Actualités

The Internet has doomed us to bizarre times. Lol cats, Reddit iAMAs and Re-pins, the strangeness never stops and its never stops evolving. And weirdest of all, there’s going to be a time when we cease to notice this as novel. The thirty-somethings who grew up during this cultural shift will become out-dated sixty-somethings. Internet oddity will become as customary a part of life.

That’s the world Tom Hanks’ Electric City lives in – a cosmos where information soaks through every function of existence, and where much of that information is bizarre. Electric City is also a post-modern realm, as much a product of stylized gumshoe fiction as of cyberpunk. Imagine a fedora-wearing fusion of Dashiell Hammett and William Gibson, and you’re on the right monorail track.

And for me, Electric City is an underscoring of how dominant the Web is – how, in less than two decades, it...