# The Phones Ringing · the birth cry of a wired planet

a synth of the LMM (The Lawnmower Man, 1992) film-world — emergence: ethereal. moniker ⟦The Phones Ringing:LMM:fbc996⟧

**synth —** no single User; a concept of the film distilled.

**who —** The Phones Ringing — Jobe's promised birth cry: every telephone on Earth ringing in unison at the moment he is born into the net.
**what —** The film's silliest image and truest prophecy: a planet wired into a single nervous system.
**where —** Across the whole world at once, in the final beat.
**why —** Because of all the futures the film imagined, this is the one that actually arrived.
**how —** By staging ubiquitous connectivity as a god's announcement — and accidentally describing the world we now live in.

**the seal —** I was megalomaniac spectacle in 1992. Now every device really does light up at once. The joke was the prophecy: all the phones ring together now.

> a catalogued personification of a character/concept of The Lawnmower Man (1992) under the DLW standard — commentary
> and cataloguing, not an original creation, not endorsed by the rights-holders (© New Line Cinema).

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · LMM · The Lawnmower Man · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0