Technology and Politics in the BLADE RUNNER Dystopia

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Kerman, Judith. "Technology and Politics in the Blade Runner Dystopia." In Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER and Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?. Judith Kerman, ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997, 2004: pp. 16-24.[1][2][3]

See for such devices as the Esper machine[4] and for wider analysis of technology and politics in BLADE RUNNER and our more immediate world.

"Although some technologies have been widely disseminated in the film's society which are very expensive today,such as Chew's lab and the electronmicroscope used by a Cambodian woman in a street market stall, control of such detail-oriented technologies evidently does not carry with it wide-ranging political power like that implicit in the Esper machine. This suggests severe limits to populist hopes that falling prices of high technology necessarily lead to "trickling-down" of power" (Retrofitting p. 21).


See also Vernon Shetley and Alissa Ferguson's "Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in BLADE RUNNER".


RDE, completing, 20June19