Film Existed Primarily in Memory
In today's edition: the X-Files, Larry Page, Latino punk, what a film used to be, digital advertising problems, and the most sued tech company.
1. Science, myth, and the X-Files.
"The ironic upshot is that The X-Files invokes the mythology of modern science in order to arrive at the very set of beliefs that modern science defines itself against. It tells a story of how, in a world riven by demons and spooks and witches, science would fall into the same kind of dogmatism it claims to vanquish."
2. What Larry Page doesn't like to do.
"It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group."
3. Los Punks.
"The intimate and honest documentary, which will make its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival as part of the documentary features competition, zooms in on the genre's local promoters, musicians and devout fans — predominantly Latino teens and young adults — who find meaning in the thriving punk-rock scene of South Central and East Los Angeles. Inside the backyards and small rooms of this music community is a palpable sense of belonging, as noted in the trailer. 'A lot of bands that have heart are poor and come from dirty, scummy, prostitute-filled, bullet-flying, filthy places that people go by as they're driving on the freeway.'"
4. When the default was ceasing to exist rather than being recorded forever.
"If you had never heard recorded music and you didn’t have it as a category of experience—if it simply never existed for you—I think that your concept of what music is would be fantastically different. Something that’s happened, a change that’s occurred over the course of my own life that I think somewhat puts this vague claim I’m making into perspective, is the way in which seeing a film used to be something that was so dependent on so many factors that it made it largely unrepeatable. You could see the film on its theatrical release, but unless you lived in, say, New York, there were no repertory cinemas. So people saw a film once and then lived with it in memory, there was no television, there were no videotapes of films. Film existed primarily in memory, and the experience of actually seeing it was very intense."
5. The incentives in digital advertising are almost perfectly misaligned all along the value chain.
"The ad industry has created its own biggest weakness — a horrible experience for the consumers whose actions pay their bills. It’s not the bad creative; we all survived the '90s. It’s the hundreds of calls to ad servers and exchanges on every page we visit, slowing down the internet for hundreds of millions of people, even on the fastest of connections. As every ad impression gets sold to the highest bidder, pages take longer and longer to load, even as entire generations are getting weaned off of web pages. So the experiences we do have stick out. Traffic, harder and harder to come by these days, is bought and sold as well, creating a cesspool of "visitors" to websites that aren’t really visitors at all, but bots or transients who close their browsers and immediately go back to whence they came — or let’s face it, Facebook."
On Fusion: Pretty much all companies get sued, but according to our analysis, one company gets sued far more often than others. I bet you can guess which it is.
1. thenewatlantis.com 2. nytimes.com | @chetansharma 3. hollywoodreporter.com 4. lithub.com | @michikokakutani 5. campaignlive.com
Film Existed Primarily in Memory