George Weed

A brilliant reimagining, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is an enzyme that binds to, and colors, my recent ponderings about compliance and predictability with respect to our digital realities. Hihi is a nonhuman character, despite its identity never revealed. Repeat mention of Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet" is a touchstone for this character's predictive abilities. (It's on my reading list now) Whereas the "super-high-risk" Smiths praise Hihi's ability to predict the future, this future only happens when people comply en masse. Hihi represents ideology in this way. Successful apps turn humans into complaint machines. Uber and Tinder already predict the future. And autocomplete just finished this sentence. Jane's autocorrect regularly fixes her typos. But similar to Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, Mr. and Mrs. Smith suggests love — complicated, unpredictable love — is a part of the solution. It makes people behave in ways that are hard to account for, where economic incentives make people highly predictable. It is beholden upon us to act unpredictably and to ignore our autocorrect sometimes. Spell things rong and it might just be a human on the other end. Keep it spicy :)