Joss Whedon And The Art Of The Perfect Detail

Fans of both the TV show Dollhouse and the operating system BeOS have excitedly pointed out that the two are connected. The fictional institution where hot young people have their memories replaced according to clients’ wishes apparently has its technical infrastructure controlled by a real OS created by a software company that closed its doors in 2001.

BeOs and Dollhouse have something else in common. They are both known for a cult following that simultaneously sings their praises and predicts their doom. Hardcore fans of BeOS refuse to let the dream die, continuing it as an open-source project even now, just as Whedon’s followers largely refuse to accept that his previous projects, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly, ever came to an end. (In the case of Buffy, which lasted for seven seasons, fans’ refusal to let the franchise die was eventually acknowledged by the release of “Season Eight,” which exists only as a series of comic books.)

The best way to get an appreciation of how BeOS occupies a similar cultural space is to read sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson’s famous essay, In The Beginning Was The Command Line. The essay itself is part computer industry chronicle, part personal history, and part plea for the reader/user to look beyond the shiny appeal of artfully rendered buttons and pull-down menus, and to embrace the raw power of talking to the computer directly.

Stephenson, writing two years before the end of BeOS as an officially supported product, quotes an entry from the BeOS public bug-tracking system, submitted by a user with the best interests of the company at heart:

The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to give it a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this, the BeOS will languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are.

Whedon, as one creator of glorious flame-out cult hits to another, has given BeOS what it always needed.

image from a series called “Before The Fall Of Missima” by brownin329