Notes for season 2 episode 14, “One Percent“.
The title “One Percent”, alluding the 2011 Occupy slogan “We are the 99%”, because it features a billionaire. Uh, ignoring the fact that every episode features a billionaire? And that statistically unlikely number of the “persons of interest” are extremely wealthy Manhattenites. A significant investment of resources into someone’s highly-specific altruism, pretty far from Bentham-ish utilitarianism. Advertising-funded media will often drift towards depicting “aspirational” living, once there any criticism of the rich is going to feel insincere.
01:58 friendczar.com in the Warners domain pool. The name is clearly a riff on “Friendster”, a 2000’s social network site that was overtaken by MySpace and Facebook years before this episode. Friendster was granted a number of patents covering social networking (which were later transferred to Facebook).
02:23 “Pierce changes phones twice a day to avoid corporate espionage.” The impracticality of which means he would have all his phone contents synced to the cloud anyway?
05:44 connectroid.com added to the pool
09:30 Apparently, after a disaster that involved a helicopter falling from the PanAm building in 1977, there were restrictions put in place on Manhattan helipad locations. Lots of pages mention this, but they don’t name or link to the law they’re referring to.
11:30 Pierce’s suit has been dry cleaned using the CO2 process. The “liquid CO2” process is usually advertised, at least in London, as “non-toxic dry cleaning”.
12:30 Oh yeah, tech companies wiping out smaller competition with bogus patent troll lawsuits. It’s the sort of thing that seems like it shouldn’t be allowed, but is in fact one of the engines that created “Big Tech”.
13:10 alchementary.com in the Warner domain pool. Small company being purchased and then left to wither, another classic Big Tech move.
14:22 “When you build a viable web server using the L.A.M.P. stack, Sinclair, you’re free to run the company.” This does feel like a nod to Zuckerburg building the first iteration of The Facebook. Also, they’re at a valet parking stand that’s just on a public street? Is that a thing?
15:09 Reese has to stay within 10 metres of the hacked McLaren in order to override its ECU? I have definitely played this videogame mission. The malware is found in the file “/vehicle/sensor/74234.vcf” suggesting it was attached to an electronic business card?
18:03 In 2009 Finch apparently had utilitarian impulses “We could invest in clean water initiatives, sustainable farming.” By 2013 he doesn’t want to cure cancer, he wants to turn people into dinosaurs.
21:14 I don’t know what videogame Pierce is playing. I don’t think its Madden, which had a monopoly on American Football games around 2012. Did they commission 3 seconds of fake videogame cgi?
24:00 “…a kid whose parents went bankrupt.” Pierce is at least 27 in Jan 2013, and probably older (actor Jimmi Simpson was 37). The availability of high-resolution digital cameras in phones began around 2003-2005. If we assume the same investment timeline as Facebook, Pierce may have already have been an independently rich twenty-something when his father’s camera business failed.
31:35 From a post-2016 perspective, social network owners partying in St Petersburg is probably a bad look.
43:00 Something symbolic about Finch stomping on a Patek Philippe to check for a GPS chip – something that would, in a few years, be a mainstream watch inclusion.