Oliver Stone: 'Pokemon Go' Leading Us Toward 'Totalitarianism'

Josh Luckenbaugh | July 22, 2016
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During a panel discussion of his new movie "Snowden" at San Diego Comic-Con Thursday, Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone expressed a deep mistrust of the new smartphone app "Pokemon Go," which he claimed was sending society in the direction of "totalitarianism."

"Snowden," a biopic of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of course, deals with questions of government surveillance. And when an audience member asked the panel about the surveillance nature of "Pokemon Go," Stone delivered a less than heartwarming answer:

It’s a new level of invasion. Once the government had been hounded by Snowden, of course the corporations went into encryption, because they had to for survival, right? But the search for profits is enormous here. Enormous. Nobody has ever seen, in the history of the world, something like Google, ever. It’s the biggest, new fastest-growing business ever, and they have invested huge amounts of money into what surveillance is, which is data-mining.

They’re data-mining every single person in this room for information as to what you’re buying, what you like, and above all, your behavior. "Pokemon Go" kicks into that. But this is everywhere. It’s what some people call surveillance capitalism. It’s the newest stage. It’s not for profit in the beginning, but it becomes for profit in the end.

Stone, known for such movies as "Platoon" and "Wall Street," went on to say, "It manipulates our behavior. [...] It has happened already quite a bit on the Internet, but you’ll see it everywhere—you'll see a new form of, frankly, a robot society, where they will know how you want to behave and they will make the mockup that matches how you behave and feed you. It’s what they call totalitarianism."

"You just made 6,500 delete 'Pokemon Go' off their phones," panel moderator Dave Karger joked as Stone's comments received light applause from the crowd. 

Zachary Quinto, who plays journalist Glenn Greenwald in the film, later defended his director's provocative statement in an interview with Entertainment Tonight:

He [Stone] went a little bit more to the heart of the matter, which I think is a really relative point that he made. [...] It's great that people are engaging with one another, but I feel like the ultimate goal for us should be to be able to do that without these devices in our hands.

It's hard to imagine "Pokemon Go" literally taking over the planet as opposed to the figurative hold it currently has on millions worldwide (it surpassed Twitter in daily active users last week). However, to be fair to Stone, it was hard to imagine someone like Snowden releasing thousands of top-secret NSA documents to the public in 2013. 

Check out the discussion of "Pokemon Go" below:

 

 

 

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