Re: Guys, I think you're missing the point...
"it's just fiction" is all good and well but it does rather miss the point itself. Fiction is a very large part of our culture. An incredibly large part of it. As such fiction forms a large part of our worldview by influencing both our value structures and how we perceive the world.
A culture is the social mores, beliefs and opinions and behaviours of a group, who learned those social artefacts while they were children.
This is a show aimed at children. Remember that for a moment.
Consider: if you want to influence a culture, where's the best place to start? At the top, with its leaders? They're already inculcated with a particular worldview. They can be nudged but, by and large, they've settled on their opinions and are unlikely to be shifted, and any change in the underlying culture often threatens their powerbase.
In the middle with the general adult population? Again, they've already absorbed their culture. Again, they are unlikely to be shifted from it because it would require reanalysis of their core beliefs. One or two may have an "epiphany" and change their behaviour when presented with an alternative culture but even they are still innately linked to the prevailing culture in which they were raised. It's burrowed deep into their brain and forms the primary motivations for their behaviour.
The children? They are young and malleable. They are still absorbing the cultural mores of their parents. They are equally open to any concept presented to them.
There's a reason why political movements always focus on children. They know that children, above all others, are easy to impress upon with new ideas, new claims, motivations completely alien to the culture they were born in. The quickest way to create a sea-change in a culture is to capture the next generation and introduce the ideas of that change within them.
Which brings us back to fiction (which forms, as I asserted, the majority of our culture). A child watching this will soak up the idea unconsciously and it will become part of his belief structure in some way. One instance won't do much, but if there are more instances, more pieces of fiction (especially television which, for a variety of physiological reasons, is an extremely potent way to influence the way people think) containing similar ideas, a cultural imperative will be crafted within the child to view open source with suspicion.
So "it's just fiction" is a bit of a red herring. It's presented as fact.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
