in 2008′s the dark knight, batman figures out a way to access every single cell phone in gotham, covertly using their microphones to help track down the joker. this technology is deemed so obviously unethical that his gadgets guy, lucius fox, essentially quits on the spot, protesting, “it’s too much power for one person.”
ultimately, though, batman does prove himself worthy of wielding it - not by using it for good, which he does, but by having lucius destroy it immediately after. it is, we understand, the only moral choice.
11 years later, spider-man: far from home entrusts spider-man with a technology that’s a bit like batman’s sonar, in that it allows our hero to surveil every mobile phone in his vicinity, but vastly more invasive and more dangerous. indeed, the first two things spidey does with edith are snoop through his classmates’ phones and call a drone strike on his own bus. accidentally, but still.
yet for spider-man, a character whose entire premise is that with great power comes great responsibility, the question is not whether anyone should get to have edith, but who.
no one wonders if, as lucius once did, edith is simply “too much power for one person.”
peter spends the entirety of far from home grappling with the question of whether he’s worthy of becoming “the next iron man,” and whether he even wants to be. the edith sunglasses are the physical manifestation of that mantle, and in a moment of weakness, peter hands them over to quentin beck, who promptly uses edith to stage a terrorist attack in london.
it should be alarming how easily edith transfers from peter to quentin and back again, how unquestioningly this super-advanced tech follows quentin’s orders to kill. (whether we’d be better off if edith were self-aware, like ultron or vision, is another can of worms entirely.) it should be horrifying that edith doesn’t have more safeguards in place to prevent quentin from slaughtering millions with his drones - or for that matter, peter from issuing a kill order against an underage civilian.
both sides, however, treat edit as a neutral piece of technology, like an egg timer or a bicycle, rather than one whose very power makes her a potential threat, like a social media platform or an atom bomb. quentin’s crimes through edith are portrayed as outgrowths of his own corrupt soul, and peter’s accidents as funny little gags about how in over his head he is.
no one - not peter, not nick fury or maria hill or happy hogan and certainly not anyone on mysterio’s side - ever suggests that the very existence of a technology that allows an individual to know this much, control this much, and do this much with a single voice command, is problematic in and of itself. no one wonders if, as lucius once did, edith is simply “too much power for one person.”
the problem is not that edith is unrealistic. it’s that edith is all too plausible. there are reports every day of tech companies listening in through our smart home devices, of social media networks selling our information, of governments surveilling its people and waging war with drones. and there’s no reason to believe any of it will stop any time soon - and certainly not with anything as quick and definitive as a 40 minute CG battle in the sky.
maybe the best we can hope for, anymore, is that the awesome powers unlocked by technology fall into responsible hands, like those of a teenager who sincerely has no interest in ruling the world or destroying it. maybe that’s what’s changed in the 11 years between the dark knight and spider-man: far from home: that we’ve lived long enough to see what was once an act of villainy reframed as one of heroism.
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