Not good bad Place is how my google search defined dystopia. Having just finished reading Dave Egers ‘The Circle’ and watched ‘her’ with Joaquín Phoenix, it seems that we are going to be over run with an appealing, useful, ubiquitous, user experience, which masks a more threatening reality. Seems rather sad.

Dave Eger’s Circle has a concept of becoming ‘transparent’ where the characters willing track and transmit their everyday activity to share with their friends, by wearing little cameras, and is referred to as ‘going clear’. It produces a great flip on the right to privacy, which is that if you aren’t prepared to share everything you must be hiding something.

“Right,” Mae said.  So what happens if I deprive anyone or everyone of something I know? Aren’t I stealing from my fellow humans?”

“Indeed,” Bailey  said, nodding earnestly. Mae looked to the audience, and saw the entire first row, the only faces visible, nodding, too.

“And given your way with words, Mae, I wonder if you can tell us this third and last revelation you made. What did you say?’

“Well, I said, privacy is theft.”

Meanwhile Joaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore is about to buy himself a computer OS that is going to sort his life out. Who turns out to be called Samantha and is rather breathlessly voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and turns out to be an incorrigible flirt. I actually found the film amazingly boring. But was very taken with the colour palette.

“We ask you a simple question. Who are you? What can you be? Where are you going? Whats out there? What are the possibilities? Element Software is proud to introduce the first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you. Its not just an operating system. Its a consciousness. Introducing OS1.”

Both ‘The Circle’ and ‘Samantha OS’ turn out to be not good and the characters end up in a bad place. But nobody minds as they are caught up in the warm pastel colours. A user experience that leaves you sad.