WORK AND WEALTH

AUTOMATING MORALITY

With the way that the soldiers have their reality altered and their job incredibly simplified by all of the technology assisting them there’s room to argue that they’re the automation the government was looking for in their military. The way the soldiers' jobs were portrayed to them helps them keep their job as binary as possible; they are the good guys, and the roaches are evil monsters that must be stopped and everyone says so. With the break in Stripes system we see the removal of the “automation” of his job, it’s no longer so simple and he in turn becomes less robotic and more expressive, and as a result he simply has his memory wiped and is sent home to an altered reality, much like replacing a faulty part in a machine. Here we see the technology ironically create a problem that only it can solve. With current understandings of memory and technology a system as complex as this isn't able to connect to our brains but there are a substantial amount of parallels with computers and how one can easily modify, create, and remove files at the click of a button, suggesting a computerization of memory achieved by the MASS.

AUTOMATING THE SOLDIERS SKILLS

Recon, translation/knowledge of the area you’re working in, and even aiming are all automated tasks within the soldiers’ lives. The “boomer” projectile maps the house for them, the problem of not knowing what the local villagers are saying becomes automated by the device the Captain has on her vest, and the soldiers are shown to have aim assist features when they’re doing target practice. All of these methods of automation make the soldiers jobs easier and most likely also reduce the cost of training one soldier.

THE DIVIDE

The soldiers we meet throughout the film are shown to have access to substantial amounts of technology to complete their jobs, meanwhile the village they’re serving appears to be from the wrong time period, the villagers enjoy none of the technological benefits that the soldiers do.

There is also a social divide, the villagers are well aware that the roaches they send the military after are human beings, and they stand no chance against these enhanced soldiers, when Stripe discovers the death sentence that is so freely given out by others he is disgusted by his own actions and the unfeeling nature of the people responsible for the deception.