Alex Winter, best known as Bill S. Preston, Esq. from the cult classic Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, is working on a new documentary about the dark underbelly of the Internet, and he wants you to help out via Kickstarter. Winter has skewered sideshow entertainment with his debut film Freaked, turned MTV culture upside down with the beloved and much-missed series The Idiot Box, and most recently made a documentary on Napster and the P2P revolution called Downloaded.
Deep Web: The Untold Story of BitCoin and the Silk Road will be a full-length doc exploring the side of the Internet that's recently been making some interesting headlines. From their Kickstarter page:
In the last ten years, the digital revolution has swept like a brushfire into every corner of modern life. The world we now live in bears little resemblance to even the recent past. And the changes that are coming will disrupt our lives in even greater ways, some good and some harmful. But this tidal wave cannot be stopped, and its path can best be charted by examining the Deep Web; the vast unseen world that lies at the heart of the Internet and is the engine for the entire technological era.Amazingly, the story of the Deep Web has never been told on film. Until now.
The Deep Web on one level simply represents the 96% of the World Wide Web that is unseen by the average citizen and not indexed by standard search engines. But more significantly, the Deep Web is a movement, a philosophy, a tool for revolution, and its foundation was built long before Napster and the iPod, WikiLeaks, The Arab Spring and the revelations of widespread NSA surveillance.
It is a long and winding road that has brought us to today's landscape of crypto-currency, Internet-fueled revolution and dangerous online black markets. And to explore this world is to better understand the full implications of where we now find ourselves and what may be the best way forward.
Some of the benefits of throwing Winter some scratch are most excellent indeed. For a $100 pledge you can have a private Skype session with Winter and talk about whatever you'd like. I'd like to ask him if he was his own stylist on the set of Lost Boys. $200 gets you a private screening party of Bill and Ted's in a SoHo apartment in New York City with Winter. For all you high rollers, you might want to consider the "Russian Oligarch" pledge level, where $10,000 gets you a screening of Bill and Ted's with Winter on a yacht in the city of your choice, plus an air guitar session. To quote Keanu Reves, "whoa."
