Peter Parker used facial recognition like the US company
Palantir to spy on all of New York. The newest movie treats This as quirky vs the Nolan Batman movies where Batman does something similar and his allies threatened to quit.
It wasn't even good then. Dark Knight treated universal surveillance as an inherently good idea so long as one sufficiently Strong Smart Man was the arbiter of it. That's just not how shit plays out.
No? It was treated as too great a power for anyone to have, but a necessary sin with the specific current circumstances. It's why Lucius threatened to walk away if Bruce kept it, which is why Bruce destroyed it immediately after using it. If Lucius had changed his mind after seeing Bruce use it, then it'd have treated it the way you said it did, but it was destroyed for a reason.
Lucius didn't just threaten to walk away. He did walk away. But he was pleased to see that Bruce had programmed the technology to self destruct using Lucius's name as the password.
But it didn’t matter that Bruce destroyed it afterwards.
The point is that Bruce created it in the first place.
It’s not The One Ring, The Holy Grail or The Last Unicorn. It’s a computer.
Destroying it is a meaningless gesture. Bruce could build another one at any time.
That’s why Fox walked away.
If push comes to shove Bruce will do almost anything. Sure, it took the Joker to make Bruce to build it. But what about the next villain, or the next guy afterwards.
Each time Bruce justifies building the device, it will become easier to justify.
Just like real life, Tyranny tends to come into existence inch by inch rather than showing up fully assembled
Tbf, it was what made Bruce suceed in that fight, he saved millions because joker could not blow up everything.
Then there's the lie of Harvey Dent.
Bruce goes to extreme lenghts in TDK, and whilst his morality is debated amidst the characters, there's a greyness in his actions, Lucius literally says out-loud to the audience "This is wrong.". But at the end of the day "he is the hero Gotham needs"
Superhero intervention and individual exceptionalism is a debate that has existed since the 80s, practically since Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns came into inception. "Batman is a facist" is since forever.
The good thing is that it is a movie, and that people can critique it or agree with it freely. I think it's important to understand how media is created and how the fictional setting and events that occur speak aloud about what the creators believe.
The circumstances and the actions (and respective consequences) are created deliverately by the author.
Exactly. It was "too great an evil" for anyone to wield but the billionaire who could afford to build it; and who could also decide who was "honorable" enough, or who had "only the best intentions at heart" to be allowed to wield it.
It was too great an evil even for the billionaire, which is why it got destroyed. You'd have a point if they kept it, but they didn't precisely because it's not something anyone should have.
And you'd have a point if it hadn't explicitly been written into the movie as the only way Batman could save the day-- and it did in fact turn out to be the only way Batman could save the day. The narrative conveniently left Batman clean, but the argument made by the plot itself was that the technology itself was necessary and there were situations where it could be justified.
What's the thing he says about living long enough to see yourself become a villain? This would be the prime example of him living to become the villain. The actions he does are villainous. They are villainous actions. Using the surveillance tech - however helpful it might be, however few a times he uses it - it's still villainous. So is he for doing so.
Not to mention, you're still boot-licking your way into the "billionaires know better than me" corner at a worrying rate.
It's an allegory for the Patriot Act after 9/11. Thr responsible thing to do was to use it for the mitigating circumstances, an emergency, then once the emergency had passed, to deconstruct it.
You can take the position that that's still inherently immoral, but then you'd have to agree that under no circumstances, ever, would the state (or any authority) be able to weild additional powers in a time of emergency. Huge natural disaster? No national guard coming to restore order.
I think Lucious destroyed it, not Bruce. Some people interpret adding Lucious name as a self-destruct code, but the previous scenes show that Bruce thought he could handle the power. IIRC it is implied like he was using it before the Joker showed up.
It's never implied he was using it before that incident with the Joker (it's actually based on tech Bruce uses for the first time to map out the office building in China) and there's no reason Lucius entering his name on a device Bruce made without his involvement would self destruct it unless Bruce programmed that in.
That's assuming it's Lucius entering his name that destroyed the machine and not just Lucius destroying the machine as he wanted to do the second he laid eyes on it.
Batman literally says "when we are done type your name" and doing so destroys the machine. Also it uses technology introduced not long ago (Sonar) which Lucius showed Batman probably less than a week before. So yeah Batman made the whole thing as a desperate measure to get Joker.
But that happened because pretend people can act in any way you want if you're writing a pretend fun story. No one who builds that system destroys it after one necessary use. Anyone willing to destroy it would never have built it. "Power corrupts" holds true, but I've always found it less true than "only the corrupt seek power."
You've pivoted from "The Dark Knight treats it as a universally good thing" to "it's a work of fiction, so it doesn't matter if it acknowledges it as a bad thing because that's not how it'd go in the real world".
Tyranny is often based on the idea that a group of people are corruptible and not able to be trusted, whereas there will be a singular incorruptible individual out there who could therefore do the job of the group more fairly, less corruptly and more efficiently.
Of course, there are so many defects in this reasoning, including misunderstanding that it is in fact the steep hierarchical nature of a group that often leads to corruption of the group, and that an individual may always come across as uncorrupted but in fact be just as corrupt as anyone else. But when you’re looking at a group system failing, giving an individual power rather than spreading the group out even further seems logical. That’s how you get Caesar, Hitler, Bjelke-Peterson, Putin, Palpatine
Social systems can't be based on individuals, they have to be based on average risk vs benefit, because they operate on a scale above the individual.
The problem with absolute power isn't that people with absolute power inevitably turn bad. It's that bad people with absolute power tend to create a lot of harm that they couldn't have caused without it, but good people rarely NEED absolute power to produce benefit.
In the long run, the benefit just isn't worth the cost.
It never treated it as a good thing. Morgan Freeman explicitly detailed why it was a bad idea, and Bruce Wayne agreed. The end with him actually being willing to destroy it, shows Bruce's inherent moral character not that the device was good. Your interpretation is really sad.
good idea so long as one sufficiently Strong Smart Man was the arbiter of it.
That's significantly downplaying Lucious' role in the situation. Bruce handed the keys of the system over to the biggest critic of it. If anything, it was promoting systems with checks and balances, watchdog groups, and steps to prohibit misuse of such systems.
The problem is always humans. Mass surveillance can only be good if it's only operated by truly good and smart people. That's just not possible in reality.
The best theory I've heard is that they're setting up mutant persecution with the new Spider-Man movie.
He develops a universal inhibitor, which is shown to work on mutants, and practically gives it to the DoDC, who might be the ones to hunt down mutants. He uses ai to track what's happening, which can easily be repurposed for mutant activities. And, there's Ned who made the Spider Tracker, which can be turned into a mutant tracker where people report mutants that they see out and about. Add in the ai like the glasses/Ultron and you get the Sentries to hunt down mutants.
He used what was already in place. He didn’t put them up or invent them, as far as I know, merely used the cities extensive surveillance to his own advantage.
EDIT: also, it isn’t just quirky, it’s something the police person he’s working closely with warns him (implicitly) that he shouldn’t be doing.
I agree there’s been a big shift in the acceptance (very specifically NOT approval) of this level of surveillance. The part even the people who accept its existence would disapprove of is the use of it by an unlicensed individual with little to no oversight.
The movie does try (IMO) to show this as Spider-man slipping away from “hero” and towards “vigilante”.
That's the problem though, why the hell does a teenager in his studio have access to govt cctv, and why is it so normalized to have somebody staring at you literally 24/7? Pretty sure there's a twilight zone episode about that.
I realize this is completely not the point but he’s 22-23 in the new movie
He was graduating high school about to enter college in the last one, and then there was a 4 year timeskip during the montage at the beginning of the movie
Also yeah I agree mass surveillance is wrong rlly idk who does it.
Right, mb, but point stands, why is there so much surveillance in New York? And why the hell is nobody noticing a constantly active connection outside of secure facilities?
You’re asking why New York, one of the most populous cities in the United States, has cameras everywhere, the same New York that has countless businesses ranging from small corner shops to mega stores, who, most likely, have set up their own cameras to deter thieves, especially in a super powered version of the world
Tbf with whats going on in the MCU I am not surprised. Alien invasions, regular people with alien tech, people with super powers. If I was a regular person I'd kind
of understand.
Its like how in real life, I'd understand that mutants shouldn't be oppressed. But if I was in the Marvel Universe, I totally want the X-Gene to get cured, especially if a teenage boy developed a power that just obliterates life in a 10 mile radius or can warp reality.
Still uses that shit and the movie makes a funny "i pretend i didnt hear that" quip about it, dont act stupid, they 100% ABSOLUTELY made it a quirky joke
It's like subliminal marketing! Hey guys look one of your favorite super hero's even does it! It's totally fine y'all should embrace the technology into your lives as we implement it! Lmfao
Holding super heroes accountable to real life morals is silly. Spider-Man also hits and falsely imprisons bad guys, he breaks into places all the time, and uses his connections with law enforcement to get special treatment etc etc.
I swear people are so quick to judge what fictional characters do based on the lens of current events, just to ignore the fact that they genuinely have good intentions and aren’t the scummy people in real life who do similar acts out of self interest
My theory is that Doom in the next movie is going to be explained as some variant of Stark who was Iron Man, but if the snap never happened, so he continued down the path that mainline Stark was going down.
Even after Ultron, after Civil War, Stark was continuing to do what he can to control everything. As we saw in Spiderman Far From Home, after all of his screwups and recklessness up to the snap, Stark was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction and a means for a single person to control people, utilized by simply wearing a pair of glasses and issuing a voice command. Need to change what a cell phone has or can access? Easy! Gun down a bus full of students anywhere in the world with no judicial oversight? Sure thing!
The snap only delayed Iron Man from becoming Doom. In the, what, 6-7 years between the snap and his death, Stark was going back to making weapons of mass destruction. Recklessly building suits for him and other people that could easily wipe others out (leaving them out so his kid could get her hands on it!!!), and Stark being Stark, he was going to slip right back into the "I'm the only one who can control it" excuse for taking the role of dictator.
So that's my take. I'm really hoping for someone, upon seeing Doom being played by someone who looks just like mainline Stark, saying something along the lines of "you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain". And with Parker looking like he is going down that path, the only thing that could help get him back in being in good moral standing is going to be his relationship with Ned and MJ. That's the one saving grace between Parker and Stark; Parker is willing to be more of a team player.
I feel like the newest movie is going to be a step in the direction of Trask Industries. The inhibitor is just straight up suppression collars from genosha
And it wasn't some off-the-cuff "well, I have no other option" decision Parker made. He clearly built the suit to recognize if surveillance tech was going to be abused, and the only safeguard he built in was a mere "are you sure" confirmation.
Peter Parker in the recent Spider-Man film used something similar to Flock and Palantir to track criminals and the movies villain. Hence the "Palantir Parker". It's incredibly unethical and it's portrayed as a good thing. Tony Stark, and his company Stark industries was an American weapons manufacturer. Israel buys a lot of American weapons, it would be unrealistic if Tony or at the very least Stark Industries didn't sell arms to them.
Nuclear weapons are morally wrong but that's a whole other conversation I'm not going to address, Bruce making them I'm assuming becoming a war criminal in the process. I don't know all the requirements or context for this one.
Wayne enterprises never stopped developing and selling weapons to the government, this included various jets, tanks, missiles system, ballistic components.
Maybe it would've been true before but I thought it was well established after the first Iron Man movie that Tony had stopped selling weapons, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Did they ever say what Stark Industries does do now that they don’t make weapons? I mean other than funding all the stuff for all the Avengers all the time, how are they making any money
Not sure how everyone saw peter using the surveillance net as being portrayed as ‘good.’ The movie makes it pretty clear that peter is obsessed with stopping crime, since he has nothing left but his spiderman identity at that point.
The film, as a film justifies Peters usage and his usage does save the day. You have your opinion, I have mine. I don't like the billion dollar company having its protagonist use that kind of tech to justify his means, when that same tech is used for a police state.
I would guess most of Peter’s sense of self worth hinges on his ability to be a ‘hero.’ He has no friends (Frank counts ig), no family, and very little social interaction outside of spiderman stuff. Catching bad guys is the only thing that drives his life by the start of BND, so if push comes to shove he’s going to do some sketchy things.
I think it makes sense for a peter who’s still deeply hurt by the events of NWH and has lost his way a bit.
Whether or not propaganda is effective is heavily dependent on the viewer. While it’s unfortunate that it was included in the movie, films do not have an obligation to be perfectly curated or to hold to an ideological standard.
I personally think it was a fumble, but I didn’t let it impact the rest of my viewing experience and I wonder if it’ll have consequences for peter in the future.
I didn't either, but It is the exact thing being addressed in this meme.
I actually did see the film in theaters (my ticket was comped admittedly) I enjoyed Toms performance and liked the plot and themes the story had. Solid B for marvel movies
yeah I agree with you, but we're talking about a kids movie. Kids look up to spiderman and if he uses the tech the kids will not be bothered by it existing irl. I really hope they adress this issue in later movies, maybe have him make new (old) friends and have them be uncomfortable with the idea. But I'll doubt it since Hollywood and especially Disney is full of sluts who love that corpo money.
i watched the early mcu movies wayyy too long ago but doesnt tony have an arc where he realizes that he should stop selling arms irresponsibly? youd thin after that he wouldnt sell if he knew it was gonna go to israel.
Yeah he gets kidnapped, sees his weapons are being sold to both sides, and decides the company should hard stop on developing weapons and focuses on green energy (the arc reactor)
In the comics, the pivoted away from arms manufacturing during the vietnam war, and modern iterations focus on defense r&d rather than weapons
It wasn’t portrayed as a good thing. It actually was portrayed as a crime, that the police chief let slide due to the gravity of the situation..
Actually, pretty much everything spider-man does is a crime, that NYPD lives with because of positive outcomes. He even nearly
killed a cop
and was allowed to walk away.
In the movie, it results in a positive outcome, and that’s exactly the problem. It sends the message that mass surveillance can be a good thing, and if the movie doesn’t explicitly condemn it, it risks normalizing the concept of a surveillance state to younger audiences
Leftist meme and it's being against mass surveillance. You clearly never heard of waco. Acting like anti government and anti surveillance is a leftist thing has to be the most reddit thing out there lmaoo. The fact that you think it's only leftists tells the world exactly why they're able to keep planting more and more flock cameras
I don’t know if you realize this, but it’s generally a left-leaning position, since opposition to state power is traditionally associated with the left
Elections are always rigged. This country is going to have every kind of president. Female. Trans. Indian. And they'll all be backed by Israel. And they'll clap and celebrate once they're elected. We haven't had a real America first president in decades. It's just all Israel boot lickers. And these redditors will kiss the boot if it's in the color blue 😂
Yeah, leftists are annoyingly immature. The most annoying thing is throwing I/P in every IP, lol. But the MCU has covered these themes in the films before: Iron-Man and Captain America: Civil War (off the top of my head) before 95% of leftist even knew Palestine existed.
leftists are annoyingly immature. The most annoying thing is throwing I/P in every IP, lol.
Dude, it's not magically ok when you do it. Instead of slinging insults try comprehending the message.
Mass surveillance bad
WMD bad
I remember fighting a national gun registry because I didn't want my privacy being violated, but all of a sudden all the right-leaning guys that didn't want that are okay with MASS SURVEILLANCE? What happened to protection of privacy?
Try driving your own cart instead of hopping on a bandwagon
Am I the onlyone finds it hilarious that News shows picture of captain with mask? I mean he is registered US soldier they definitely have the picture of his bare face.
"Captain America has gone into hiding. So everyone be on the lookout for him dressed in his bright, spangly, and highly-recognizable suit. It's not like he can take it off and look like a regular person"
The issue I have is his "disguise" is doing more to make him look like Captain America. The picture of him is wearing a cowl that covers his hair and eyes and so he covers his hair and eyes?
Think it's to do with the most recent movie where Peter Parker, sets up a city wide hidden surveillance network which has like facial recognition and shit to track down criminals.
Really suspect but tbh he gets called out for it in the movie.
Yes, his AI tells him his actions are both illegal & immoral
Anyone claiming the movie was promoting mass surveillance & tracking wasn't paying attention to the fact peter was essentially mentally ill obsessed filling time with crime fighting & crossing lines in his actions he normally would never- like throwing a police car & going for the kill on people
iirc this is something the original Hulk movie did right. The irradiation experiments that created both him and Absorbing Man (his dad) were tests to prove the bomb wouldn't kill humans because "humans can handle low levels of irradiation by gamma energy without a mutation."
basicly Peter Parker / Spider man can get away with shit coz hes spider man peter parker but replace him for other characters in other shows and we get boos
I mean Tony Stark would have made weapons for Israel, but that is also treated like a bad thing within the story. It is kind of a major plot point of the first movie that he realizes his weapons manufacturing is bad
Can anyone versed in the MCU lore tell me if the thing about Iron Man is true? Maybe it would've been true before but I thought it was well established after the first Iron Man movie that Tony had stopped making weapons (beyond the suit).
McU says it a few times but it's very much background noise. Iron man 2 is entirely about how he doesn't want to make weapons with the arc reactor and mass produce suits but then that happens with ultron ect ect.
he says he stops selling weapons after the first movie yes, but its weird BC his company doesn't like....do anything. Hammer wanted them to get back into selling weapons but their technology in general is way better, but they bring up he has defense contracts. IDK, its one of the weird early on MCU writings
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
It’s a reference to Peter Parker in the new movie where he uses mass surveillance similar to palantir and flock. The whole meme revolves around the application of the heros role in the real world of the United States.
This references the new movie but it could also reference the comic book version of Civil War as Spiderman supported Iron man's Superhuman registration act. He does eventually switch sides, but only after Iron Man attacks him. Basically the big reason in the comics why Civil War happens is the government wants all Superhuman, not just heros but anyone with powers, to register in this huhe database. Iron man, being bascually the government and sheild lap dog, tries to force this. Captain America disagrees saying it violated privacy and Civil liberty making him go underground. Iron man and Reed go crazy and build a prison for those that don't want to follow the new law, make a clone of Thor, and use harsh tactics. The story ends with Captain America giving up after almost killing Iron man, Iron man becomes sheild director, and then creates the 50-state plan where he plans to put a superhero team in every state. Basically creating a superhero surveillance state. It didn't really go any further but it was a few steps away from something like DC's injustice
I would not like that in real life, but also, I would not like a crazy spider vigilante flying through my city. The whole situation that city NEEDS a crazy dude in mask to preserve some sort of peace would be nuts to me and should probably make NYC rent cheap.
But you don’t see me making funny nicknames and saying that it’s wrong. Because it’s a damn fictional story.
Iron Man would not make weapons for Israel. After seeing what Stark industries were doing with the weapons he was selling I’m pretty sure he’ll be overly cautious as to who he lends his fire power.
The first iron man film Stark is literally a weapons manufacturer in the middle east. He might not be doing it anymore but textually he has absolutely sold weapons to Israel. He probably also sold them to Hamas in secret
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u/qualityvote2 16h ago edited 1h ago
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