Weekend Reads (Aug 26): Elon Musk, AI and Copyrights, Hackers, the Return of CDs
Recommended weekend reading material for August 26, 2023.
In case you missed it, I recently announced a giveaway for Opus subscribers to celebrate the site crossing the 7,000 post milestone. There are giveaways for both paid and free subscribers with some really cool prizes, including some lovely artwork and one of my favorite books that I read this year.
The winners will be selected on September 1, 2023, so you have all of August to subscribe and enter if you haven’t already.
Now, on to this week’s links…
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Ronan Farrow explores Elon Musk’s growing levels of influence and control, not just in terms of electric cars and social media, but also with space exploration, government regulations, and international politics.
In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from nasa, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’”
Related: Since becoming Twitter/X’s CEO, Musk has made a lot of bad/weird/unsettling decisions, including: firing the vast majority of employees (including those responsible for overseeing child safety), blocking content, limiting access, and unbanning accounts that had previously been suspended for violent threats, harassment, and misinformation. Now he wants to remove headlines from articles that are shared on the platform, which could lead to an increase in misleading and confusing content.
Also related: Elon Musk may have the largest follower count on Twitter/X, but it’s not everything that it appears to be — which may have implications for the platform’s user base as a whole.
A recent court ruling states that AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted because it wasn’t created by humans.
U.S. copyright law, she underscored, “protects only works of human creation” and is “designed to adapt with the times.” There’s been a consistent understanding that human creativity is “at the core of copyrightability, even as that human creativity is channeled through new tools or into new media,” the ruling stated.
While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that they do so only after a human develops a “mental conception” of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.
“Human involvement in, and ultimate creative control over, the work at issue was key to the conclusion that the new type of work fell within the bounds of copyright,” Howell wrote.
It’ll be interesting to see if and how this affects movie studios seeking to use AI in their productions. (The possibility of AI replacing human writers and actors is one of the primary concerns driving the current Hollywood strikes.)
Once upon a time, it seemed like there would never be a good video game adaptation into TV or film, thanks to the likes of 1993’s Super Mario Bros. and 1995’s Mortal Kombat. But some recent successes suggest that the times are changing.
That Sony, Nintendo, and their production partners didn’t fumble those bags was still a significant sign that the bad old days of video game adaptations were behind us. But how far would the good days extend? Arguing that The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Movie portended many more quality adaptations to come was like arguing that Shohei Ohtani’s arrival inaugurated a new era of MLB two-way players. Maybe, but how many people have the capacity to be among the fastest-throwing, hardest-hitting, fastest-running, and most durable players in the highest-level league? You’d like to see someone with fewer physical gifts make it work before you declare the lasting end of a decades-long drought. Similarly, you’d like to see some games that are less primed for adaptation give rise to great TV shows or movies before bat-flipping for real.
Enter Twisted Metal.
Technology promised to make things cheaper by getting rid of middle-men and being more efficient. But now everything your favorite streamers, ride-hailing services, and cloud computing providers — figureheads for tech’s disrupting nature — are getting more and more expensive.
Streaming was supposed to be better and cheaper. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. This NFL season, as in previous years, I’ll record games on OTA linear TV using a TiVo box from about 2014. I’ll watch hours of action every weekend free, and I’ll watch no ads. Streaming can’t match that.
You can still stream without ads, but the cost of this is getting so high and the bundling is so complex that it’s getting as bad as cable — the technology that streaming was supposed to radically improve upon.
The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services would cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago. The average cable TV package was $83 a month, it reported.
I have friends who rotate between subscriptions, canceling them and renewing only when something they really want to watch becomes available. Which is a strategy that I’ve considered implementing for my family.
And of course, there are free services like Hoopla and Kanopy that cost you nothing but a valid library card.
In the process of developing credit reports, credit bureaus like Experian and Equifax amass a lot of information on people, and they can turn a profit if they sell that information — which makes it easier than ever for criminals to find out all sorts of information about millions of Americans.
This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement.
A 404 Media investigation has found that criminals have managed to tap into that data supply chain, in some cases by stealing former law enforcement officer’s identities, and are selling unfettered access to their criminal cohorts online. The tool 404 Media tested has also been used to gather information on high profile targets such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and even President Joe Biden, seemingly without restriction. 404 Media verified that although not always sensitive, at least some of that data is accurate.
CDs are surging in popularity, not with Gen Xers like myself, but rather, with Gen Z collectors.
Kurz finds that young people tend to be interested in listening to an album in the order the artist originally intended, and that it is increasingly important to consumers that they financially support their favorite artist as much as possible.
“I think people are looking to have ownership of their music as opposed to just getting it free or if they’re doing a subscription service for streaming, they’re basically leasing their music,” he says. “The educated fan base has learned … you know, sometimes you’d have enough to buy a sandwich if you have 100,000 streams. [Collectors want] to truly be respectful and supportive of the artist who’s looking to have ownership of their music, and know that there’s a decent return going back to the artists.”
Like I always say, if you really want to support your favorite artists, then you need to buy their music instead of just streaming it.
And yes, this article did make me feel really old.
While CDs may be experiencing a resurgence, the same can’t be said of DVDs. Not on Netflix, anyway, which is shutting down its movie-by-mail service at the end of September.
I admit that I haven’t watched a DVD in recent memory, aside from an occasional screener with friends. I suppose that in clinging to the nostalgic element of DVDs but not paying for them, I’m part of the problem. Even so, I find myself more wistful than I’d expected that the DVD era is fading away. Streamers have made a subset of films available, but when so many other great movies disappear into the legal no-man’s-land between platforms, something is lost. The DVD gave audiences stable access to movies they love. This Netflix news may not affect the true DVD loyalists out there, who have already built up their private disc collections. But for casual movie fans, our viewing world has officially narrowed.
It’s been a long time since I got a red envelope in the mail, but I still remember how excited I was whenever there was one waiting for me. It really was a magical time.
From the Blog
My friend Jake recently posted a thread on Twitter that exposes a disturbing mix of conservatism, Nazism, and pornography.
Setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not Raw Egg Nationalist’s Nazism is real or just a shtick, you’d think that someone like Abbotoy — someone who seeks to “promote a vigorous Christian approach to the cultural challenges of our day” — would be hesitant to platform someone who spreads and promotes pornographic material, especially if it’s part of some mere “tongue-in-cheek performance.” Doing so seems to undermine and downplay the cultural challenge that pornography represents, a cultural challenge that — in my experience, anyway — most Christians want to combat.
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