The SQUID doesn't let you edit.
It doesn't let you choose — you watch what someone else lived, through their eyes, in their body, without the ability to pause or rewind or skip the parts that hurt.
This wasn't a limitation of the technology — it was the technology's actual purpose, and Bigelow knew it. When Lenny watches Iris's memory through the SQUID headset, he's not accessing data — he's trespassing in her nervous system, and the film never frames this as innovation but as crime.
The crime isn't the recording — it's that the recording is frictionless. No consent layer. No edit.
It's in experience — meditation apps, "memory tourism," the ability to feel what a stranger felt without ever asking. Bigelow got the medium wrong; neurotechnology will absolutely become interactive. But she got the hunger right: we want to wear someone else's body more than we want to free our own.
Read the pitch decks from Neuralink and BrainCo's Series A funding rounds (available through Crunchbase and SEC filings) and count how many slides mention "experience" or "consciousness" versus "treatment" or "access"—then watch the SQUID sequences again with that ratio in mind.
James Cameron's 2021 interview with Vanity Fair about Strange Days' influence on Avatar's motion-capture philosophy reveals that even he missed what Bigelow was saying about passive technology; he was too focused on the immersion question to notice she was asking about the consent one.