The Pre-Crime Surveillance Nightmare

Steven Spielberg's 2002 movie, Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian, high-tech surveillance state, has become one of the most prophetic sci-fi movies.

The movie was released at a time when just 664.5 million people used the internet, a figure that represents just 13.8% of today’s internet users, and over a year before the launch of Facebook, a platform that helped to normalize surveillance advertising.

Yet despite the relative infancy of the internet and online surveillance industry at the time of its release, Minority Report still predicted the emergence of eyeball-scanning technology, crime-fighting robots, targeted ads, and mass surveillance, long before they went mainstream.

The movie was set in 2054 and at the time, its depiction of such a massive shift in technological surveillance over the course of 52 years was hard to imagine.

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