provider of database load balancing software" -- unloads some other basic data delights.
Forty-one percent of these people claimed to work in the tech industry. You might imagine, therefore, that these tech types can't wait for the new "Star Trek."
But no.
Their biggest craving is for "Independence Day: Resurgence," to which some reviewers have been pleasant and others less so. (The Guardian: "Planet-smashingly boring.")
Among this group of techies, "Independence Day" beat "Star Trek Beyond" by five percentage points. It beat "Ghostbusters" by 20 points.
Naturally, I have theories.
The most prosaic is that "Independence Day" comes out in the US on Thursday, while "Star Trek" isn't due until July 22. Techies are immediate beings.
I fear there's more to it. The tech world is now far more fascinated with aliens and the world's imminent destruction than what they see as some little sci-fi fantasy in which even the humans are strange.
The more the tech world creates artificial intelligence to replace humans and dreams of inserting nanobots into all heads, the more it realizes how much of the world's future is in its hands.
After all, the biggest tech brains are worrying about the world's immediate tomorrows, rather than hundreds of years into the future.
Stephen Hawking, for example, wishes we'd stop being so aggressive. Elon Musk is afraid of the Terminator. These men are concerned our potential for instant destruction is very strong.
One invention in the wrong little fingers, one government taken over by orange-haired, self-aggrandizing aliens and who knows where we'll be?
