City council meetings across the country have had wild characters for a while, but we’re now seeing literal villains show up in support of mass surveillance. A few weeks ago we saw Darth Vader show up in San Diego in support of Flock cameras, and now we have Dr. Doom showing up in Seattle claiming “total dominion” and that he’ll be watching the entire city.
Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a legal threat to Alex Gibney and the production company behind the new Musk documentary, which so far is receiving strong reviews. We know very well by now that Musk’s “free speech” persona is just a cheap costume. The letter, described by THR, looks plainly like an intimidation device. At least Gibney doesn’t seem intimidated.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
Alex Gibney’s three-hour-plus documentary on Elon Musk is closer than the Moon. It’ll premiere at the Venice International Film Festival on September 8th. Here’s the first teaser:
The Matrix was said to be coming back for a fifth time back in 2024, with director Drew Goddard at the helm. We haven’t heard much since then, until Matrix co-creator and co-director Lilly Wachowski told KCRW last week that Goddard was waiting on the Wachowski sisters’ blessing to move forward. Lilly seems over the whole affair, saying that she “doesn’t want to play in that sandbox anymore.” Here’s the rest of what she said about moving forward for Matrix 5:
He doesn’t wanna go forward unless he gets our blessing, and so, it becomes this complicated situation that maybe we’re gonna stick our noses in a tiny bit and see how we feel and if we wanna pass on our blessing to Drew or not.
That’s the vote tally at the United Nations to adopt a new world map, the “Equal Earth projection”, that corrects distortions in the centuries-old and well-known Mercator projection. The Mercator map was prized during the era of European imperialism. (This is also a subject in a great episode of The West Wing.) The proposed new map more accurately portrays the relative size of continents.
You can probably guess the only nation that voted against it. Yes, it was the United States, which called this “a radical ideological project.” Perhaps the new map should depict us as an island standing alone against the world’s nations. If you really want to find a radical ideological project in mapping, just look at Trump’s “Lake America” designation.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman apologized earlier today for a “messy” rollout of GPT-6 Astra that left paying users locked out of the new model. Altman says the tool is now available to “all Pro, Enterprise, and Business Premium users.”
He probably thinks he’s invincible at this point, but Trump is actually now wading into a place that may even (sadly) be more dangerous for him than living in the Epstein files. Data centers, like Flock cameras, are remarkably unpopular among Americans of all stripes. He always manages to wiggle out of consequences, but this will be a compelling new test of how far people will go to drink his Kool-Aid.
As Netflix turns into a video podcast warehouse, HBO is planting its own flag with an original titan of radio. The Howard Stern Show arrives with weekly episodes on HBO Max September 17th. The series will be adapted from Stern’s SiriusXM program.
