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Slack.com slash DHQ. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them

and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Balinsky.

When the movie Tron came out in 1982, it did okay at the box office. Not exactly a summer

blockbuster. Critics were underwhelmed. But there was a young boy who saw the movie

at a multiplex on Cape Cod, and he loved it so much. He bought the action figures and

the toy motorcycles that the characters rode on. And those toys are still sitting in

his old bedroom at his parents' house today, or so I've been told from reliable sources.

I still think Tron is underrated. And over the last few months, I've kept thinking about

this one scene that I think sums up the moment in high tech that we're going through right

now. And I'll talk about that scene later. But first, if you've never seen the movie,

here's a quick recap. Jeff Bridges plays a game designer and computer programmer named

Kevin Flynn, whose hip and cool in a very young Jeff Bridges sort of way.

You invented space paranoid. Paranoids, Matrix Blaster, Viscuot, whole slew of. I was this

close to starting my own little enterprise, man.

Flynn's backstory is that his ideas were stolen, and he was pushed out of a tech company,

which has now become a mega corporation. But Flynn doesn't realize the company is actually

being run by an evil AI program called Master Control. The CEO of the company actually

...