Tag Archive : CULTURE

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Culture

AR, VR, MR: Making Sense of Magic Leap and the Future of Reality

The age of virtual realty is here but augmented reality and its cousin mixed reality are making strides. WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin breaks down the new platforms.

Edgar Wright's Baby Driver begins the way most capers end: three goons pulling off a bank heist, then their getaway driver leaving the cops in his rearview. Unlike most capers, though, the escapade goes down to the pulse-pounding strains of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Bellbottoms." It’s a whiplash-inducing rush that lays more than a dozen cars to waste and doesn’t let up for the song’s entire 5:16 runtime, each screeching turn and crash perfectly timed to the track's churning rhythm. And it ought to be—Wright’s been plotting it ever since he heard "Bellbottoms" in 1995. “That moment was the closest I’ve ever come to synesthesia,” the writer-director says. “I would listen to that song and start visualizing a car chase.” As a result, he made a movie perfect for a song, instead of finding a song perfect for his movie.

What’s incredible, though, is that when he dreamed up Baby Driver—arguably the first film to make the iPod a central character—most people were still making each other mixtapes. Back when “Bellbottoms” was released, folks couldn’t dance down the street with 3,000 songs at their disposal. Even with the 15 you could cram onto a single side of a cassette, cuing up the right track at the right time was just about impossible. Portable CD players helped deliver music faster and more accurately, but they skipped constantly if you tried to walk with them having anything more than the slightest spring in your step. iPods and their non-Apple mp3-playing ilk changed all that, allowing hundreds of hours of music to be stuffed in your pocket ready to be cued up during just the right moment.

“For the first time, which wasn’t the case with the Walkman or the Discman, the iPod meant people could basically start soundtracking their own lives,” says Wright.

That’s what getaway driver Baby does throughout the movie. Looking to fulfill a debt to the crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey), he times every heist to a specific song. A sufferer of tinnitus, he needs the music focus on the road—to drown out the hum in his ears and the chaos around him. That leads to some exquisitely crafted car chases, but it also leads to some moments more relatable to folks who don’t know how to execute proper donuts. Like, for example, the time Baby goes on a coffee run set entirely to Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle.” We've all had that moment, all known instinctively based on the weather, mood, or activity just what song to cue up, then timed every footstep or lane change to that said song. For music fans, getting it right feels like high-fiving a million angels. For a director like Wright, making a movie that way is downright genius.

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Lots of directors make movies with soundtracks in mind—and often have songs in mind when they develop their films. Quentin Tarantino and Cameron Crowe are both known for this, but Wright took it a step further, timing scenes to the songs he knew he was going to use. Instead of syncing the action to a track as the movie was being edited, it was shot to be beat-for-beat—just like we all do when we time our morning run to Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm” (or, you know, whatever is on your sprint mix).

“When life starts to sync up with your soundtrack, it’s a magical moment," Wright says. "If it’s something where you’re walking and it’s cloudy and the sun comes out in time with a bit in the song you feel like you’re omnipotent—so Baby Driver is an entire movie made up of moments like that.”

As a result, Baby Driver feels like a rollicking action movie that just happens to plays like the fantasy everyone has experienced when the bassline of their favorite song times perfectly to their footfall—it’s just that when Baby’s foot falls its dropping the pedal to the floor.

The next time you watch George A. Romero’s classic 1968 creepshow Night of the Living Dead, do your best not to look away. It won’t be easy, as the zombie-zeitgeist-defining shocker—filmed in stark black-and-white, and populated with terrifyingly dead-eyed human-hunters—still has the power to unnerve, nearly 50 years after its release. But take a closer look, and you might get a sense of just how much low-budget derring-do and luck was involved in making one of the most epochal horror films of all time. “There’s a copy of the script visible in one of the frames!” Romero told the New York Times last year. “I won’t tell where. It will be a little challenge for fans to spot it.”

Romero, who died Sunday at the age of 77 after a brief bout with lung cancer, directed several smart-schlock joy-rides during his decades-long stint as a director and writer, including 1973’s bio-shock thriller The Crazies, the 1978 blood-sucking drama Martin, and 1982’s lovingly yucky comics adaptation Creepshow. But his long-running career was always better off dead, thanks to a series of socially minded zombie movies that began with Night—which Romero and a bunch of friends shot in rural Pennsylvania at a reported cost of just $114,000. (The production was so commando that, at one point, a member of the film’s production team borrowed his mother’s car to shoot a scene, and wound up smashing the windshield; he repaired the damage before she could find out).

Romero didn’t invent the zombie movie, but he did reanimate it, using cheap-but-effective effects, patient camerawork, and amateur actors to give the movie an almost documentary-like urgency. As a result, Night went on to earn millions at drive-ins and college theaters across the country, making it one of the biggest independent smashes of the century, and a clear influence on everything from 28 Days Later to World War Z to The Walking Dead.

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Still, it wasn’t just the movie’s eerily determined flesh-eaters that made Night of the Living Dead a hit; it was the suffocating on- and off-screen mood it captured. Released during one of the most divisive and paranoia-prone years of the ’60s, Night climaxed with a harrowing finale, in which an African-American survivor (played by Duane Jones) survives a bloody night of zombie-fighting—only to be shot dead by a white gunman. It was a savage bit of social commentary snuck into a midnight movie, and though Romero maintained that the movie wasn’t supposed to be a racial allegory, Night nonetheless proved that horror films were an ideal vessel with which to examine the nightmares of our real world. As Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele noted earlier this year, “the way [Night of the Living Dead] handles race is so essential to what makes it great.”

Romero would make five follow-ups to his shambling breakout, and though 1985’s barf-cajoling Day of the Dead and 2005’s Land of the Dead were both gross, groovy B-movie fun, his greatest work was 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, which followed a team of survivors as they hid out in a zombie-infested shopping mall. Dawn’s anti-consumerism message was a hoot, and the movie could have functioned as pure camp alone—except it remains downright terrifying, full of anatomically detailed gore (all hail gross-out king Tom Savini!), believably desperate heroes (and baddies), and hordes of lurching, formerly luxury-seeking zombies whose dead-eyed lust for more, more, more! seemed awfully human. Dawn comes to mind every time I drive by an empty shopping center, or gaze at a dead-mall photo gallery, and it proved that few other filmmakers understood our base desires—and their ruinous effects—quite as well as Romero. "When there's no more room in hell,” a character says in the movie’s most famous quote, “the dead will walk the Earth." Thanks to Romero, we all got to experience that hell from a safe, scared-brainless distance.

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World War Z: Building a Better Zombie Effects Exclusive

WIRED's exclusive behind the scenes look at the making of "World War Z" reveals how the visual effects artists at MPC used massive crowd simulations and hand animation to create the devastating swarming of Jerusalem by a zombie horde.

Just over a month ago, Fusion reporter Emma Roller did exactly what the far-right internet wanted her to do: she believed 4chan. For months, the online message board had been engaging in an informal propaganda operation, discussing innocuous gestures and symbols as though they were secret signals among white-supremacist groups. The "OK" symbol emerged as a favorite of those gestures, and the ultra-far-right media got in on the joke. So when Roller saw an image of self-described "national security reporter" Mike Cernovich and his colleague Cassandra Fairbanks doing it, she retweeted it—along with the message, "just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the White House."

Now she's facing a defamation lawsuit. While both Cernovich and Fairbanks have been open about intentionally participating in the troll, Fairbanks—at the time an employee of Kremlin-owned site Sputnik, and now working for the Breitbart-alum run Big League Politics—is now suing Roller for falsely claiming that she's a white supremacist. (Roller's tweet has since been deleted.)

If you've spent much time on social media, you've seen this tactic before: someone trying to slip out of their rhetorical bind by claiming that their offending statement had been a joke, and that you're just being hypersensitive. That thing where someone wears irony as a defense, hiding their true motives? What is that?

That, friend, is Poe's Law: On the internet, it's impossible to tell who is joking. In other words, it's the thinking person's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But Poe's Law isn't only useful as a defense against pearl-clutching reactions. It's also a diagnosis of exactly how the troll mentality has weakened internet culture. If nobody knows what anyone means, then every denial is plausible.

A degree of ambiguity has always been baked into internet exchanges. "Usenet in the '80s, community guidelines would often indicate that it was hard to tell if someone was being silly or sincere," says Ryan Milner, author of The World Made Meme. But the first person to codify this particular digital phenomenon was a user calling himself "Nathan Poe," on a creationist forum in 2005. During a discussion about perceived flaws in the theory of evolution, people began bemoaning how difficult it was to divine if participants were for real. Then Poe (who has never been identified IRL) posted this axiom: "POE’S LAW: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article."

Since then, the concept has grown far from its creationist origins. "It's a big part of the culture of collective spaces like 4chan or Reddit, where people don’t know each other interpersonally and you can't gauge intention," Milner says. There's even a subreddit called /r/poeslawinaction ____ where users document and discuss ambiguous internet moments. Take, for example, 4chan's infamous /pol/ (short for "politically incorrect") board, where people routinely post obscene and hateful content. Guess how they justify their actions:

It's also spawned pictorial memes of its own.

But because the internet has changed in innumerable ways since 2005, expanding and accelerating all the while, Poe's Law applies to more and more internet interactions. “When social networks used to be bounded by interests, the joke teller could expect that their audience was in on the joke," says Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Internet Culture. "Now a single retweet can cause spontaneous global amplification.” That's a lot of people who don't have context for your in-joke.

Meanwhile, 4chan's reach has continued to grow, either through its own profile—thanks to ____ hand-wringing news stories—or the emergence of the alt-right and other troll-leaning groups. With Poe's Law serving as a refuge for more and more scoundrels, it has effectively been weaponized, like so many other memes.

To wit: Breitbart tech editor and "provocateur" Milo Yiannopolous, who clearly understands the escape hatch that ambiguity offers from accusations of prejudice. Yiannopoulos took to Breitbart to make this Poe-etic claim: "Are [the alt-right] actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents." He used similar logic to justify actions like leading a racist harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones, which culminated in his ousting from Twitter. And to plenty of people, that just looked like Twitter not being able to take a joke.

4chan's /b/ board—the original home of 4chan's trolls and their shitposting shock tactics—has an internet-famous boilerplate to the same effect: "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything written here as fact." (So you can imagine 4chan's delight at mainstream journalists like Roller taking their activities seriously despite the disclaimer.)

Poe's Law doesn't end online, either. “People talking about 'spin in the era of Trump' and 'post truth' don’t talk about politics in terms of Poe’s Law," Phillips says. "But it's there, whenever you’re not sure if you should be mad or just roll your eyes.” It's as present in Julian Assange stoking the Seth Rich conspiracy or Kellyanne Conway's "kidding" about telling people to buy Ivanka Trump's clothing as it is in YouTuber PewDiePie's attempts to justify racism as satire.

Just being able to name the phenomenon makes it a little easier to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ off the little stuff. But it also points to less apathetic way forward. Once you know it's there, Poe's Law begins to lose its potency—especially as a shield for trolls to hide behind. As Milner says, "When all you have are people’s words, then the words and their effect are all that matters."

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How To Battle Trolling Ad Hominem Attacks Online

An internet troll's favorite way to argue? Ad hominem, of course! This is your guide to spotting bad arguments on the internet and how to fight them.

Last year the self-professed “communist farmer” and “saxophone kisser” known as Oedipus uploaded a song to SoundCloud, the artist-first music streaming platform that launched in 2008. Titled “Please B Okay”, it was a bright horn-driven melody that sampled vocals from Japanese soul-pop singer Taeko Ohnuki’s 1977 album Sunshower. I first came across the song because I’d been having an atypically unfavorable week and a friend messaged it with the hope of it being a momentary cure-all. “This instantly makes me feel better,” she said. Looking back, her remark shouldn’t have been a surprise: Oedipus had tagged the two-minute track as “selfcarecore”—a sure nod to its calming, feel-good properties.

By conventional industry standards, selfcarecore is not an established music genre, but it carries significance just the same. On SoundCloud, genres thrive on amorphism, defined more by a song’s uncompromising sentiment—rage, anxiety, body-rolling euphoria—than the pulse of the beat or musical composition. (A casual listener might be inclined to label “Please B Okay” as simply house music.) This has given the Berlin-based platform a unique advantage not just in breaking unknown talent but in becoming a breeding ground for experimental sounds.

A cursory scan of the streaming service reveals a deluge of genres: from kawaii trap and Nu Soul to
swooz, broken beat, and
stresswave. There are also artists like Sugg Savage, an ascendant Maryland newcomer who’s creating some of the best music of the moment and has become something of a Picasso in this regard: She has mothered genres as disparate as lowkey gospel (“Let’z”), spirit bounce (“Funk Bounce”), midnight boogie (“Party Dawg”), and bleep bloop blop pop (“Fill In The Blank”). Collectively, her songs could fit somewhere within the expanse of R&B, but a truer estimation of her work shows how each song belongs to a singular classification. “Let’z” draws from a multitude of sources—a Motown-soul-meets-Chicago-juke jambalaya of sonic bliss—but its core is imbued with the essence of gospel music: uplift, faith, a dogged optimism. “You better know he’s got a plan for you,” she croons just before the song’s conclusion, a sweetly sung aphorism that could just as easily have been pulled from the Bible. Hence: lowkey.

In early July, SoundCloud was reported to be on its last leg, having laid off 40 percent of its workforce in a move that, at best, felt reasonably apocalyptic. But cofounder Alexander Ljung remained confident, saying the digital music service, which had hoisted cultural forces like Chance the Rapper and Lorde to national audiences, was still solvent. SoundCloud was “completely unique,” he said. “You can can find artists there that don’t exist anywhere else. Many are the next ones to accept Grammys. There is tremendous financial and cultural impact on SoundCloud. It will stay strong.”

In spite of the company’s nebulous future, Ljung was right about one thing. The platform is an utterly one-of-a-kind domain. If SoundCloud set out to build a business model on community-oriented music streaming for DJs, musicians, nascent podcasters, and mixed-media artists, it soon reflected that plurality in every regard, a network whose parameters seemed borderless. There was a sound for everybody. Stresswave not your thing? Try chillwave. Or funk wave. Or future wave. You would be hard-pressed to find a platform that has allowed for organic discovery as seamlessly as SoundCloud. A handful of my current favorite artists—Nick Hakim, Kwabs, Sonder, and Kaytranada, whose novel flip of Janet Jackson’s enduring ballad “If” I still spin weekly—I first came across on the platform.

In time, too, the service fulfilled its own pledge, becoming a genre itself: SoundCloud rap, or what The New York Times recently deemed “the most vital and disruptive new movement in hip hop thanks to rebellious music, volcanic energy, and occasional acts of malevolence.” It’s a sound predicated on dissonance that prioritizes “abandon over structure, rawness over dexterity” and has been adopted by a crop of Florida upstarts, including Smokepurpp and Lil Pump, whose track “Molly” was one of the highest-played on the platform this month.

Like Chance the Rapper and Lorde before him, the Philadelphia-born rager Lil Uzi Vert parlayed his titanic success on SoundCloud—the company anointed him its most followed artist of 2016—into mainstream sustainability, a major-label deal, and a headlining tour. I shadowed Uzi for a day last summer, from the edges of New Jersey into the heart of the Lower Manhattan, just moments before he took the stage for a sold-out show. He’s been compared to Young Thug and Lil Yachty, rap eccentrics who have come to define a nontraditional hip hop sound. Currently, Uzi’s “XO Tour Llif3” ranks as the fourth-most-played song for the final week of July—coasting just above 1.4 million listens in the span of seven days. It’s a hazy melody about suicide, substance abuse, and his rocky relationship with his ex-girlfriend. But it’s not rap. Not really. On his SoundCloud page, Uzi tagged the song “alternative rock.”

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Gadgets

How Hip-Hop Producer Steve Lacy Makes Hits With … His Phone

Steve Lacy is a pretty big deal. He's part of the band The Internet, he's a producer for J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar, and he just put out his first solo album which he made on his iPhone.

In a week where sexual harassment allegations against powerful men continued to come to light and the situation continues to be dire in Puerto Rico, people have been turning to old traditions to keep their spirits high: Halloween, Stranger Things, and wondering what in the world is actually going with Taylor Swift right now. Well, it's that or wondering what in the world is happening in Spain, but that's not entirely uplifting. And those tidbits are just the beginning. Here's everything else the internet was talking about over the last seven days.

Coming Soon, But Not That Soon

What Happened: The first rule of show business is: Never over-promise on something you can't deliver. Last week, the president might've forgotten to apply the first rule of show business.

What Really Happened: Last weekend, President Trump sent out a tweet that (probably) no one saw coming.

The announcement seemed to come out of the blue, but as soon as it did it grabbed a lot of media attention. There was one detail, though, that Trump hadn't mentioned—namely, that the release of the files wasn't Trump's doing, but something that President George H.W. Bush scheduled 25 years ago. But that didn't matter to a lot of folks, who saw this tweet as a sign that Trump was, indeed, draining the swamp as promised.

Those who didn't count themselves amongst Trump's faithful were … a little less impressed.

Nonetheless, Trump did his best to play up the show, ensuring that people didn't forget what was coming with this tweet the day before:

So, what happened? Well, not exactly what was promised, it turns out.

Well, that's a letdown. Reports suggested that Trump made the decision to withhold the files himself. But bear in mind, he's still working on it, apparently.

The Takeaway: Actually, speaking of transparency…

The Picture of Donald Trump

What Happened: Well, if there's one thing last week taught everyone it's "ask a silly question, get a nonsensical answer."

What Really Happened: So, last week someone in the media asked President Trump if he thought he ought to act more civil. He replied that he was—but the media didn't present him that way.

Let's file this one under "people are unconvinced," yes?

Of course, with the media being so biased against him, there was almost certainly no way it'd share these comments. Oh wait. Never mind.

The Takeaway: Say what you like about Trump, he's certainly offering his fair share of quotable lines. Just look at them in context of some other presidential greatest hits!

Immigration Status Updates

What Happened: Meanwhile, in more serious news, the internet got very upset last week over developments in US authorities' approach to immigration issues, particularly those involving kids.

What Really Happened: Last week the increasingly ugly battle over immigration in the US saw two of its ugliest battles yet. First, there was a teen immigrant from Central America who was blocked from having an abortion by the Trump administration. (She had the abortion on Wednesday after a weeks-long legal battle.) Then, there was … this:

Yes, authorities detained a 10-year-old girl after emergency gallbladder surgery because she was an undocumented immigrant. The vast majority of social media was upset by the story.

However, not everyone was outraged. Some even saw what was going on as a good thing.

The Takeaway: And, sure; there's a case to be made that this is just what happens when you have an immigration policy that cares about the law and not individual cases. At least there's nothing that demonstrates that isn't the case, except that President Trump has apparently intervened to keep a Chinese dissident from being deported, because he's a Mar-a-Lago member. Occasionally, real life is stranger than fiction.

Ceci N’est Pas CNN

What Happened: CNN wants you to believe your eyes, and not pay attention to any men behind the curtain. Not everyone is on board with that advice.

What Really Happened: First, the news.

That's CNN's new ad campaign, launched last week addressing the fake news landscape directly. Response was fairly evenly split between those who saw what was being said and appreciated it—

—to those who were unconvinced—

—and then, there were those whose predilections were entirely in the other direction…

Nonetheless, as an ad campaign it definitely worked; everyone seemed to be talking about it, even if they were only doing so in the context of their new parody version.

Mission … accomplished?

The Takeaway: For those who weren't sure they were on board with the message, perhaps the problem was that the ad just didn't go far enough?

Come Together, Right Now, Over Rex

What Happened: Rex Tillerson offered up hope for a broken world. Kind of.

What Really Happened: When the internet can't agree on whether children should be deported while recovering from surgery or even whether an apple is, indeed, an apple, it's worth wondering if their shared reality is utterly broken. Are people all in such bubbles now that they can't agree on anything? Well, apparently, there is one thing everyone can go along with. And it's not what you might expect.

Yes, Rex Tillerson vocalized the one thing nearly everyone managed to agree on last week.

Tillerson's comments also went viral in mainstream media, proving even more that the desire to curl up in a ball is the one thing that brings everyone together. Sure, it's not the best of shared experiences, but it's a start, right? This is the turning point! Right here!

The Takeaway:

Clocks move forward this weekend, which can only mean it’s time for the East Coast to struggle under feet of snow once again. Well, that or it's time for Barack and Michelle Obama to team up with Netflix to produce shows to guide humanity into the future. While the world keeps turning, however, let’s answer this one very important question: What was the rest of the internet up to last week?

Sam Nunberg Does the Rounds

What Happened: In a move that surely delighted everyone who'd ever wanted to ignore all legal advice and do something stupid, one witness in the ongoing investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 election decided to do a media tour after receiving a subpoena for evidence. Whoops!

What Really Happened: Before last week, it’s probably fair to say that most people hadn’t heard of Sam Nunberg. Prior to Monday, he was pretty much known as a former Donald Trump campaign aide who didn’t like Trump. After this week, though? Well, now everyone knows who Sam Nunberg is.

How amazing was Nunberg’s MSNBC call? Amazing enough that people couldn’t really believe it was happening at the time.

Impressively enough, things only got stranger; once Nunberg was finished talking to Katy Tur, he started calling up other news shows for follow-ups.

As people started wondering whether he was sending a message to Trump or simply having some kind of public breakdown—many theories abounded—some people were just stunned that it didn’t seem to stop.

The Takeaway: The best part of it all? After a full day of telling people that he wasn’t going to co-operate with special counsel Robert Mueller, he then changed his mind and decided that, you know what? He’ll co-operate after all.

The Resignation of Gary Cohn

What Happened: The saga of “People Leaving the White House” continued last week as the director of the National Economic Council and chief economic advisor to President Trump jumped ship.

What Really Happened: He’s stuck with the president through thick, thin, and his talk of "both sides" following the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, but last week Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, finally found the thing that pushed him over the edge: trade tariffs.

The New York Times broke the story, but the news quickly spread. Cohn was leaving, and it was a big deal. As always, Twitter was swift to react.

While many were quick to praise Cohn as a man of principle, others wanted to put his resignation in some (much-needed) perspective.

Turns out, some people were upset about Cohn’s departure. And those people were the ones with money who paid attention to what the Trump Administration does in respect to financial planning.

That doesn’t seem like an incredibly positive sign. But the White House, as is traditional, wanted to play down the very idea that this was a problem.

How do those inside the building really feel, though? Let’s just look at how a couple of key figures Cohn worked with reacted to the news.

“Globalist,” huh? That's not too surprising, but as some pointed out, that can be read as an anti-Semitic term.

The Takeaway: But where will Cohn go now?

Coming Up After the Break

What Happened: How best to announce a major foreign policy moment? Maybe teasing it in the press room, like it’s a promo for The Apprentice? Can that be forgiven if it’s what it appears to be?

What Really Happened: It seemed like just a normal Thursday in the White House—which is to say chaotic (sorry, filled with great energy)—until, out of nowhere, the president came into the press room to drop an unexpected tease to the media.

That’s certainly exciting. But you know what’s more exciting? Finding out that the Pentagon wasn’t in the loop.

No, wait. That’s terrifying, not exciting. So, everyone wondered, what could it be? Things started to leak early, because … well, of course they did.

Turns out, the rumors was true: Trump had agreed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, after months of nuclear brinksmanship and name-calling. (Remember “Rocket Man” and boasts of bigger buttons?) Some were thrilled with the news.

Indeed, US senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina got very excited, offering a statement that seemed like a dare.

Why would you tell the North Koreans not to play Trump? Isn't that a huge part of the reason they’re doing this? You’re just going to make them want to do it even more. Don’t say things like that! No wonder that others were, shall we say, less than enthused about the move.

But let’s be optimistic for a brief second, while accepting that such naiveté is only likely to lead to heartache down the road. If this actually leads to a de-escalation in nuclear brinksmanship with North Korea, never mind the rumored retirement of the North Korean nuclear program, that would be an astonishing accomplishment, even if it was one that was accidentally arrived at rather than the game of four-dimensional chess everyone would rather pretend it is. Here’s to … the potential continuation of peace?

The Takeaway: There is one thing that almost everyone can count on during whatever happens in the meeting between the leaders, of course.

More Stormy Weather

What Happened: Just when you thought there was no more juice left in the Stormy Daniels/Donald Trump affair, things continued to get, well, juicier.

What Really Happened: Let’s check in on the apparently ongoing Stormy Daniels/Donald Trump affair. Well, one kind of affair, at least. You might think you know everything there is to know about what happened, but apparently not.

Yes, amazingly, President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen complained that he was never reimbursed for his payoff to Stephanie Clifford, the adult actress known as Stormy Daniels, which is a fascinating revelation considering that the president, according to Cohen, knew nothing about this whole thing.

Still, surely things can't get any worse.

No no. We said surely things can't get any worse.

Sometimes, you have to wonder just how good of a lawyer Michael Cohen really is, don’t you? Or even if he is a lawyer at all…

Oh, but wait! Then Clifford sued Trump, claiming that the agreement used to try and buy her silence was actually invalid because Trump had never signed it. Ridiculous enough yet? Well, then there’s what the lawsuit actually revealed.

Yes, the lawsuit turned out to be required reading that raised all kinds of questions, some of which were asked to the person whose job is supposed to be answering questions for the president.

Of course, that response raised a somewhat obvious problem.

This apparently didn’t go down well in the White House.

As everyone talked about Trump’s unhappiness, some pointed out that it’s not like it was the press secretary's fault, per se.

Who’d work in the White House, at this point? No matter what you do, you’re more than likely to upset the man in the Oval Office.

The Takeaway: At least there’s nothing inherently contradictory in the positions taken here.

They’re All Gonna Laugh @ You

What Happened: What would you do if your Amazon Alexa just started laughing at you for no immediately obvious reason?

What Really Happened: It’s been a while since we’ve thought about the idea that artificial intelligences and new technologies are actually going to betray humanity, and yet here it is: Amazon’s Alexa is laughing at people.

Spooky and weird, as we’re sure you’d agree. But, it turns out, that person wasn’t alone.

Yes, this is how The Terminator starts these days: The robot revolution is all about home devices loudly judging the people who use them. Many, of course, saw this coming.

As it happened, Amazon had an explanation for the whole thing, but that didn’t stop everyone freaking out about it anyway. Of course, not everyone was freaked out by the laughter…

Some even felt like things didn’t go far enough…

Come on, denizens of the internet. Can’t you just accept that some things are weird for once?

The Takeaway: If only there was a way to simultaneously dunk on one brand while promoting another…

More WIRED Culture

Last Saturday I did something nearly everyone does when their friend goes to the bathroom at a bar: I checked Twitter. There, amidst the Hurricane Irma updates and breathless discussion about Hillary Clinton’s new book, was a very simple message from Darren Aronofsky. After spending a few seconds to try and remember when I actually started following the Black Swan director (inconclusive), I realized what his message was saying: “now #nyc #scavengerhunt” next to an image of Jennifer Lawrence from his upcoming movie mother! and a New York telephone number. My friend returned from the bathroom and I showed her the tweet. “I think Darren Aronofsky is having a scavenger hunt in New York tonight,” I said. My friend, the smart one, just said, “Well, call and find out.”

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I dialed. A prerecorded message delivered in what I can only best describe as Stalker Siri said “Welcome” and informed me that my pilgrimage began by going to the northeast corner of Columbus Park, where I was to look for the “ape with the horn.” (I later learned it was “agent with the horn”—the Stonewall Inn is pretty loud, even at 4 pm on a Saturday.) We were only about 30 minutes away. I jotted the info on a bar napkin and we headed to Chinatown.

As soon as we got there, I immediately spotted a few people in film-student chic surrounding a woman in mechanics’ coveralls standing next to what looked like a saxhorn. (Maybe? I don’t know horns.) My friend pointed out that she had an earpiece in. Definitely an agent. Fully realizing I was a grown-ass person about to ask another full adult if she was part of a scavenger hunt to see a Jennifer Lawrence movie, I hung back for a few minutes and played with my phone, like a creep. The film students took off.

I approached the woman. She looked me directly in the eye. “Um, hi. I’m…” “Whom do you seek?” she asked. Crap. Was this like Sleep No More? Was I supposed to have a character? I stammered. “Mother?” This was the right answer. “Thumb,” she said. I stuck my opposable up like Maverick getting into an F-14 cockpit. She produced a stamp pad and a square of thin paper. I gave her my thumbprint. (This would’ve been a great scam for someone attempting to steal my iPhone.) She told me to take the paper across the street and find the yellow paint on the sidewalk and follow it until I found “the agent with the suitcase.” (All these agents! The details of mother! had been kept tightly under wraps in the weeks before its release, but I was pretty sure no one was KGB. That’s Lawrence’s other movie.)

I retrieved my friend and said, “We’ve got to go.” Sure enough, there was a dribble of golden paint on the sidewalk leading west on Bayard Street into SoHo. The yellow paint road ended and … nothing. There was a dude with a knapsack sitting outside the back entrance of a store. Couldn’t be. Again, awareness that you’re an adult holding a copy of your thumbprint asking a stranger if he’s an “agent” feels weird. Even in New York City. (Well, not really.) “Ask him,” my friend said. I approached. “Are you the agent with the suitcase?” He stared blankly. “Sorry. Never mind.” “Wait. … Listen for it.” I stopped. Someone down an alley was literally whistling. Next to a goddamn suitcase. I approached and held out my thumbprint paper like an idiot. The man, in a trench coat and sporting a finely waxed handlebar mustache, took out a lighter and lit the paper on fire and smiled. (He no longer could unlock my phone, but this was now an excellent opportunity for a mugging or making a career shift to sex work.) He lifted the suitcase and placed it flat across my arms. Opening it, he produced a red pepper and told me it was all I needed. I took it and walked away, so confused.

Showing it to my friend I realized I could hear and feel something jangling inside. I cracked it open. It was a skeleton key attached to a gold disc with the number “89” embossed on it. Maybe this actually was a ploy to get me to take up hooking. Hey, I don’t know what Aronofsky does with his weekends. Then I realized there was another phone number pressed into the metal. I called it. A slightly different sounding Stalker Siri congratulated me on “making it this far” and told me I’d been granted entrance to the premiere of mother! The key was my ticket and I had to find yet another agent at 51st Street and 6 ½ Avenue on September 13. (6 ½ Avenue is a real place, conveniently located near Radio City Music Hall.) The voice also instructed me to “dress for a funeral.” (Who was dead? What was dead? Me? Aronofsky’s career? Paramount Pictures’ marketing budget? I had no idea.)

Exactly what the whole scavenger hunt had to do with mother! is unclear. Even after seeing the film, it's hard to see the connection. Though that might be intentional. Prior to its release, very few details about Aronofsky's movie made it to the public. The plot was simply described as "a couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home." People who saw it early were asked to sign NDAs. Maybe the themes of the hunt were intentionally different than those of the movie so as not to spoil it. (To be fair, the film does feature people on a pilgrimage, there is a funeral of sorts, and I think I remember seeing a red pepper.) What's more clear is why the director would hold a scavenger hunt in the first place. When you're treating your movie's plot like Schrödinger's cat, you've gotta do something to get people interested in its box.

Four days after the hunt, I went to the prescribed location and found the same agent who’d taken my thumbprint. This time she was in a black dress with a funeral veil on. “Nice to see you again,” she said as I produced my key. “One ticket or two?” I took two. I was bringing the friend I’d dragged through this whole mess in the first place. We went inside Radio City Music Hall, where Aronofsky introduced his film and apologized for what it was about to do.

I’m telling you all this because the whole mess is ridiculous. I’m also telling you all this because trying to explain, analyze, or unpack mother! is like trying to follow a Mobius strip to its rightful end. There isn’t one, and trying to point people to one isn’t fair. Aronofsky’s new film is about a couple's life getting upended by the arrival of new guests, but it's also the story of what happens when creators (like Javier Bardem's character "Him") value their creations above all else (like Lawrence's "Mother"). It's bizarre, a horror-tragicomedy that leaves conclusions up to you. (That’s a compliment.) I’m not even sure if it’s good, but it hasn’t escaped my mind in days, so my inkling is that its provocative qualities eclipse the fact that it begs the question “Am I enjoying this?” Some see it as a religious allegory, others as a call for ecological awareness. Many claim it’s beyond the pale. Everyone is correct. Or they're wrong. It doesn't matter. Aronofsky’s garden of earthly delights might be the strangest thing out there until Stranger Things comes back, and that makes it the perfect antidote to the summer’s superheroes.

As the credits rolled, the floor below the screen began to open and a silhouette appeared in the darkness. I whispered to no one in particular, “That’s fucking Patti Smith.” That’s not a joke. She really showed up and did a three-song set, read Rebecca Solnit’s reinterpretation of “Our Father,” and closed the night by dedicating “Because the Night” to Lawrence and “her chosen one.” Like so many other aspects of mother!, I don’t want to overanalyze why this happened, I just want to be glad that it did.

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Over the course of five Predator films, the titular alien hunters have taken on jungle grunts, LA cops, and even a few xenomorphs. But at a panel for the forthcoming sequel The Predator at Comic-Con International, it was revealed there was an equally super-powered warrior residing among the movie’s cast: Thomas Jane.

"Thomas," asked Sterling K. Brown, The Predator's Will Traeger, "would you do everyone a favor and show them your feet real quick?" Jane, the star of such Comic-Con-beloved hits as The Expanse and The Punisher, obligingly propped his bare toes on the table. "Thomas doesn’t wear shoes!" Brown exclaimed. "He walked everywhere in Vancouver, in the middle of winter, with nothing on his feet. I thought, 'You should be cold right now!'"

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The panel for The Predator was full of similarly personal revelations, as the film’s cast members—including Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key, Jake Busey, Trevante Rhodes, and Augusto Aguilera—gathered in Hall H to reveal early footage from the movie, which is directed and co-written by Shane Black. The original 1987 Predator, Black said, "was a piece of perfect pop art: The alien craze of the ‘80s and the Rambo craze, put together. And it had a wink to it, because you had these muscular guys with weapons that were absolutely ridiculous." (Not to mention the occasional ridiculously choppy one-liner.)

Black's new version, he noted, was intended as a sort of "Dirty Half-Dozen.” In one clip screened for the hall, Munn—playing a government biologist—finds herself in a hotel room with a group of sarcastic ex-soldiers who've just escaped an encounter with a deadly Predator. "They have me on call," Munn’s character says, "in case there’s … contact." Throwing together a bunch of outsiders, and casting the movie with a squad of recognizable character actors, gave Black "a chance to bounce people off each other," he said,"and make these guys as relatable as possible."

That bounciness continued after filming was finished. "My favorite thing on a film is set building an almost insta-culture," said Key. "We spent a lot of time in my trailer watching YouTube videos, blaxploitation movies, Dolemite movies, The Room. We would do everything in our power to get some moment from those movies into our movie.” Key was especially keen on getting one of his favorite blaxploitation lines into The Predator. "I tried six times: 'Bitch, are you for real?'"

Black also debuted a sequence in which a Predator—after nearly offing an on-the-run trio played by Munn, Room star Jacob Tremblay, and Logan’s Boyd Holbrook—is annihilated by a bigger, meaner, never-before-seen Predator that’s eager for revenge. "There’s a faction on Predator homeworld that’s been bested not once, but twice, by earthlings," said Black. "They send their champions to earth, and they don’t come home. They don’t like that. So we figured they want to punch back."

So did Munn, who wanted to make sure her scientist character could handle a firearm with relative ease. "When you see a movie where a guy picks up a gun, he just automatically knows how to use it," she said. "And girls are just like, 'I don’t know…' I didn’t want her to be proficient, because she’s not a soldier. But I wanted her to know how [to shoot], the ways guys know how."

Yet the biggest skill on display was Jane’s foot-free lifestyle (the actor explained that he spent years in a shoeless society, and was kicked out after wearing shoes to a restaurant). It was a moment that made everyone in the room think: Are you for real? "As a black man who has fought really hard to get good tennis shoes," said Sterling, "and to have good coverage on both of his feet. I’m like, this is a white man who’s just like, 'My feet are tough enough.'" Whether they’re tough enough to help The Predator crew outrun the enemy remains to be seen.

You've got your Netflix subscription and Amazon Prime. You’ve got HBO Now, at least when Game of Thrones is on, and maybe pay up for a more specialized service too, like Crunchyroll or the WWE Network. It’s already a lot! Bad news: It’s about to get worse.

The notion that streaming services might someday totally supplant the monolithic cable package has glittered on the horizon for years now. But as that future becomes increasingly the present, an uncomfortable reality has set in: There’s too much. To Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and HBO Now, add WarnerMedia, Disney, and Apple as omnibus, general-interest streaming destinations. Investors have poured a billion dollars into something called Quibi, which has an unfortunate name but exclusive Guillermo del Toro content. And the niche options continue to proliferate as well, whether it’s DC Universe or College Humor. If we’re not at the breaking point yet, we’re surely about to find it.

“Everybody wants to talk about how much money’s being spent on content. But as a consumer, don’t you already feel like you have enough content choices out there?" says Dan Rayburn, a streaming media analyst with Frost & Sullivan. "Our eyeballs and the time that we have to consume media of any kind is being challenged."

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with choice. That’s especially true if your interests run more niche, outside the relatively anodyne confines of a cable package, or even the relatively mainstream offerings of Netflix and Amazon. "The abundance of programming and commercial viability of smaller audiences is making it possible for storytelling from a much wider range of experiences to finally be available," says Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan and author of Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television.

But while tailored, a la carte services have long been the promise of streaming TV, it's starting to look more like a series of pricey buffets. Competing megacorporations are all pumping billions into original content, much of it designed for mass appeal. (Apple has reportedly mandated no "gratuitous sex, profanity or violence" on its incoming streaming service.) And even if each also produces more experimental or idiosyncratic options, you’ll be hard pressed to access all or even most of them. The show that scratches your itch won't necessarily be on a platform you can afford to pay for.

Jennifer Holt, UCSB

"Realistically you're not going to have a consumer with more than two or three services per month,” says Rayburn. Especially when you consider that these streaming services still largely supplement, rather than replace, traditional cable packages. There’s only so much disposable income to go around, no matter how much you care for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

"In a lot of ways it's an extension of the narrowcasting that began in the 1980s, with cable," says Jennifer Holt, a media studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But by advancing that trend, it also exacerbates the fragmentation of culture that came with it. Again, that has plenty of potential benefit, giving otherwise marginalized perspectives more opportunities for representation. But it paradoxically may also make those shows increasingly hard to find.

"There was a time, the '70s or the '80s, when you knew what channel your show was on," says Holt. "That kind of got lost in a lot of ways, with certain streaming services. Now maybe the idea of branding this content will take on different dimensions. You’re going to have to know where to find it. It becomes more work."

Meanwhile, the splintering of services also threatens to hasten the decay of a broader, shared cultural conversation. "It starts to evacuate the potential for any real communal, cultural touchstone when we’re all watching completely different services," says Holt.

All else being equal, one might expect all of this to be a blip, a temporary flash of exuberance that will subside once good old fashioned market forces clear away the rabble. But the untimely death of net neutrality, along with a merger-friendly Justice Department, have left all else quite explicitly unequal.

"I think the bigger issue is what happens in the aftermath of net neutrality's elimination," says Lotz, who argues that allowing ISPs to enforce paid prioritization is "more likely to change the marketplace for the services in profound ways."

AT&T owns WarnerMedia, for instance, and so can not only potentially offer its impending streaming service at a discount—or for free—to its mobile or cable customers, but could prioritize its performance on its network, and downgrade that of rivals. (WarnerMedia hasn’t announced pricing yet, but if any of this seems far-fetched, note that AT&T already offers DirecTV Now discounts for mobile customers, and doesn’t count DirecTV Now streaming against data caps.) Comcast, meanwhile owns NBCUniversal, which gives it a sizable stake in Hulu; it also recently acquired Sky, which operates Now TV, a popular streaming service internationally.

The cable-content hybrid companies, in fact, win no matter what. Even if you pass on their streaming service, they can always make up the difference by charging more for broadband.

Dan Rayburn, Frost & Sullivan

And then there are the companies for whom a streaming platform is a means to a greater end. Apple isn't an ISP, but it does want to sell iPhones and iPads and Apple TVs, and will reportedly make at least some aspects of its streaming service free for hardware customers—just as, Holt notes, the early radio programs only existed to help radio companies sell more radios. Likewise, Amazon attempting to drive Prime subscriptions. All of which is to say, the field will stay crowded for longer than you might expect.

There are some bright spots in all of this, especially when you think small. "The services that work very well are the niche services, the ones that are targeting a specific type of user with a specific type of content," says Rayburn. Those more targeted services have also forged new business models; Rayburn points to CuriosityStream, which recently embraced sponsors to help lower prices for viewers.

And Holt notes that most popular streaming services currently have fairly liberal password-sharing policies; as long as that holds true, she says, piracy could be the tie that binds us.

As more megaservices fill the landscape, though, one wonders how long before the niche upstarts feel the squeeze. And as your streaming options continue to kaleidoscope, what's coming next looks promising, sure, but also daunting. Especially given who it's coming from.

"The combination of the digital distributor, whether it's the mobile phone or the ISP, and the content delivery, to me that’s the bleak future we’re headed toward," says Holt. "I don’t think it's going to work out for consumers."