Hollywood and the Deepfake Treatment
New opportunities in the entertainment industry and the information strategic environment.
A. The convicted terrorist of the Christchurch mosque shootings on 15th March 2019 is demanding a judicial appeal. Institutional arrangements are in place to prevent his notoriety: this can be viewed via both a civil affairs and a psychological operations lens.
B. National intelligence dissemination processes around the Director of National Intelligence in the United States are under greater public scrutiny for alleged procedural anomalies.
C. I finally saw all of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020): a time travel thriller with Great Power competition; SOF direct action; cyberwarfare / information warfare; and various non-state actors. The film was criticised on its release for sound design that often muffled the actors’ dialogue and other diegetic elements. Nolan’s film script is publicly available - and is tightly written in terms of Hollywood’s standard format conventions.
D. COL Chaveso Cook and LTC Nicole Alexander have a Special Warfare Journal article on elevating Civil Affairs and PSYOP in the SOF-Space-Cyber triad that begins with a threat scenario (thus integrated Strategic Foresight as well).
E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on the Art of Color created by Dr Peter Dourmashkin.
F. Edward Satchi has used AI to restore footage that was cut from Orson Welles’ classic The Magnificent Ambersons. Classical Hollywood cinema and Auteur directors are now getting the Deepfake treatment. Meanwhile, contemporary Hollywood is struggling to survive in the post-COVID world.
G. About 10 years ago, I went to a lot of academic presentations on smart houses. They are apparently terrible to live in.
H. Debt and the goldbug rush to the gold safe haven are interlinked.
I. A leak of the classic Al Di Meola jazz album Casino (1978).
J. On Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ideological worldview.
K. Allegra Spender MP (Member for Wentworth, NSW) talks about investment in an Arnotts special investment vehicle. A couple of observations. The offer being oversubscribed means that investment banks (private capital) likely bought up the offer. Arnotts being owned by Kolhberg Kravis Roberts fits the trend that private equity / private credit markets are a dominant institutional play - i.e. this will also drive the observed herding behaviour for being oversubscribed. Many of the other investment sectors and categories that Spender mentions are normative or ideological priorities for Spender and her electorate voters; they are not considered as such by the investment banks and other (alternative) asset investors who oversubscribed. This is best understood as both a behavioural “revealed preference” of deal / manager / investment vehicle selection, and a risk-return trade-off. Hence, these managers will likely either dismiss or delimit many of the other fiscal, public and social policy issues and “wicked problems” that Spender mentions in her speech. You can also consider this speech (or any speech by a politician) via the lens of argumentation / rhetoric.