Precog visions: Predicting the future with the Minority Report sociotechnical imaginary

Abstract

The 2002 film Minority Report regularly appears in tech press articles asking whether it ‘predicted the future’. When such publications invoke the film as having ‘predicted the future’ or ‘come true’, what social and political claims are being made? How has Minority Report become a discursive tool for imagining, constructing, and criticizing sociotechnical worlds? In this paper, we evaluate the worldbuilding process and real-world trajectories of three technologies ‘from’ Minority Report, as refracted through the lens of tech journalism: gestural interfaces, targeted advertising, and predictive policing. We argue that science fiction does more than represent technologies; it participates in their social construction. Some technologies imagined in Minority Report operate as ‘diegetic prototypes’, and the journalistic witnessing public takes them up in complex ways, interpreting, misinterpreting, and remixing the technologies depicted in the film. We further argue that it is not only technologies that move between film and reality in this process, but entire sociotechnical imaginaries. We find that in tech beat interpretations of Minority Report, the interfaces between bodies and technologies reflect a Silicon Valley sociotechnical imaginary of disembodied cyborg subjects and deracialized surveillance that materially and discursively shapes how technologies depicted in the film are developed and received.

Keywords

Sociotechnical imaginaries diegetic prototypes science fiction film tech journalism cyborg surveillance studies

In the two decades since the 2002 release of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, the film has lingered in the public imagination as a catalog of future technology. Minority Report pioneered worldbuilding techniques to vividly imagine a future that left a lasting impression on audiences (Johnson, 2009; Kirby, 2010; Pendleton-Jullian & Brown, 2018). Popular press articles, especially in tech beat publications, frequently revisit the film, asking whether it successfully ‘predicted the future’—that is, asking whether the technologies depicted have been realized since its release. For example, in Wired, ‘Six real gadgets Minority Report predicted correctly’ (Chen, 2008); in The Verge, ‘10 years later, looking back at how ‘Minority Report’ predicted the future’ (Kopfstein, 2012); in Esquire, ‘The movie that accurately predicted the future of technology’ (Howard, 2014); in SyFy Wire ‘This week in genre history: Minority Report predicted our future’ (Grierson, 2020). Such pieces treat the film as an exercise in real-world technological forecasting, bridging fiction and reality.

The idea that Minority Report should be taken as a ‘reality-based future rather than science fiction’ was deliberately cultivated by Spielberg and the film’s production team (Hart, 2010). Based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick, the main plot revolves around the social and ethical implications of a speculative crime prediction technology (‘Precrime’). This system consists of three mutant humans with precognitive abilities plugged into a brain-computer interface that is deployed by police to apprehend criminals before they commit a crime. Novel to the worldbuilding process (led by designer Alex McDowell) was the way the film also envisioned other, less plot-central technologies—technologies that are taken for granted in the film’s world (Kirby, 2010). Before the film’s script was even set, Spielberg convened scientists, engineers, technologists, and futurists to create the ‘2054 bible’, a document that holistically envisioned what Washington, D.C. could actually look like in 2054 (McDowell, 2019). This included a slew of innovations, from gesture-sensing computer screens to brain-computer interfaces to ‘sick sticks’ (vomit-inducing police batons).

Since the film’s release, technologies similar to the ones depicted in the film—including gesture recognition interfaces, retina scanners, and targeted advertising—have actually been developed, and even marketed as ‘Minority Report interfaces’ or ‘making Minority Report real’ (Hopkins, 2008; Saenz, 2010a, 2010b). Meanwhile, the emergence of predictive policing technologies has prompted reconsideration of the film’s themes, and it serves as a frequent referent in debates over surveillance (Hughes, 2020; McCormack, 2016; Wray, 2018).

In this article, we interrogate how Minority Report is deployed in popular discourses about technologies and the social worlds in which they are embedded. There is a generative irony to evaluating the technological ‘predictions’ of a film about the dangers of predictive technology; even asking the question ‘has Minority Report come true?’ reveals that at least some audiences would like science fiction to be a useful tool for predicting the future. We thus ask, when publications invoke the film as having ‘predicted the future’, what social and political claims are being made? How has the film become a discursive tool for imagining, constructing, and critiquing sociotechnical worlds?

To answer this question, we evaluate the worldbuilding process and subsequent real-world trajectories of three technologies ‘from’ Minority Report: gestural interfaces, targeted advertising, and predictive policing. We explore how these technologies are depicted in the film and were later realized in product development, as refracted through the lens of tech news publications like Wired. We argue that science fiction does more than represent technologies; it participates in their social construction. The technologies imagined in Minority Report’s worldbuilding process operate to some extent as ‘diegetic prototypes’: ‘cinematic depictions of future technologies’ that ‘demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, benevolence, and viability’ (Kirby, 2010, p. 43). The journalistic witnessing public takes up these prototypes in complex ways; rather than accepting the film’s technological visions at face value, we find that the writers of tech news publications interpret, misinterpret, and remix the technologies depicted in Minority Report, sometimes even attributing entirely unrelated technologies to the film. Moreover, it is not only technologies that move between film and reality, but entire sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015a). We find that in tech beat interpretations of Minority Report, the interfaces between bodies and technologies reflect a sociotechnical imaginary of cyborg subjects and public/private surveillance in which information ‘loses its body’. Our analysis illustrates the complexity of how tech journalism mobilizes science fiction to materially and discursively shape how technologies are constructed, making visible a Silicon Valley imaginary of disembodiment and deracialization with all-too-real stakes. We thus emphasize a critical, feminist perspective on embodiment in science and technology studies discourses of science fiction film, diegetic prototyping, and sociotechnical imaginaries, arguing that materiality and embodiment are crucial elements in the movement of technologies and politics across fiction and fact.

Science fiction and the social construction of technologies in tech journalism

What is the relationship between science fiction and real-world technology? Research from the sociology of science suggests that scientists and others typically engage in ‘boundary-work’ to distinguish ‘real’ science from ‘non-science’ (Gieryn, 1995). Through such processes, science fiction is often firmly demarcated from science. However, Haraway (1990b) offers a different way to conceptualize this relationship, treating scientific practice as a form of representation and challenging the distinction between fact and fiction. Situating ‘scientific fact’ in the broader genre of ‘SF’ (science fiction or speculative fiction), she argues that ‘[t]he sciences have complex histories in the constitution of imaginative worlds and of actual bodies in modern and postmodern “first world” cultures’ (p. 5).

In our analysis, we join the substantial body of STS research suggesting that the reverse is also true: science fiction plays a significant role in the social construction of science and technology (e.g., Fleischmann & Templeton, 2008; Franklin, 2008; Haran et al., 2007; Kirby, 2013; Milburn, 2018). Much of this research focuses on direct relationships between scientists and science fiction film. Burri (2018) suggests that four perspectives characterize these studies: the representation of scientists in film, how scientists interact with films in their work, how science is communicated publicly, and the impact of films on scientific production. Our analysis implicates all four perspectives, expanding on how other actors such as tech journalists mediate between science fiction and technological reality. We thus position both Minority Report and tech publications’ invocations of the film as part of the social construction of technology (Pinch & Bijker, 1984), exploring how tech publications serve as complicated witnesses to the ‘diegetic prototypes’ (Kirby, 2010) modeled in the film.

Diegetic prototypes and the social construction of technology

The ‘social construction of technology’ approach points to the role of different social groups in (1) establishing the interpretive flexibility of facts and artifacts; (2) showing how artifacts become ‘stabilized’, achieving a kind of closure of debate; and (3) situating technological artifacts in relation to ‘the wider sociopolitical milieu’ (Pinch & Bijker, 1984, p. 428). Minority Report, as a cultural touchstone for ‘the future’, offers an interesting look at the social construction of technologies as they move from filmic to real-world development. To imagine and develop several novel technologies, all of which fit together within a larger social and political order, Spielberg hired technical experts in computer science, urban planning, and user interface design to construct the ‘2054 bible,’ which served as a reference point for the film’s worldbuilding. These hired technical consultants had to negotiate with the filmmaking team, whose creative imperatives led them to attach different meanings to the film’s technological innovations. And, as we will see, tech journalists constitute another crucial social group that participates in this meaning-making process that reflects the interpretive flexibility of fiction and fact, technology and politics.

Frank (2003) suggests that science consultants provide two key services to film production: They contribute to the realism of the images shown and bring the symbolic capital of scientific expertise to bear on production and publicity. Kirby (2010) builds on this study to discuss how consultants and filmmakers negotiate between scientific accuracy and expertise on the one hand and creative and commercial imperatives on the other—all with an eye to public reception of the final film. It is in the context of negotiation between consultants, filmmakers, and publics that Kirby develops the concept of diegetic prototypes.

Diegetic prototypes operate via ‘virtual witnessing’, a concept articulated by Shapin and Schaffer (2011) in their study of how, in the 17th century, experimental reports became a literary technology by which readers evaluated and came to accept experimental findings as fact. Kirby (2013) argues that in the present day, this concept can be extended from the elite scientific community to broader public acceptance of science and technology, with television and cinema (including fictional media) serving as mediators: ‘Popular cinema is particularly effective as a virtual witnessing technology because the intent of its construction is to blur the distinction between virtual witnessing and direct witnessing’ (p. 26). Consultants working on films are able to convince audiences to accept novel technologies through this witnessing of diegetic prototypes.

Kirby holds up Minority Report, particularly John Underkoffler’s work as a science consultant on the film’s gestural interface technologies, as a success story for diegetic prototyping. Underkoffler, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab at the time of Minority Report’s production, quickly impressed Spielberg with his prototypes of a futuristic, touch-free computer interface; he was hired as the film’s lead design consultant with the intention of implementing his tech in the film. Kirby (2010) writes, ‘Minority Report was a golden opportunity for John Underkoffler to demonstrate [his gesture interface] to the public, and potential funders. … The important factor was that Underkoffler conscientiously treated this cinematic representation as an actual prototype,’ describing how he developed a ‘self-consistent’ gestural vocabulary for actors to use to make interaction with the interface appear ‘naturalistic’ (p. 50). When Kirby’s article came out in 2010, Underkoffler was an exemplar of the power of diegetic prototyping: a savvy businessman who had gone on to a career as a tech consultant and entrepreneur (Jarreau, 2013; Rothkerch, 2002). Underkoffler’s company, Oblong Industries, was starting to deliver on the promise of a gesture-sensing conference room. Other gestural interfaces, such as the Microsoft Kinect, were also proliferating from the MIT Media Lab (Hopkins, 2008; Saenz, 2010a, 2010b; Ward, 2019). As one journalist wrote, ‘Kinect [was] finally fulfil[ling] its Minority Report destiny’ (Savov, 2010).

However, the 2054 bible team also illustrates the difficulties of diegetic prototyping: For many who consulted on the film, there was no such success. The technology consulting meetings, which featured experts from different fields and political leanings, ‘understandably didn’t reach consensus’, and certain voices won out over others—often based on Spielberg’s own ideas about what would make an appealing film (Clarke, 2002). As Joel Garreau, who attended the ‘think tank summit’, wrote, it was clear that ‘[n]o matter what we really thought, no future would be acceptable if it got in the way of the chase scenes’ (Clarke, 2002). Whereas Spielberg was attentive even to Underkoffler’s smallest suggestions, others felt that their input or fields of expertise were not as valued. Urban planning experts William Mitchell and Peter Calthorpe, for instance, expressed frustration that Spielberg could not be talked out of a ‘50s-style-science-fiction vision of a towered Washington metropolis’—regardless of what they predicted about zoning laws or architecture in future cities (Kirby, 2010, p. 51).

Not all technologies in sci-fi films perform as diegetic prototypes. Kirby (2010) differentiates between prototypes intended by technology consultants to generate real-world funding opportunities and ‘speculative scenarios’, which he describes as ‘highly implausible and impractical situations and technologies that film-makers and science consultants imbue with a sheen of plausibility, so that they look possible within a film’s narrative’ (p. 46). The primary difference is that diegetic prototypes are meant to be realized, while speculative scenarios are viewed as impossible to achieve in real life and are intended only for narrative purposes. This is similar to Milburn’s (2010) analysis of the relationship between scientists and science fiction as ‘fan practice’, which offers a way of thinking about how different types of fictional technologies may inculcate real-world technoscientific imaginaries that influence what gets built. Milburn (2010) suggests that scientists modify and remix science fiction into technoscientific practice in three ways: as 1) ‘blueprint mods’ that seek to ‘transform some discrete element of a science fiction text into technical reality’; 2) ‘supplementary mods’ that substitute a ‘scientifically viable alternative to some otherwise appealing, but technically impossible, science fiction conceit’; or 3) ‘speculative mods’ that contribute to future-oriented discourse about the consequences of technoscientific change (pp. 566–568).

Of course, social groups beyond engineers and scientists are important to the acceptance (or rejection) of diegetic prototypes. It is worth remembering that films like Minority Report are not intended to facilitate the development of new technologies; they are intended to entertain and to encourage moviegoing audiences to engage with the ‘material, moral, and social landscapes’ that they depict (Jasanoff, 2015a, p. 3). The diegetic prototypes created by engineering consultants are not always easy to disentangle from the elements crafted by directors and producers to maximize audience engagement. And when movies receive media coverage, reporters are not always careful to respect the boundaries of what was intended as a diegetic prototype and what was not; as we discuss below, tech outlets have regularly invoked Minority Report to discuss the realization and implications of almost any technology related (however tenuously) to those in the film.

Thus, we consider how news media engage with science fiction as a component of the public witnessing of diegetic prototypes. STS accounts of portrayals of science on TV and in journalism suggest that such media influence public understandings of the certainty of scientific knowledge via processes of witnessing (Collins, 1987). Our analysis of Minority Report suggests that in journalistic coverage, some technological elements of the film are criticized as unrealistic, impractical, or dystopian, whereas others are presented as inevitable, taken-for-granted, benevolent, or desirable in ways that do not always line up with the film’s presentation of these elements. Technologies such as gestural interfaces and targeted advertising are taken for granted, while others, such as the futuristic drug ‘neuroin’ or police jetpacks, are rarely mentioned. Some technologies that are depicted quite cynically in the film (such as targeted advertising) are occasionally framed as desirable in tech news coverage. And, depending on which reporter’s work you read, ‘precrime’ itself may be accepted or problematized.

We return to Kirby’s elucidation of gesture recognition technology in Minority Report in our case studies below, discussing how this and other projects to realize technologies from the film translate from the world of the film to real-world (in)viability and public acceptance or critique. In doing so, we probe the complex interpretive role that tech news publications play in diegetic prototyping. Kirby’s (2010) analysis centers negotiations between science consultants and filmmakers, while Milburn (2010) focuses on how speculative technologies in films are taken up by scientists. Other research has examined the interpretive roles of gamers and fan communities (Cheng, 2012; Milburn, 2018), science writers (Johnston, 2006; Kilgore, 2010; Turney, 1998), educators (York, 2015), and the military (Caldwell & Lenoir, 2018) in mediating science fiction, technoscientific production, and sociotechnical imaginaries. Our analysis focuses on tech journalists, who mediate between scientists, companies, and consumers to explain, hype, or question new technologies. Tech journalists are not the only group to employ the film in public discourse around emerging technologies (for instance, it is also invoked by anti-surveillance activists). However, if films like Minority Report contain diegetic prototypes, then these publications and their readers make up a major group of ‘virtual witnesses’ to be convinced.

In our discussion of the ‘tech beat’ in journalism, we refer mainly to publications whose primary focus is on technology, such as Wired, though more general outlets often have a section for technology reporting. Brennen et al. (2021) argue that the tech beat serves three key functions: reviewing technology products, tracking business investments, and exploring the social and political implications of technology. They contend that such journalism is deeply intertwined with industry in ways that undercut critique. And indeed, the tech beat in journalism has distinctly cyber-libertarian, techno-utopian origins: Turner (2008) describes how Wired, for instance, emerged alongside the early internet in the countercultural and deregulatory ethos of Silicon Valley. Tech journalists also frequently take on popular roles as oracles and future predictors: as Karpf (2018) notes, Wired has been running articles that claim to predict the future of technology for over 25 years (with a mixed record of success). Such publications thus likely play an important role in shaping sociotechnical imaginaries around emerging technologies, driven by their own investment in maintaining social capital as future predictors.

Sociotechnical imaginaries of Silicon Valley

We posit that it is not only technologies, but sociotechnical imaginaries that are socially constructed across film and reality, materially and discursively (re)shaping technologies and politics. This is in keeping with Jasanoff and Kim’s (2009) formulation of the concept, which Jasanoff later defines as ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff, 2015a, p. 4). Jasanoff (2015a) invokes science fiction as bound up with technology: ‘Technological innovation often follows on the heels of science fiction, lagging authorial imagination by decades or longer’ (p. 1). She argues that STS literature needs to show not only how technologies are socially constructed, but how they are situated within ‘integrated material, moral, and social landscapes’, such as those of science fiction (Jasanoff, 2015a, p. 3). She concludes that ‘[s]cience fiction … is a repository of sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff, 2015b, p. 337). This notion of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ is articulated in contrast to Marcus’s (1995) ‘technoscientific imaginaries’, extending the notion beyond the narrow band of scientific practice and practitioners and acknowledging the role that power structures play in determining who decides how technologies and social orders are imagined and realized.

Jasanoff (2015a) locates her understanding of imagination in anthropological theory, from Durkheim and Weber to Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, Taylor’s emphasis on imaginaries and moral practices, and Appadurai’s articulation of imagination as ‘organized work and practices’ (pp. 6–8). This perspective has informed much STS thinking about ‘the future’ as it relates to emerging technologies. Sociotechnical imaginaries are distinct from both expectations and visions of the future, per Borup et al. (2006), who suggest that ‘technological expectations can more specifically be described as real-time representations of future technological situations and capabilities’ (p. 286). Visions overlap with this definition, but are more normative. However, Konrad et al. (2016) suggest that studies of expectations, visions, and imaginaries all emphasize the performativity of representations of the future, showing ‘how future-oriented discourses, practices, and materialities shape the way society makes sense of science and technology, adjust how actors create strategies, and contribute to the shaping of technologies, as well as the development of entire technology fields’ (p. 4). ‘Imaginaries’ have concrete, real world impact on how technologies are understood and implemented.

Understandings of sociotechnical imaginaries are particularly relevant to the relationship between Hollywood film and the Silicon Valley style of tech enthusiasm seen in publications like Wired and TechCrunch. Historians of Silicon Valley and the ‘Californian Ideology’ have written about how West Coast developers of technologies have historically been swayed by science fiction aesthetics and fictional depictions of futuristic technologies, which guide their beliefs about what technologies they should produce, from spaceships to nanobots and artificial intelligence (Barbrook & Cameron, 1995; Helmreich, 2000; McCray, 2012; Turner, 2008). In the case of Minority Report, such imaginaries of futuristic aesthetics shape the construction of technology both within the filmmaking process and in the ‘real world’ beyond it.

As with diegetic prototypes, sociotechnical imaginaries offer a conceptual framing for understanding how technology depicted in fiction plays back and forth with the development and implementation of real technologies, albeit with a different focus; while Kirby’s analysis centers individual objects and engineers, Jasanoff’s analysis emphasizes large technological systems and their social and moral landscapes. But whereas science fiction is seen as a mere ‘repository’ for sociotechnical imaginaries in Jasanoff’s construction, we argue that such imaginaries move dynamically with depictions of technologies across screen and reality. We therefore look at the interplay of diegetic prototypes and sociotechnical imaginaries to understand how technologies were shaped by the technologists involved in the making of Minority Report, as well as the journalists interpreting those technologies as they play out in the real world.

Empirical analysis

With this theoretical grounding, we turn to an analysis of the Minority Report worldbuilding process and subsequent media coverage. We ask: How are diegetic prototypes received by the tech journalists who virtually witness them? How do these journalists participate in the social construction of technologies that appear in films? How is this participation related to the construction and contestation of particular sociotechnical imaginaries? We show how technologies and social worlds prototyped in film retain interpretive flexibility when taken up by audiences, at which point they are interpreted, misinterpreted, and remixed in encounters with reality. Analogizing between a depiction of a technology in a film and an embodied, material technology in the real world involves making choices about how relationships between bodies and technologies are represented. In the process, technologies mutate, crossing the boundaries of organic and computational matter and gaining and losing bodies in cadence with imaginaries of cyborgs and surveillance. We read the discourses in these publications in two ways: first, as evidence of how reporters for these magazines, often themselves part of the tech elite, imagine Minority Report’s technological interventions, and second, as evidence of what the investors, entrepreneurs, and early adopting consumers who read these magazines learn about the sociotechnical imaginary of the film. Our aim in documenting these interpretations and misinterpretations is not to ‘fact check’ or criticize the accuracy of journalistic representations of the film, but rather to ask what deeper assumptions about technology these selective omissions or false equivalences reveal. We argue that these slippages are not random; they reveal patterns of focusing on the digital aspects of the film’s sociotechnical imaginary over those having to do with bodies. By studying these responses to the film, we can learn how diegetic prototyping shakes out beyond the silver screen.

Minority Report is occasionally referenced by more mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, LA Times, Fox, or NPR, in order to contextualize new technologies—almost always in articles about surveillance and predictive policing. However, for tech publications, the film occupies an especially prominent place. Between 2002 and 2020, Wired published over 200 articles comparing new technologies to Minority Report—from algorithms that predict car crashes to a desk with three built-in computer screens (Adams, 2017; Wired Staff, 2019). There is real investment in the idea that the film ‘predicted the future’. While The Guardian, The Atlantic, and other outlets have occasionally published articles along the lines of ‘Six real gadgets Minority Report predicted correctly’, Wired has published one nearly every two years (Arthur, 2010; Carr, 2010; Chen, 2008; Kopfstein, 2012). Early on, Wired—and other publications growing out of the ‘90s cyberculture movements which Turner (2008) and McCray (2012) describe—fully embraced the film’s futurist ambitions. Reporters at these publications interpreted Minority Report as a triumph of Hollywood listening to tech elite culture about what the future will be like (Clarke, 2002; Kennedy, 2002; Stroud, 2002), maintaining the ‘symbolic capital’ of this sort of worldbuilding process (Frank, 2003). For instance, in 2002, Wired called in futurist Peter Schwartz to predict when the tech economy would recover from the dot-com crash, citing the fact that he had consulted on Minority Report as his ‘precog cred’ (Davis, 2002). The awed tone of articles about ‘dreamed-up gizmos … hardening into reality’ (Chen, 2008) often seems to take for granted that emerging technologies are ‘coming true’ exactly as they were dreamed up in the film.

However, drawing comparisons between fictional technologies on the silver screen and emerging technologies in the material world is not always a straightforward process. While some technologies featured in the film have received outsized attention, such as the gesture technology developed by Underkoffler, other technologies ‘taken for granted’ in the film have largely been overlooked: Articles frequently discuss retina scanning, targeted advertisements, precognitive policing, transparent and ubiquitous screens, and self-driving cars, but it’s very rare to see Minority Report referenced in conjunction with vomit-inducing police batons, prisoners in medically-induced comas, futuristic opiate stand-ins for crack cocaine, extraordinarily potent antibiotics, or police jetpacks, though these technologies also play important roles in the film.

A variety of factors may determine which technologies get picked up by tech journalists. Some technologies are more thoroughly developed in the film’s production and foregrounded in the plot. Another factor is the relationships amongst news publications, film studios, research institutes, and tech companies; journalists are more likely to write about tech featured in film, company, or research press releases. Underkoffler’s gesture interfaces, for example, might play an outsized role in tech journalism about Minority Report because Underkoffler himself actively promoted it to journalists, and Wired’s journalists were directly connected to him through the MIT Media Lab and other organizations. Wired articles intended to review consumer electronics (for instance, a gesture interface) also cover their subjects differently than articles intended to explore the sociopolitical implications of a system (for instance, predictive policing technology) (Brennen et al., 2021). And of course, how Wired’s journalists, editors, and production staff personally interpret the film plays a role. Tech journalists are one of a number of communities that participate in the interpretation of a film’s sociotechnical imaginary; while they should not be considered in a vacuum or as monolithic, their interpretations are highly visible and influential to the social construction of technologies.

Particularly telling about tech journalists’ active role in translating and remixing films, is that where some technologies are elided, others are inserted: Minority Report gets referenced in articles discussing technologies for predicting intelligence or car crashes, though these technologies never appear in the film (Leu, 2015; Marshall, 2016). In one instance, a reporter for Wired claimed that ‘[t]he technology that recognizes Cruise in the GAP store is informed by a chip embedded inside him … today no such chip is needed’—despite the fact that Cruise’s character is actually identified by a retina scan, not a chip (Smith & Browne, 2019). Such misremembering suggests that Minority Report’s effects on the social construction of technology happen through a more complex mechanism than viewers learning to desire a technology as it is depicted in the movies; rather, journalists may take up the sociotechnical imaginary of a film to interpret other technologies not featured on screen.

To explore the multitude of forces shaping the social construction of diegetic prototypes, we focus on three technologies depicted in Minority Report—gesture sensing technology, targeted advertising billboards, and predictive policing technology—as discussed in Wired from 2002 to 2020. These cases are drawn from a content analysis of Wired articles containing or tagged with the words ‘Minority Report’ (located via the publication’s online search function). We supplement this with analysis of how the film is invoked in other tech publications, including The Verge, TechCrunch, and the MIT Technology Review.

Gesturing towards ‘the Minority Report interface’

Underkoffler’s vision for gesture-capturing computer interfaces is the technology most commonly featured in ‘What Minority Report got right’ articles. Many of these tell approximately the same story that Kirby (2010) does: Underkoffler is a success story, a designer who prototyped the technology in the film and then brought it to life. The Microsoft Kinect, developed by the MIT Media Lab—where Underkoffler had once worked—as well as technologies developed by Leap Motion and Obscura, are frequently referenced as ‘having fulfilled [their] Minority Report destiny’ (Perenson, 2007; Savov, 2010; Sutter, 2011; Vanhemert, 2015). Coverage of these interfaces does not merely claim that this technology is like Minority Report, but often, that it literally is the technology from the film: ‘a Minority Report interface’ (Kurtzweil, 2008; Saenz, 2010a; Savov, 2010). Tech developers also often employ this comparison in order to sell their technology: ‘“It will feel like Minority Report,” promises Pete Thompson, general manager of Microsoft’s Surface computing group, “Very futuristic—but it will be here this year”’ (Perenson, 2007). Perhaps so much tech reporting focuses on Minority Report and the gesture interface because companies deliberately invoke the film in press releases to sell the technology. Minority Report has, as Kirby (2010) claims, become a core part of how technologists imagine and desire screen technologies, validating a narrative that Underkoffler’s on-screen vision really changed the direction of screen technology development.

However, when we dig into the reality of the technologies discussed in these articles, we find that the material implementation and social meaning of these technologies is very different from how they appear in Minority Report. Underkoffler explicitly imagined gesture tech as a tool for the workplace of the future, as used by film protagonist John Anderton in the Precrime unit. He never gave up on this vision; his current company, Oblong Industries, aims to design ‘the future of conference room technology’ (Underkoffler, 2010). However, the most successful implementations of gesture tech currently on the market are not for work, but recreation—as video gaming systems. Underkoffler’s colleagues at the Media Lab, working on game design for the Xbox, first successfully implemented gesture recognition in the Microsoft Kinect, one of the first technologies to be hailed as a ‘Minority Report interface’ (Saenz, 2010a, 2010b).

Although Wired journalists have compared everything from motion comics to decorative casino tabletop screens to Minority Report’s gesture tech, the few implementations for offices that they review don’t receive high marks (Friess, 2003; Kohler, 2016). For starters, it has turned out much easier to develop technology that detects full-body motion than fine motor gestures, making early gesture tech like the Kinect more appropriate for full-body interactive media like dancing games, not the fine manipulation of documents and files. But even when the Leap Motion system overcame this hurdle, creating an interface that could identify individual fingers, one disappointed reviewer from Wired still complained, ‘[i]t may look cool, sure, but no one is going to want to wave their hands around at work all day’ (Vanhemert, 2015). Minority Report’s frictionless future, built on the visions of UI designers but not ergonomics experts or 9-to-5 office workers, turned out to be impractical when tested against the matter of the human body.

While many of the disappointed reports from Wired still cling to the romance of the film’s futurism—‘[t]he whole scene has a certain Minority Report flair, which is equal parts irresistible and impractical’ (Vanhemert, 2015)—it is clear that even when real-world technologies resembling the technologies in Minority Report have been developed, they have not been universally adopted as the film predicted. Rather than transforming office work, gesture tech’s actual implementations—Microsoft Kinect and Leap Motion— have led to a world with high-tech video games, but the same low-tech conference rooms.

Here we see a limit to the power of diegetic prototyping: While a prototype in a film might be enough to convince investors and audiences of a future technology’s ‘benevolence,’ its real-world implementation and social role will be constrained by material realities not encountered in the film. Minority Report’s cyborg visions of frictionless integration with screens—what Nakamura (2007) calls the ‘white interface style’—run aground on the embodied demands of day-to-day workplace life.

Eliding the realities of the human body is not unique to tech journalism’s discussion of gesture interfaces. Hayles (1999) writes: ‘When information loses its body, equating humans and computers is especially easy, for the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature’ (p. 2). We might, for instance, think about the computational surveillance systems and scheduling algorithms that structure Amazon warehouse workers’ time too rigidly for basic human necessities like rest and bathroom breaks (De Lara, 2018; Gutelius & Pinto, 2023). Wired’s focus on technologies like gestural interfaces promises users that they will be the ‘masters’ of futuristic systems, empowered by rather than subject to them. Meanwhile, many real-world technologies used in the workplace, such as Amazon’s logistics systems, subject workers to computational control. Both derive from an idealized futuristic sociotechnical imaginary in which the working body does not tire—where the human interfaces seamlessly with computers without the burdens of the body. Tech journalists’ coverage of Minority Report’s gesture interface points vividly to how film and tech journalism can encourage hype and development of technologies in a techno-utopian fantasy of labor and control that at best is discarded when refused by actual bodies’ needs—and at worst, masks a reality that forcibly subjects bodies to capitalist imperatives.

Clicks and eyeballs: Tracking ads in Minority Report

Reporters for tech news outlets often compare targeted advertising technology to Minority Report in situations where the social meaning of advertising is similar, but the material implementation of the technology differs. When the film was released, targeted advertising had just started to emerge on the internet. Amazon, for instance, had recently implemented some of the first product recommendation algorithms. Some futurists dreamt that the same technology would become available in physical space as well (Stroud, 2002). Minority Report’s 2054 bible team predicted that this technology would operate via biometric surveillance, with holographic billboards that scan a passerby’s retina and display personalized ads to them based on their identity and emotional state: ‘John Anderton, you look like you could use a Guinness!’

In a fictional presaging of Silicon Valley’s growing dependence on digital advertising business models, all of the ads in Minority Report were paid product placements, designed by advertising firm 3 Ring Circus on behalf of Lexus, Nokia, and other companies that altogether paid $25 million dollars to showcase imagined future products (Grossberg, 2002; Grover, 2002; Stroud, 2002; Walker, 2002). While the ad targeting depicted in the film was not universally regarded as benevolent by viewers (it’s ‘magnificently creepy’, wrote one New York Times reporter), many advertising consultants on the film remained convinced that the technology was desirable, even defending it in Wired (Mitchell, 2002). Since the release of the film, Wired and other tech outlets have chronicled a number of attempts (by Microsoft Kinect, Quividi, Mitsubishi, NewAer, and others) to deliver this prototype as a product.

Notably, however, of all the targeted advertising products described by tech journalists as ‘Minority Report-like’, none rely on retina scanning to biometrically identify individuals as the billboards in Minority Report do. Shortly after the film was released, in an article describing billboards that track and identify users based on their cell phone signals, a reporter for Wired wrote that ‘the scene in Steven Spielberg’s futuristic Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise’s character is besieged by video advertising targeted directly at him as he walks down the street, is, even today, more than pure science fiction’ (Terdiman, 2003). Similarly, an article from TechCrunch referenced a scene from Minority Report in which Anderton is greeted by a personalized holographic assistant at a futuristic GAP store to explain another phone-based technology (Butcher, 2017). Wired has run articles invoking Minority Report to explain such varied advertising technologies as location-based push notifications from FourSquare, wearable RFID tags, and Smart Cities tracking a user’s ID number through an app on their phone (Batista, 2003; Marshall, 2017; Tate, 2013). For these publications, retina scanning is not necessary for the comparison, despite being a major plot device in the film.

These comparisons make some sense if we center the visual similarity of the scenes. One tech reporter calls out this basis for comparison explicitly: ‘That vision was dreamt up by MIT consultants for the film many years ago, and as of today it would be entirely possible to reproduce, given we all now walk around with smartphones’ (Butcher, 2017). However, in equating retina scanning with RFID or smartphone tracking, the material and organic differences between these technologies are elided. Minority Report would have been a very different film if, for instance, Cruise’s character could have swapped out his smartphone rather than his eyeballs to evade capture. In the film’s world, only the eyeless, like Anderton’s drug dealer, are excluded from corporate and state surveillance. In Wired articles, meanwhile, a strange form of transubstantiation substitutes smartphones for eyeballs—a cyborg logic that treats them as interchangeably equated with identity. In Haraway’s (1990a) definition, a ‘cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (p. 149). Given the prevalence of boundary-crossing between organism and machine (Haraway, 1990a), we should perhaps be unsurprised by the reporter who invented Cruise’s implanted chip (Smith & Browne, 2019).

Eliding discussion of biometrics also means that tech journalism often glosses over the film’s engagement with race. For instance, in a scene set in a GAP store, a fugitive Anderton is taken aback when he is addressed as ‘Mr. Yamamoto’, a reminder that his replacement eyes had a previous owner with a racialized body. This is a vivid reminder of embodiment that wouldn’t be experienced with real-world digital technologies until the advent of face recognition. Rather than focusing on the critique of biometric surveillance in the film, invocations of Minority Report in Wired tend to emphasize the desirability or ‘creepiness’ of targeted ads in physical space.

Advertising surveillance based on smartphones or chips has different political implications than surveillance based on bodies—but to tech journalists drawing connections to Minority Report, these distinctions are not self-evident. For instance, Butcher’s (2017) phrasing that ‘we all’ own smartphones runs aground on the inequalities in access to smartphone technology among the American public, which for better or worse render some more visible to corporate and state surveillance than others. Equating identity recognition based on the possession of consumer technologies to biometric identity recognition shifts the basis of identity in ways that erase the embodied experiences of, for instance, Black people, who are more frequently misrecognized by facial recognition systems (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018)—even as they are disproportionately the target of policing. In critiquing the general ‘creepiness’ of such systems, what is missed is how particular groups differentially experience public and private surveillance.

Cyborg substitutions and Minority Report’s Precrime

In the last case we examine, predictive policing, we see a similar cyborg equivalence between biology and computation, as reporters conflate precogs and predictive algorithms, future prediction and mind reading. In this case, the technology depicted in the film was not intended as a diegetic prototype; rather, it was meant to provoke critique of surveillance and explore the philosophical implications of a carceral system that denies free will. As such, it can be thought of as a ‘speculative scenario’ (Kirby, 2010) or ‘speculative mod’ (Milburn, 2010). As one of the most ‘unrealistic’ parts of the film—‘more fantasy than sci-fi’—Minority Report’s technology for predictive policing is actually a hybrid organic and computational system: three mutant children of drug addicts who are capable of predicting the future, hooked up to a device that can record their visions (Jarreau, 2013; Warren, 2010). This detail, a holdover from Dick’s short story, was one of the aspects of the film in which science consultants were least involved. The design team did not intend to establish the ‘benevolence’ or ‘viability’ of this technology in the same way that consultants working on gesture tech or targeted ads attempted to (Kirby, 2010). Nonetheless, the precogs still feature in articles as a comparison for predictive policing technologies—and, occasionally, to describe other predictive technologies.

Wired has invoked Minority Report’s precogs to discuss predictive policing (Barber, 2010; Crawford, 2015; Ito, 2018), as well as a huge variety of algorithmic systems that purport to predict everything from recidivism rates to traffic accidents (Ito, 2018; Marshall, 2016, 2017). It has even invoked precogs to describe algorithms that allow self-driving cars to navigate safely; self-driving cars do appear in Minority Report—but as a completely separate technology from the precogs (Adams, 2017). Meanwhile, a piece from MIT Technology Review describes a phrenological algorithm that ‘identifies’ individuals as criminals based on their facial structure as a ‘Minority Report scenario’ (Emerging Technology from the arXiv, 2016). Wired articles also draw comparisons between the film and computer systems that analyse neurological behavior in order to gain information about humans—sometimes even information that isn’t useful in predicting their actions. For instance, one article invoking Minority Report describes a scientist who claims to be able to detect intelligence from fMRI scans (Leu, 2015). Some articles seem to associate the film’s precogs with being able not only to predict the future but also to read minds (Molteni, 2019)—a slip that characters in the film make as well. Whereas precognitive policing may not be a diegetic prototype in Kirby’s (2010) sense, news publications are nonetheless interested in employing it in the social construction of real-world technologies.

Comparisons to Minority Report are frequently used to critique predictive policing. Such comparisons, which appear not only in tech news, but also in mainstream publications, are often intended to draw out concerns about privacy, surveillance, and fairness: ‘The new form of policing feels eerily reminiscent of … Minority Report’ (Hughes, 2020). Activists have also taken up the rhetoric of the film to frame critiques of predictive policing technology: ‘We are taking one step closer to the dystopian world of Minority Report without any discussion of the serious privacy concerns that are implicated’, writes one ACLU blogger in 2016 to describe New York’s predictive policing system (McCormack, 2016). The 2017 documentary Pre-Crime uses Minority Report as its entire framing for critiquing predictive policing (Wray, 2018).

Meanwhile, rather than aligning themselves with the film and its technologies, the creators of predictive policing algorithms try to distance themselves from Minority Report in seeking to convince the public that the technology is benevolent. ‘The 2002 movie Minority Report may create the impression that ‘‘predictive’’ analytics will be used to target individuals inappropriately for future crimes … The analytic methods used in the predictive policing model do not identify specific individuals’, one article on algorithmic tools for Police Chief Magazine attempts to clarify (Beck & McCue, 2009). The PredPol website, meanwhile, has an entire section titled ‘Why PredPol is not like Minority Report’ (Rey, 2020). Discussing gesture interfaces, Minority Report is a high-tech, screen-filled, frictionless future to aspire towards. Discussing predictive policing, it’s a surveillance dystopia to be avoided.

Despite the negative valence, articles invoking precogs still often draw equivalences between biology and computers in a manner similar to Wired’s coverage of targeted billboard advertising. Jarreau (2013) spells out this analogy:

Although the idea of using visions seen by the children of drug-abusers, the ‘precogs’, is certainly more fantasy than science, using data mining and crime analytics to build patterns and predict future events hits closer to home. … What if Big Data took the role of the ‘Precogs’ in Minority Report …?

In many journalistic comparisons, the conversion of precogs into data is assumed. For instance, in 2014, Kevin Kelly—who worked as a science consultant for Minority Report and was a founding editor of Wired—compared the internet ‘tracking machine’ to the film’s precogs (Kelly, 2014). In the film, Precrime and computer-mediated surveillance (through retina scanning) are distinct technologies—but Kelly has merged them into a computer system that surveils the populace and, through data it collects, predicts their behavior. Other articles make weak connections with phrases such as ‘it’s a little Minority Report-y’ (Marshall, 2016), or ‘[police departments] are looking more and more like the precrime unit in Minority Report,’ (Ward, 2019). Such framings point to a collective amnesia about the organic nature of the precogs, such that the phrase ‘Minority Report’ or ‘precog’ becomes equated with any computational predictive system. The same cyborg logic that transforms Tom Cruise’s eyes into a smartphone transforms the precogs into algorithms: information losing its body (Haraway, 1990a; Hayles, 1999).

This conflation might be partially provoked by the film’s depiction of the precogs. Agatha and the other precogs are presented as uncanny, android-like beings who exist in a perpetually technological environment, hooked up to EEG machines and electronic screens that continuously read their thoughts and output them to computers (hence invocations of the film in articles about brain scans) (Leu, 2015; Molteni, 2019). Minority Report’s cinematic vocabulary sorts these humans as technological objects, and they are frequently treated as such by characters in the film until Agatha challenges this dehumanization. The conflation is particularly striking because the boundary between nature and technology is a visual theme of the film, as visible in the stark contrast between Precrime founder Lamar Burgess’s harsh blue-and-chrome ‘masculine’ computational sphere and precog creator Dr. Iris Hineman’s green-and-brown ‘feminine’ natural world—the meeting of which makes them the ‘parents’ of Precrime. At the end of the film, Agatha and the other precogs are released to live in a cabin in an idyllic natural setting, no longer cyborg, but entirely human. That the precogs are humans, not algorithms, is crucial to how the predictive data they output is interpreted: Agatha’s subjectivity as a woman, trauma survivor, and daughter of a murdered woman is what ultimately allows her to expose errors that a computer would pass over. However, in the collective memory of Minority Report in tech news publications, the humanity of the precogs is forgotten; the equivalence between humans acting as cyborg tech and computers predicting human behavior is taken for granted.

Films like Minority Report, and their uptake in popular culture, often focus on gadgetry, rather than the politics of race, as the locus of surveillance. Surveillance studies research links racism and technology in the carceral system (Browne, 2015) in ways useful for considering the racialized (dis)embodiment of technologies constructed across the imaginaries of the film and reality. Browne (2015) argues that surveillance should be seen as ongoing rather than ‘inaugurated by new technologies’, factoring in ‘how racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order’ (pp. 8–9). New technologies that reinforce systemic racism in policing have roots in a long history of antiblack surveillance, traceable from the monitoring and policing of enslaved people onward.

While Minority Report shies away from explicit discussion of racism, the film can be read through the lens of ‘racializing surveillance’, as Browne (2015, p. 16) calls it. Nama (2008) employs such a reading, writing, ‘[a]dmittedly, on a grand scale, Minority Report is a morality tale that flirts with existential issues of free will, fate, and criminal intent. Yet, allegorically, it is also a part of a specific discourse surrounding race’ (p. 142). He points to the statistically disproportionate incarceration of Black people by law enforcement as one point of support for this reading; another comes from the parallels between the backstory of Minority Report’s oracular precogs—as children of addicts of the fictional drug neuroin—and the real-world crack cocaine epidemic (Nama, 2008, pp. 142–143). Scannell (2019) similarly argues that Minority Report is intrinsically a story of carceral technologies under racial capitalism, observing that in the original story, ‘[t]he cyborg labor of the enslaved, justified by eugenicist ableism, is taken for granted and goes unquestioned,’ whereas in Spielberg’s rendition, precrime is treated as an aberration rather than the product of American racial capitalism working as designed (p. 109). He further notes that projecting dystopian policing into a fictional future erases racial disparities in the present. Scannell connects the sociotechnical imaginary of cyborgs and surveillance underlying precrime in the film to the logics invoked in defense of real predictive policing software—even as defenders of that technology seek to distance their work from Minority Report.

The way that tech journalists use Minority Report to frame conversations about emerging surveillance and carceral technologies often elides the racialized inequalities that these systems perpetuate. As Nama (2008) and Scannell (2019) argue, the film emphasizes universalizing issues of free will and privacy, rather than the racist bias of policing and its algorithmic implementations, despite their implication in the narrative. It tells the story of a White man on the run from a surveillance system that has unfairly accused him of a crime. In this, Minority Report portrays surveillance as a system ‘inaugurated by new technologies’, rather than as an ongoing system driven by the long history of racist attempts to exert government control over Black bodies (Browne, 2015, p. 8). It is perhaps not unrelated to this framing in the film that tech news articles invoking Minority Report tend to frame policing debates in the ‘colorblind’ terms of free will and privacy—the cyber-libertarian terms on which Silicon Valley was founded—rather than in terms of algorithmic racial bias. (There are, in fact, a number of articles in Wired that criticize racial bias in predictive policing algorithms, but they tend not to be the same articles that reference Minority Report.) Claiming that the sociotechnical imaginary of Minority Report’s predictive policing dystopia ‘came true’ becomes a framing device, shaping the debate around predictive policing in a deracialized way. In the film and in Wired’s coverage of precrime, particular relations of bodies to surveillance are emphasized or elided, choices which have real political effects in how real-world surveillance technologies are discussed.

Nakamura (2007) reads Minority Report as implicating a critique of Whiteness—one that nonetheless elides racial realities such as the disproportionate racial profiling of Black Americans, and that has largely gone unremarked in the film’s reception. Examining Anderton’s interactions with technology, she argues that the film racializes its protagonist in subjecting him to the very systems of which he was once the master: the (White) cyborgian operator of the transparent gestural interface (reinforced by a Black character, Jad, in a supporting role) who then becomes the target of Precrime, racialized as Japanese (with historical links to the World War II internment of Japanese Americans) in the moment his eyes are swapped for Yamamoto’s. She writes, ‘[t]he narrative of inadvertent cross-racial passing that is so much a part of Minority Report is enabled by the replacement of the physical body by the databody as a subject (and product) of surveillance’ (Nakamura, 2007, p. 119). As seen across our case studies, Wired’s deployment of the film tends to avoid such critique, focusing on abstract questions of free will or the ‘creepiness’ or effectiveness of certain technologies that comport with a Silicon Valley sociotechnical imaginary, and steering away from discussions of racializing surveillance that might complicate its disembodied politics.

Conclusion

Our analysis of how Minority Report’s technologies are invoked in tech news discourse shows how technologies come to be socially constructed across film and reality. In examining how one particular group—tech journalists—react to technologies ‘prototyped’ on screen, we find that the technologies that viewers remember bear complex relationships to what filmmakers and technology consultants intended to portray. Whenever a tech news site reports that Minority Report is ‘coming true’, choices are made about how to define the boundaries of the technologies depicted. In interpreting, misinterpreting, and remixing these technologies, reporters accept and reject certain parts of the prototypes shown on screen: ‘No, our government hasn’t yet imprisoned a group of nude psychics to combat crime … but neuroscientists are devising a method to predict mistakes’ (Chen, 2008). Reporters highlight certain aspects of the technological object as benevolent, desirable, unsettling, malicious, or otherwise worthy of consideration, and entirely dismiss others. In many articles comparing real-world tech to Minority Report, bodies are erased or replaced by computers—effectively suggesting that the embodied materiality of these technologies does not matter to how the prototyped concept is taken up in tech journalism.

These elisions, interestingly, parallel elisions that took place in the film’s worldbuilding process. One member of the 2054 bible team, Garreau (2002), railed at a number of inaccuracies in the film: What was a fully automated Lexus factory doing in the middle of a major metropolitan area? And how had Spielberg cast so few Black actors in a film set in a city that was almost 50% African-American? Perhaps we should not be surprised that the tech beat, which valorized this worldbuilding process, was similarly predisposed to see gadgets as central to claims that Minority Report ‘came true’—while allowing the social context of the technologies to slip.

In this, the social construction of technologies across film and reality intersects with the construction of sociotechnical imaginaries. Audiences viewing films do not understand them as the work of individual technology consultants creating discrete technologies, but as gestalts packaging an entire social, political, and technological future. Over time, technologies bleed together in audiences’ imaginations: Tech journalists conflate precogs with computers and eyeballs with smartphones. Minority Report’s screens bleed beyond the film’s bounds, as Wired’s reporters extend its vision of a frictionless computational world. One Wired article even references the film in relation to a high-tech winery’s ‘Fermentation Intelligence Logic Control System, a Minority Report-style setup that tracks the vino at a molecular level’, and includes ‘a curved display of charts and graphs showing an ancient process in far-out detail. A geotagging system means that the tanks even “know” exactly which person is standing in front of which tank’ (Zimberoff, 2016). None of these technologies actually appear in Minority Report, but the comparison is nonetheless legible because the winery evokes the same futuristic imaginary of screens, surveillance, prediction, and absolute control.

As Jasanoff (2015a) reminds us, sociotechnical imaginaries are not just the work of one ‘vanguard vision’ (Hilgartner, 2015, cited in Jasanoff, 2015a, p. 4), but are collectively held and stabilized—including the sociotechnical imaginaries projected by films. Interpreting such filmic sociotechnical imaginaries is a social process. Slippages and reshapings might stem from preexisting notions of futurity and technology: Is Wired’s collective amnesia about bodies in Minority Report the natural consequence of a culture that has already embraced cyborg logic to disregard embodiment and favor immateriality (Haraway, 1990a; Hayles, 1999)? In our analysis, we find that through these processes of interpretation, bodies interface with technology, or disappear altogether. Feminist STS literature on cyborgs and critical surveillance studies offer ways to interpret how the sociotechnical imaginary of the film encodes different relationships of bodies to technologies than journalistic interpretations of those technologies.

The original sociopolitical context of Minority Report—that of Dick’s short story—is the aftermath of World War II; the story responded to the pressing social and political questions of that time regarding authoritarianism and control. The 2002 film, released during the national security furor following 9/11, transposes Dick’s premise to a time when these themes held renewed significance for Americans. As Nama (2008) observes: ‘Clearly, the idea of a special law enforcement unit designed to stop murder before it happens taps into the collective American desire for a sense of security and protection’ (p. 142). This desire, alongside the commercial logic of capitalism, informs the creation of many of the technologies in the film and the real-world products to which they are connected. These logics of control inflect how technologies are depicted as interfacing with bodies in the film.

Questions of the presence and absence of race and embodiment emerge throughout our analysis of how the film is taken up in Wired, connecting tech journalism’s invocations of Minority Report to a Silicon Valley sociotechnical imaginary of a deracialized and disembodied informational future. Fighting to prove the ‘benevolence’ of a diegetic prototype is also a process of fighting for the acceptance of a particular sociotechnical imaginary in which that prototype plays a benevolent role. When tech news reporters report that ‘Minority Report Predicted Our Future,’ they assume a particular vision of the future—the Silicon Valley sociotechnical imaginary—and defend the symbolic capital of the worldbuilding process which produced the film as an appropriate method for producing knowledge about that future. In so doing, they uphold the ‘precog cred’ of MIT Media Lab design consultants and Silicon Valley technologists, sci-fi futurism, and the worldbuilding process, even when that involves drawing strained equivalences between some technologies and eliding others.

The sociotechnical imaginary evinced in Wired’s interpretations of Minority Report might thus be read as an intensification and remixing of the imaginary undergirding the film’s worldbuilding process. The imaginary that emerges from this blurring of film into reality by tech journalists is one in which particular relations of bodies to corporate and statist surveillance technologies are assumed and either valorized (targeted advertising) or contested (predictive policing). Wired’s historical entanglement with Silicon Valley is evident in its invocations of Minority Report, as it co-constructs a sociotechnical imaginary of frictionless, transparent gadgetry, corporate surveillance, and overreach by the state. In tech journalists’ mobilization of the film, the body progressively disappears, supplanted by data and algorithms, and the racialized dynamics of carceral computation — implicated but not made explicit in the film — are subsumed to universalizing questions about free will and privacy.

Beyond what this analysis reveals about Minority Report as a cultural touchstone, we more generally propose that to understand the social construction of technologies which appear in science fiction films, we need to examine not only negotiations between filmmakers and technologists, but also how social groups like journalists that mediate between technologies and publics have a vested interest in the validity of certain visions of the future. Their interpretations have very material stakes—for the workplace, for surveillance-based advertising, for racist policing systems—that can be seen when we examine the interfaces of bodies and technologies. The sociotechnical imaginaries that these groups co-construct around a film impact how the technologies prototyped in the film are imagined, desired, realized, and received. Drawing analogies between a diegetic prototype and a real-world technology—that is, claiming that a film ‘predicted the future’—is a material and discursive process that validates certain futures over others. When reporters invoke a film to evaluate whether it ‘predicted the future’, they are not merely noting a similarity to the real world: They are making a case that our current world, for better or worse, is approaching a particular sociotechnical imaginary evoked by the film, and implying that this should inflect our real-world relationship with technology. As the case of Minority Report demonstrates, to claim foresight about technology on the basis of film is to stake a political claim about the real world we are building and the bodies that inhabit it.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This project emerged out of a series of generative conversations within the Media As Sociotechnical Systems collective at the University of Southern California. We would also like to thank Jennifer Petersen and Andrew Lakoff for their feedback and encouragement on an early draft of this paper. Special thanks as well to the three anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insights and engagement with our analysis.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mehitabel Glenhaber

Author biographies

Mehitabel Glenhaber is an artist and independent researcher. They hold a Master’s Degree in Communication from USC Annenberg. Much of their work and art focuses on depictions of novel technologies in science fiction media, exploring the role that film and other popular entertainment mediums play in the social construction of technologies.

Hamsini Sridharan is a doctoral candidate at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She studies historical and contemporary entanglements of digital technologies with environmental imaginaries and speculative futures, asking how such entanglements shape the critique, contestation, and governance of technology.

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