> In this way, Jeffrey Katzenberg said to us, “I understand something about the world that others do not.” And yet, in saying so, he missed the essential lesson that could have been gleaned from his own industry: Popular culture is an existential conflict between what is “good”, what people like, and what people watch. This dialectic is the central feature of cultural businesses.
Dialectic and existential conflicts aside, I don't think the "gray area of public taste" really applies here. Quibi's content was BAD. [1,2,3] If there is an existential lesson here about entertainment platforms, maybe it's Don't:
* launch a $2B app
* with no library of content
* that is strictly walled off from your customer's social media
Quibi seemed to do a lot wrong. But when it comes to how bad their content was, I've seen some writers say Quibi produced first draft scripts other studios had passed on without a re-write. They thought they could run with proof-of-concept quality scripts to avoid hiring writers.
In some respects. Polymorphic code is more like it, ie. DNA. DNA is data, but it creates processes (code) that produce proteins that then alter the data through histones and methylation and transcription factors. It becomes insanely non-linear and chaotic, the organism becoming an amalgamation of code and data in flux.
Scummy is a polite word for the advertisements. It's been fascinating to watch them evolve in waves.
First wave: POV of a predator in a parking garage approaching a woman. Grave female voiceover: "Sexual predators could track your automobile, and remotely control the vehicle - including unlocking the doors." The female victim turns as the camera descends on her - she screams - "Vote No on Question 1. Don't let sexual predators control YOUR vehicle."
Second wave: Russian hackers with pimples nodding with pleasure as they take control of your vehicle, in a "Kremlin-sponsored hacking room" that looks like NCIS by way of Dr. Strangelove. Vote no - don't let Russian hackers control your vehicle.
Third wave - Muddy the waters by changing tone entirely to mimic the "Yes on 1" ads which have local, named individuals urging "it's your data, keep control of it." Muddied version - "It's your data, keep it safe. Vote no on 1."
Fourth wave - white unnamed men in auto shops with forced-sounding boston accents explaining that if you vote yes on 1, it'll hurt the little guy.
The insane $$ being thrown at trying to kill this bill [] tells a story in itself.
Over $23 million paid by automakers funded these scummy advertisements. Thankfully we know this from campaign finance transparency. The ads say in fine print that they are paid for by the "Coalition for Safe and Secure Data" and that top donors include "the Alliance for Automotive Innovation."
A Coalition campaign finance report from 2020 [0] shows $23 million in receipts from the likes of Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and others.
Expenditures in that report show who is helping them produce these ads.
Which reports? Reports that require disclosure of political advertising spend?
Yes. They're incredibly important. I want to know who is paying to try to influence an election. Many times, actionable information is exposed through these reports.
AIUI the German solution is to make their cars so difficult to repair and maintain, and require so many specialised tools, that nobody who isn't an authorised dealership will want to touch them.
It's interesting that there's no norm against participating in this kind of gross dishonesty. Everyone is comfortable that political speech is just a set of things you say to win the argument, and need bear no relation to any real or plausible events.
I think that it's not that there is no norms, it's that there's no point in having norms. These attack ads are conducted by proxies, not the interested parties themselves. It takes more energy to go after them then it takes for the interested parties to make a new proxy.
Ha, as if auto manufacturers all have an org dedicated to monitoring and deterring sexual predators and Russian hackers. Can anyone from one of these companies comment on this? Can I get a discount if I opt out of that at the dealership? I'm a techie, really I'd prefer to install Windows Defender on the car myself, thank you!
It wouldn’t be so laughable if the auto manufacturers didn’t already claim your data as their own and sell it to marketers.
This tidbit from the Onstar privacy policy made me laugh:
“The nature of our products and services means that there may be circumstances where you might let someone else use a product or service that we provide to you (for example, you let someone else drive your OnStar equipped vehicle). It is important that if you do let someone else use one of our products or services that you inform them of this Privacy Statement and of the privacy choices that you have made.“
Were you self-hosting, or using the free service? If self-hosting, I'm curious what resources you were devoting to your VPS, and which hosting provider?
Google is many different companies and products, and some of them I'm so grateful for. They provide a simple product that does something magically better than the competition, don't screw with the recipe. I give them my data because I like the service.
But the company-wide decision to manipulate the URL as a business strategy drains all my enthusiasm. The "U" is really important! The URL is basically a filename that you use to access the data store called the Internet. Don't take it away from me by the brute force of market dominance. I need to be sure of where I'm addressing my packets. Don't tamper with that essential construct.
I use both browsers, but without Firefox, I'd be lost in the wilderness. With its recent layoffs I'm worried about the web.
Is it really a company-wide strategy to manipulate the URL? The Chrome change was based on user studies that showed that people do not understand URLs.
The days of URLs as a data access key are gone. So many other things (cookies, etc) go into controlling what pages show that what was originally a 1:1 mapping between URL and content is now a many to many mapping. I'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's the web we live in now.
Doesn't matter if they understand it or not. It's the one and only barrier between you and malicious actors, or you and a monopolist. And oh look there's Google, attacking the one thing that protects the world from their ownership of the web.
People might not understand how a seat belt works, it's still there and we still use them.
It's the only browser that gives me complete control over my session logins in containers, and it respects the cardinality of the URL - never meddles with it, conceals part of it, autocompletes it... I use Chrome only when forced to by lack of Firefox support.
Since a couple of versions ago, the history dropdown in the URL bar (but not the URL bar itself) has been hiding the "https://", at least for me. Which is incredibly annoying when you're used to "not having a https:// prefix" implying "use http:// as the prefix", since it makes it look like every site in the history dropdown is insecure. And it's inconsistent with the URL bar itself: type "example.org" on the URL bar, and not only will it go to http://example.org, but also it will hide the http://.
