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TV once had the single, oppressive goal of amusing as many people as possible at the same time, which is also what made it so stupid: “Television is the way it is,” David Foster Wallace wrote in 1993, “simply because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests

The SVOD model (streaming video on demand) liberated TV from the law of averages and the prison of time and made it seem as if our refined, moral and intelligent interests might now be found on the other side of the screen.

Lotz argues that by freeing itself from the core goal of linear television — selling an assembled audience to advertisers — the streaming model “completely changes the calculus of programming.” That’s because “instead of building an audience,” Lotz writes, “on-demand delivery allows SVODs to build audiences.”

while an end to the content boom may be hard on writers, directors and actors, it could offer viewers some relief.

Netflix and other streaming services sold the U.S. public on convenience and abundance

this came with a cost. Binge-watching and the content boom helped atomize American culture

“Girl” sounds like a film that transgender moviegoers might rally around. It depicts a teenage trans girl, Lara, raised by a single father who supports not only her dreams of becoming a ballerina but also her gender confirmation surgery. It’s set in Belgium, so much of Lara’s health care is paid for and her doctor and therapist are encouraging caregivers. And it’s a prize winner that is up for a best foreign-language Golden Globe on Sunday.

Yet “Girl,” which has been picked up by Netflix, faces a firestorm, one that pits the director, Lukas Dhont; the trans woman who inspired it, the dancer Nora Monsecour; and the film’s supporters against trans activists and others who consider its scrutiny of a trans character’s body so dangerous that they urge no one to see it

“Girl” asks a provocative question: Have we gotten to a place where a film can explore dark aspects of an individual trans character without feeling regressive? No one should have the burden of representing a class of people in a film; real people are complicated. But what happens when a movie is both art and a trigger?

around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear weapons technology” to a powerful rival, as Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, put it. Studios needed those same beloved movies and shows for the streaming services they were building from scratch, and fueling Netflix’s rise was only hurting them. The content spigots were, in large part, turned off.

Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.

The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MTV and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of TV” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming.

It’s not just TV, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice.

offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality.

When The OA debuted in a surprise drop at the end of 2016, it quickly became one of Netflix’s coveted word-of-mouth hits, as viewers furiously debated its meaning, its mythology, its magniloquence

If there was one factor that seemed to unnerve some people about The OA, it was its sincerity

This trend, Batmanglij theorized, is part of a reaction to the fact that reality feels more and more fractured, with its online portals to different worlds, and its varying versions of the truth

Courts usually don’t let cats argue cases. But here was Rod Ponton, a county attorney in Presidio County, Texas, unable to figure out how to turn off the cat filter on his Zoom call during a hearing on Tuesday in Texas’ 394th Judicial District Court.

The result was a video immediately hailed across the internet as an instant classic,

“If I can make the country chuckle for a moment in these difficult times they’re going through, I’m happy to let them do that at my expense,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon.

chances are you’ve been watched, liked and followed by a crush, a lover or an ex.

Prying eyes on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter can be exciting when they come from a prospective romantic partner, confusing when unrequited and infuriating when the looker is an ex

this 21st-century phenomenon, which has joined ghosting, Netflix and chill, breadcrumbing and other recent entries to the dating lexicon.

There is no shortage of hype about artificial intelligence and big data, but models are the source of the real power behind these tools. A model is a decision framework in which the logic is derived by algorithm from data, rather than explicitly programmed by a developer or implicitly conveyed via a person’s intuition. The output is a prediction on which a decision can be mad

Once created, a model can learn from its successes and failures with speed and sophistication that humans usually cannot match

Building this system requires a mechanism (often software-based) to collect data, processes to create models from the data, the models themselves, and a mechanism (also often software based) to deliver or act on the suggestions from those models.

Overall, this year has offered little encouragement. In 2020, the Russell 1000 Growth Index returned 38.49 percent, while the Russell 1000 Value Index returned 2.8 percent, according to Morningstar.

And since Oct. 28, for example, the same Russell 1000 Growth Index gained 9.73 percent through December, while the Russell 1000 Value Index rose 15.14 percent.

Such stocks have been surpassed in the market by so-called growth stocks — which grow at such a rapid rate that investors focus more on their apparently glowing future than on corporate profits, which may be negligible or nonexistent.

in a much-needed and well-timed satire of snowflake hand-wringing over the Australian bush fires, the Sun’s politically incorrect columnist Jeremy Clarkson declared the continent unfit for human habitation and welcomed scorched whiteys back to the motherland, unaccompanied minors and all.

Clarkson’s suggestion that Australians needed to “come home”, while unconsciously prefiguring the mass migrations the climate crisis will cause in this decade, could read as a slap in the face to indigenous Australians, for whom the continent has always been “home”

Both Clarkson’s and Turd’s careers have flourished by exploiting the notion that they are lone voices of sanity against a politically correct snowflake cabal intent on silencing normal blokes like them

ara Menker runs a private company, Gro Intelligence, that uses data and AI to make predictions about climate change and food security, but when she appeared before the U.N. Security Council on May 19, she sounded more like an advocate. Gro’s data has found that, because of rising food prices around the world, 400 million people have become food insecure in the last 5 months alone. (Food insecurity, as Gro defines it, means people living on $3.59 a day or less.)

Menker, 39, who was chosen as one of TIME’s Most Influential People in 2021, was born in Ethiopia, attended college at Mount Holyoke, worked as a commodities trader on Wall Street, and left to start Gro to use technology to tackle challenges like hunger and climate change. Today, Gro works with governments and big food companies, analyzing hundreds of trillions of data points from satellites, governments, and private sources, to forecast the supply of agricultural products globally.

In recent months, as the war in Ukraine raged on, Gro’s systems started flagging problems that were putting a growing number of people at risk of going hungry. Some were worsened by the war, but many others have been building for longer, caused by the actions of other governments banning exports or imposing tariffs. Menker talked to TIME shortly after briefing the U.N.

Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify seems to believe, the company’s content rules.

As a matter of principle, Mr Rogan should be able to speak. As a commercial question, Spotify has made a publisher’s gamble that his wildly popular show will attract more customers than it repels—just as Netflix recently bet that Dave Chappelle’s risqué comedy show would tickle more subscribers than it turned off. The gamble is, in the most literal sense, Spotify’s business.

The result is that the content mix on audio platforms is starting to look less like the curated library of Netflix and more like the infinite hotch-potch of YouTube. Unlike other social networks, however, audio platforms have little experience in moderating content.

Affected sites included Twitter (TWTR, Tech30), Etsy (ETSY), Github, Vox, Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) and Reddit.

"If you take out one of these DNS service providers, you can disrupt a large number of popular online services, which is exactly what we're seeing today," said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at cybersecurity startup SentinelOne.

The massive outage drew the attention of the FBI which said Friday that it was "investigating all potential causes" of the attack.

a speech this month by a Stanford University lecturer and entrepreneur named Balaji S. Srinivasan. The speech gained attention in technology circles. But it deserves a wider audience, because it was an unusually honest articulation of ideas that are common among members of a digital overclass whose decisions shape ever more of our lives.

told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become “the Microsoft of nations”: outdated and obsolescent. When technology companies calcify, Mr. Srinivasan said, you don’t reform them. You exit and launch your own. Why not do so with America?

In practice, this vision calls for building actual communities that would be beyond the reach of the state that Silicon Valley’s libertarians despise. But in the near term, Mr. Srinivasan noted, there are piecemeal ways to opt out of the society — like spending unregulated digital currency, sleeping in unregulated hotels and manufacturing unregulated guns. What Mr. Srinivasan called “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” he explained, “basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology.”

the regulations could radically reshape how Internet content is delivered to consumers. For example, if a gaming company cannot afford the fast track to players, customers could lose interest and its product could fail.

The rules are also likely to eventually raise prices as the likes of Disney and Netflix pass on to customers whatever they pay for the speedier lanes,

“Americans were promised, and deserve, an Internet that is free of toll roads, fast lanes and censorship — corporate or governmental.”

a closer look at the forces that drive the relentless pace at elite companies suggests that — however much the most sought-after employers in the country may be changing their official policies — brutal competition remains an inescapable component of workers’ daily lives. In some ways it’s getting worse.

the basic problem is that the rewards for ascending to top jobs at companies like Netflix and Goldman Sachs are not just enormous, they are also substantially greater than at companies in the next tier down. As a result, far more people are interested in these jobs than there are available slots, leading to the brutal competition

Grueling competition remains perhaps the defining feature of the upper echelon in today’s white-collar workplace.

Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.

The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days

there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?

For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.

One theory of the case, and the one that the Obama administration embraced Monday, is that the Internet is like electricity. It is fundamental to the 21st century economy, as essential to functioning in modern society as electricity. It is a public utility. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” the president said in his written statement.