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Digital Carter (constantly repeating 'Max Headroom') is sold to a pirate television station, while organic Carter is sold for organ donation. Lucky for them, the goons disposing of them do the typical goon thing and try to sell them each for money. The experiment is a failure, and both Carter and his digital version are sent off to be disposed.

What does he hit his head on? A low clearance sign with the words 'Max Headroom 2.3m.' The company, however, doesn't want Carter to disappear, so the aforementioned boy genius constructs a virtual version to fool audiences. Carter-being chased through the building-attempts to escape a parking garage on a motorcycle, but hits his head as the villainous child genius of the company manipulates a platform lift. Protagonist Edison Carter discovers that the massive media conglomerate that he's working for is using a new form of subliminal messaging to sell advertising that has resulted in fatal consequences. Quality entertainment and red herrings aside: From the beginning, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future had its geek credentials in order, and gave us a glimpse of a dystopian future where people are treated as nothing more than data, media dominates the landscape, and society is manipulated for corporate gain: A traditional cyberpunk dystopia that resides a little too close to home. 42 also has significance in the works of author Lewis Carroll and others. This is clearly a reference to Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where 42 is the answer to the meaning of life.

This number has continued to carry significance into the modern era through Chaos Magick and genre writers like Grant Morrison (e.g., his Invisibles comic book series).Īnother good example of solid geekery is the number of the apartment in the raid at the very beginning: 42. Wilson himself acknowledges that his first exposure to the strangeness of 23 came from a conversation with author William S. In particular the number 23 has great significance with the pseudo-religion Discordia, and plays an important role in the works of counterculture elite Robert Anton Wilson. For example, the network on the show is Network 23-a number with well-known counterculture and modern occult significance known as the 23 enigma.

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In addition, there were Easter eggs littered throughout the TV movie that lent credence to Max's geek credentials (or at least showed you that the writers were true cultural insiders). The truth is that the original Max Headroom pilot was less than an hour of grainy made-for-TV goodness meant to launch Max as a video DJ for a UK music video show (you can find episodes on YouTube with a quick search). Max Headroom himself (itself?) was a highly experimental creation that blended music, artificial intelligence, and cyberpunk, and the end result was much more subversive than most remember thanks to New Coke commercials perverting perceptions. In fact, it was Ahern's interest in producing a Max Headroom episode for the Codepunk podcast that inspired and spawned several recent media pieces on the character and the character's relationship to culture. Artist and technologist Bill Ahern (Codepunk co-editor) is another. Conversational artificial intelligence pioneer Ben Brown (creator of Botkit and current Microsoft employee) counts himself among this group. Those a part of this modern generation might recognize Max Headroom as a goofy head in a television box with an annoying stutter and bad fashion sense, but the reality is much darker, dystopian, and subversive-and it's a perfect reflection of the youth movement of the 80's coupled with the emerging niche literature of that time period.Īs odds would have it, there is a small group of individuals circulating online that remember and revere the oddities and cultural experimentation of Max Headroom. Much of the modern generation seems to live off of memes, YouTube video clips, and recycled collage advertisements that feign nostalgia. The result of this is the raiding of authenticity from past generations into a meme-ified version of itself. Modern culture siphons value from past generations in order to pre-package quantity for quick financial extraction.