...Obviously, the internet has rendered the notion of sending important information on floppy disks — much less on floppy disks embedded in a handsome dude’s skull — obsolete. And the nuts and bolts of Johnny Mnemonic’s future is a lot clunkier and more analog-based than the sleeker real world of 2021. Still, a lot of the spirit of Johnny Mnemonic’s future hits close to home, like its world dominated by enormous tech corporations, the opening scene where Johnny roams through a street filled with people in surgical masks, and this speech from Henry Rollins’ hacker/doctor character about the immense damage wrought by excessive technology.



Johnny Mnemonic’s internet supposedly causes something called “nerve attenuation syndrome,” which destroys people’s brains — a pretty effective stand-in for the metaphorical “brain worms” that seem to afflict a lot of people who’ve spent so much time scrolling through our internet, especially on social media, that they’ve lost their perspective on reality. Everyone uses a form of FaceTime for communication, although most of their phones are stationary and attached to television screens. There’s even a reference to an “eyephone,” which sure sounds a lot like the gadget that would begin to take over global communications about a decade after Johnny Mnemonic’s release.

Johnny’s fancy virtual reality visor and gloves, which he uses to surf the world wide web without getting his feet wet, is a bit on the goofy side — and the digital effects used to create the imagery of exploring the internet are very dated — but the basic functionality of this technology is fairly close to the headset and controllers of the Oculus Quest.



Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story and screenplay by William Gibson, one of the godfathers of the cyberpunk genre. Gibson maintains that the theatrically released Johnny Mnemonic is not the script he wrote; the distributor cut the film down from 103 to 95 minutes in an attempt to appeal to a more mainstream audience. (In another sign of Johnny Mnemonic’s impressive legacy, one of the new video games currently available on the actual Internet circa 2021 is called Cyberpunk 2077, starring Keanu Reeves as a character named Johnny Silverhand.) ...

Read More: How ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ Predicted the World of ‘Internet 2021’ | https://screencrush.com/johnny-mnemonic-internet-2021/