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.
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.