I didn’t run out of things to watch on Netflix. No one can.
But for some reason I decided to watch AMC’s “Rubicon” again. If you haven’t seen it, this one I recommend. It is all I remembered it was. A psychological thriller, filled with riddles, where the only image of blood is a red stain on a bathrobe collected as evidence, and still manages to keep you at the edge of the seat.
It goes deep into Intelligence community conspiracies. But that’s not what I wanted to write about here.
I spend a lot of cycles thinking about change, innovation, and how that affects us as humans. Rubicon was released in 2010, and in some scenes there are pictures of the first Blackberry-carrying president of the United States, and there is talk about Predator drones, and Hellfire missiles.
But as advanced and contemporary these things may happen to sound, re-watching this show, felt to me almost like a WWII epoch show. The show starts pretty much on the premise of crossword puzzles. Yep, crossword puzzles, in printed newspapers! There are desk phones ringing in offices, with ring-ring sounds, not even the recognizable Cisco Call Manager ringtones from 24. There are paper dossiers passed around in meetings, actual printed photographs shuffled. Nobody texts each other, there is not a single Zoom call (there is ONE instance of “Cisco Tele Presence” product placement).
It is amazing to see so much change in just about a decade.
Sometimes, we don’t realize how far have we come, unless we look back at where we have been.