Latest news with #TheSecondComing
Daily Maverick
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Crossed Wires: Artificial intelligence slouches towards the advertising industry
Quite suddenly, AI is shredding long-established norms everywhere in this vaunted industry. One of the most startling developments has been the release of Meta's Veo 3, a text-to-video application released a few weeks ago, which has to be seen to be believed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? — WB Yeats, The Second Coming Perhaps it's a bit of an overkill to link AI's looming encroachment on the advertising industry to Yeats' darkly foreboding poem. Yet, having just returned from Cannes, where the global ad industry's biggest event, the Golden Lions, is held, it was clear that AI was hanging like a shadow — not visible to everyone perhaps, but obvious at least to those who are certain of the disruption to come. They were the ones who looked like deer caught in the headlights, standing startled and paralysed amid the glitz and glamour of the event. I was there to present a paper titled 'AI in Advertising: Governance, Regulation and Other Troubles' on behalf of the Icas (International Council for Advertising Self-Regulation) Global Think Tank. I was not the only one talking about AI in Cannes; the conversations and presentations were everywhere. One disquieting question didn't have to be articulated: has the advertising industry arrived at its Fleet Street moment? The question refers to the collapse of the printed newspaper business in the mid-'90s, catalysed by digitisation and the internet, which brutally upended an industry that had remained largely unchanged for more than a century. There were many casualties and only a few survivors in its wake — which is what is likely to happen in advertising. Quite suddenly, AI is shredding long-established norms everywhere in this vaunted industry. One of the most startling developments has been the release of Meta's Veo 3, a text-to-video application released a few weeks ago, which has to be seen to be believed (just go to YouTube and search for Veo 3; here is but one example). The quality of the video and the AI 'actors' and locations is indistinguishable from those shot with cameras and populated by human actors and extras. With Veo 3, the user describes the scene they want to see, gives the actors a 'script' and 'directions', and Veo 3 does the rest. (Veo 3 is not the only text-to-video app, just the latest.) Professional-level text-to-video is a brand-new strand of Generative AI. There are, of course, grumbles. It has limitations. Currently, Veo 3 can only render eight seconds of video. Some visual elements are difficult to control or 'not quite right'. It is expensive. Expensive? Consider this: A marketing director will brief an agency to deliver a 30-second video commercial. The agency then refines the brief, perhaps with a rough storyboard and brand/campaign context, and passes it on to a few video production companies. One of those companies comes up with a creative approach and pitches a treatment: three days of shooting, four locations, three actors, 10 extras, two weeks of post-production. Budget? $1.5-million. Or the agency can use Veo 3 in the hands of a single tech-savvy director and perhaps a good human Veo 3 expert. Cost? $150,000, with 10 differently flavoured commercials rendered for presentation to the client within two weeks. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this is going. It signals the end of video production companies, except for live events or productions with celebrity actors. One estimate I heard at the conference predicted 3,000 production company bankruptcies globally within two years. And it may mean the end of some ad agencies if some corporations decide to plough the money they're saving in production costs into forming new in-house agencies. Dystopian scenario This scenario isn't even the worst of it. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently spelt out the following audacious and dystopian scenario: 'We're going to get to a point where you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that's going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.' Here is his vision: A business comes to Meta with a product and a few ideas, and then Meta takes over; it does everything: creative concept, production, media strategy, analytics. Then AI constantly refines the ad in near-real time, on an ongoing basis, until it performs at maximum efficiency. Zuckerberg, somewhat brutally, implied that, in the future, advertising agencies will not be required. There are those who will strenuously object, who will talk about brand strategy and management, understanding client product roadmaps, and other assumed sacred cows — the 'deep' cores of the agency proposition. These too, I submit, will fall to AI as soon as it learns from hundreds of thousands of successful brand case studies and is able to generate a plethora of its own novel approaches. Audience targeting Finally, there is the matter of audience targeting. The holy grail of the advertising industry has long been the idea of the perfectly relevant ad — one that is pitched directly and only to individual consumers who are looking to buy that very product or service. Consumers have also sought the same thing: ads that matter to them and do not waste their attention. It has been assumed to be a perfect match of incentives. But AI is now able to understand much more about individuals than we are comfortable with. By analysing our internet behaviour, our social media behaviour, our friends, our devices, our buying patterns, even the tenor of our emotional states when we post, AI can paint a near-perfect picture of who we are at any moment. This intrusion is a privacy nightmare, one demanding regulation, which may not be properly enforceable in a fast-fracturing and chaotic landscape. There will, of course, be some advertising agencies which grab the nettle and shed their old skins to quickly embrace and exploit AI, perhaps pivoting quickly enough to other business models to avoid obsolescence. Others will end up like the celluloid film editors I used to know, obstinately and proudly refusing to submit to the newfangled video editing systems that started arriving in the late 1990s. They were brave and foolhardy, and they died alone. DM Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.
Edmonton Journal
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Edmonton Journal
Edmonton rapper Headline addresses MMA fighter's death on new album
Article content Album single No Diddy (Gotham City) is a braggadocious hype song built over a mosaic of triumphant horns and cinematic strings. Rick Ross also shows up to rap about wearing thousand-dollar jeans and a watch worth a hundred stacks. Dig the way the horns switch up under the Teflon Don's verses, giving it an air of mafioso menace. Closing off The Second Coming is Teezus, perhaps the most personal song Headline has released. On it, he addresses the death of his friend Trokon Dousuah, who died after injuries sustained in a charity mixed martial arts fight in November 2024. 'I knew I had to honour Teezy in a way the both of us knew I could,' says Elechko. 'I put every ounce of thought and heart into creating a song that would be the legacy of his final moments immortalized in song, like the true champions of old.'
The Independent
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
In breezy satire Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm channels Don Draper
'Things fall apart,' the Irish poet WB Yeats wrote in his 1919 poem 'The Second Coming'. 'Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' All epochs move, inexorably, towards decline, and so too, apparently, all happy lives. That's the premise of half the television put out into the world – a good life, ruined – not least the new Apple TV+ crime saga Your Friends & Neighbors, which shows the American Dream going up in smoke. Andrew 'Coop' Cooper (Jon Hamm) has the perfect life: a beautiful family, a palace in the suburbs, a job at a hedge fund that pays handsomely. Almost overnight, he loses everything. His wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), runs off with one of his best friends, athletics mogul Nick (Mark Tallman), and Coop finds himself living in a rental with his bipolar sister, Ali (Lena Hall). To add to his struggles, he loses his job – and a big pot of money – after a one-night stand with a colleague. But the alimony cheques still have to be written and the Maserati's not going to refuel itself. 'I just want to know how long I could float on what I've got,' he asks his friend, and business manager, Barney (Hoon Lee). The answer is 'not long' – that is until Coop realises that he has access to all the luxury items stored, oh so carelessly, in the houses of his country club peers. Regular men pushed into a life of crime is a subgenre of its own. Accountant turned money launderer (Ozark), chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin (Breaking Bad), judge turned vigilante (Your Honour); now we have hedge-fund manager turned cat burglar. It's a role that gives Hamm another chance to flex his smoothie skills. Coop's narration purrs through a social critique of the life he's living ('the age-old economics of social extortion') even while he struggles, frantically, to keep up appearances (a concept reinforced by a truly dreadful theme song). The key to Coop's success as a thief lies in the conformity of his milieu. They all wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, value the same bottles of wine. 'Nobody, even the cops apparently, would suspect a guy like me,' Coop confesses. Hamm is an actor of quite limited range – or, more charitably, is frequently typecast – but he is a master of a type of depressive confidence. He specialises in portraying men who exude charm but clearly have something missing. It's not too reductive to compare Coop to Don Draper, his fabled role on Mad Men: both men behave amorally while also exhibiting a strict moral code. Men, that is, of contradictions. Your Friends & Neighbors is clearly a vehicle for Hamm's talents (and popularity), but there is still space for the 'friends and neighbours' too. Peet manages to bring some sympathy to the faintly monstrous ex-wife, while there are fun roles for Olivia Munn, as a recent divorcee whose life is disintegrating in parallel, and Aimee Carrero as Elena, Coop's old maid who becomes his accomplice. It's all very easy on the eye. Showrunner Jonathan Tropper has written a solid, if uninspiring story, and Apple have brought it to the screen with the sort of colour palette you'd expect from a DFS advert. And yet there's something a bit insipid about Your Friends & Neighbors. Coop selects his victims based on the ease of sneaking into their mansions, the likelihood that they won't notice a missing watch or handbag. It's all a bit easy. He's not quite a Robin Hood ('I'm in a bind here,' he tells his fence, Lu (Randy Danson); 'No, you only think you are,' she replies) but, equally, the ethical stakes of his crimes are not quite the same as, say, drug running. And when he's not robbing a bunch of worthless ingrates, Coop is at home caring for his sister. The audience is invited to like and exonerate the character (even the sexual misconduct, for which he loses his job, is a conspiracy against him) with a readiness that was never afforded to Don Draper. This lack of ambiguity, combined with the diffuse lighting, obscured nudity and a blank cheque for the costume department, makes the whole thing feel a bit toothless. Your Friends & Neighbors is a luxury product. Like the company that makes it, it's well crafted and easy on the eye. But, beneath that glossy veneer, does it justify the investment? For every Severance, it seems, Apple puts out a lot of frustratingly mediocre fare. A breezy enough caper, Your Friends & Neighbors prefers to retread old ground rather than forge new paths. Or, as Coop puts it when he begins his petty larceny spree, 'What's the worst that could happen?'
Boston Globe
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A show of unity with Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus
The program's focus on the ensemble as a whole was palpable even before the orchestra played a single note. In most American orchestras, including the BSO, musicians tend to take their seats on their own, individually warming up on stage or quietly talking with their colleagues before the tuning note signals everyone to hush. However, the small 'Tabula Rasa' chamber orchestra of strings and prepared piano evidently tuned backstage before emerging from the wings together with Slobodeniouk, Lin, and Velinzon, with no separate pre-piece applause for conductor or soloists. If that was a way to grab the audience's attention and minimize chatter going into the whirlwind of 'Tabula Rasa,' it worked. Lin and Velinzon attacked the piercing first note, an A played several octaves apart; during the weighty seconds of silence that followed, you could hear your neighbors breathing. The first movement of 'Tabula Rasa' is called 'Ludus,' Latin for 'game,' but playful is the last descriptor I'd use. Mesmerizing, perhaps 'apocalyptic,' it recalled Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming' in a way as Slobodeniouk guided the orchestra through several ever-intensifying, expanding gyres of variations. Each statement was separated from the next by Vytas Baksys's muted, bell-like intonations on the prepared piano, until at last the center could not hold, and orchestra and soloists rose to the shattering cascade of arpeggios that led to the extended final chord. The solo violin parts often echo each other nearly note for note, and in doing so call to attention the differences between the players; here, Velinzon's tone was temperate and matter-of-fact while Lin's was crisper and mournful. Advertisement 'Silentium,' the longer second movement, was ominous and implacable, rife with precise harmonies that could be sonic pitfalls for a less attuned orchestra, but not this BSO; the slow but steady forward motion conjured images of Yeats's beast slouching toward Bethlehem. After the final descent, with the melody passed downward through the sections to one single double bass, Slobodeniouk kept on conducting silence for several measures, unwilling (rightfully so) to let the world in until he said as much by slowly lowering his hand. Dima Slobodeniouk conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra with violinists Alexander Velinzon and Lucia Lin in Arvo Pärt's "Tabula Rasa" on Thursday. Hilary Scott With the 'Requiem,' the Tanglewood Festival Chorus gave a stunning and profound display of unity. Their quality of performance has been on a distinct upswing lately, and the fruits of their work showed in the precise intonation in the 'Kyrie,' explosive dynamic variation in the 'Dies Irae,' and elegant phrasing in the 'Lacrimosa' — staples of the choral repertoire where rough patches tend to make themselves visible. The tenor parts of the 'Requiem' choral book can be especially punishing, and the TFC tenors deftly shouldered the demands, letting their high notes bloom. Advertisement Swanson and Amereau made fine showings in their BSO subscription debuts. Morley, a BSO veteran who brings her 'Rose in Bloom' has he sung this piece?) Slobodeniouk only made his BSO debut in 2018, but since then he's led around a dozen programs at Tanglewood and Symphony Hall. Next week's wartime program of Hailstork, Stravinsky, and Elgar makes one more for the Finnish conductor, who previously held positions at the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia. He's here often enough that the BSO may as well give him some kind of title; I certainly wouldn't object, and the fact that he keeps getting invited back for multi-program engagements in both venues suggests the musicians might not have an issue with it, either. This hobby pilot knows how to fly the BSO. BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA At Symphony Hall, March 27. Repeats March 29. 617-266-1200, A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Donald Trump's chaos strategy: Why Americans continue to fall for his game of distraction
President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms. Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since Jan. 20, the most in a president's first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law. It has only been three weeks since Trump returned to power; these are the good times compared to what will come next. Be very wary of any political observer or other public voice — or anyone else — who suggests that Trump and his MAGA movement are losing, in disarray, ineffective or somehow confused or weak. Such people are seeing what they want to see and not what is actually happening. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement's strategy is chaos. Moreover, that chaos is in service to their shock and awe strategy to end America's pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright fascism modeled on Viktor Orbán's Hungary or Vladimir Putin's Russia with Trump as de facto leader for life. As Harold Meyerson observes in The American Prospect, 'As to the wider world, if we ever sought to be that beacon on the hill, we're now the bully on the hill. America, Trumpified.' America's center is rapidly collapsing, and it has not been very difficult for Trump and the MAGA movement and the other fascists and authoritarians to break it. During these last three weeks, I have been repeating aloud, on the bus, during my walks, and at random times throughout the day, William Butler Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming,' particularly his warning that 'the centre cannot hold": Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand…. At the root of Trumpism and American fascism's quick ascendance, and the pitiful resistance to it, is a profound failure of imagination. The phrase 'failure of imagination' can trace its popular use in the United States to the Apollo 1 disaster and testimony by astronaut Col. Frank Borman. As depicted in the 1998 TV miniseries 'From the Earth to the Moon', Borman told Congress that: A failure of imagination. We've always known there was the possibility of fire in a spacecraft. But the fear was that it would happen in space, when you're 180 miles from terra firma and the nearest fire station. That was the worry. No one ever imagined it could happen on the ground. If anyone had thought of it, the test would've been classified as hazardous. But it wasn't. We just didn't think of it. Now whose fault is that? Well, it's North American's [the capsule manufacturer] fault. It's NASA's fault. It's the fault of every person who ever worked on Apollo. It's my fault. I didn't think the test was hazardous. No one did. I wish to God we had. The failure of imagination that allowed Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to ascend to power is of a different type. It was wholly predictable. Trump and his agents were direct, vocal, and public in their plans to make him the country's first elected dictator on 'day one' and to launch a revolutionary project to return the country to the Gilded Age, if not before, and the types of destruction it would necessitate as the rights and freedoms of entire groups of Americans are taken away, the social safety net is further gutted, and the plutocrats and kleptocrats and White Christian Nationalists and other White racial authoritarians are given free rein over American life. In many ways, the failure of imagination by the country's 'responsible' political leaders, the mainstream news media and the American public that empowered Trump and MAGA's ascendance is willful and negligent. For years, these so-called responsible voices repeatedly proclaimed that Donald Trump was done for after his first term in office after a coup attempt on Jan. 6, twice impeached, multiple criminal and civil trials, a botched COVID response and an economy left in tatters. That did not happen. These same 'responsible' and 'mainstream' voices also declared that there was no way that the Republican Party would nominate Trump to be its candidate in 2024, he is damaged goods with too much baggage, and the 'adults in the room' would step in and rise to the occasion. Again, this did not happen. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, almost quite literally, own today's Republican Party and 'conservative' and larger right-wing movement. Throughout the Trumpocene, these 'reasonable' and 'mainstream' voices were confident that 'the walls were closing in' and heroes would rise, like in an old Hollywood movie, to vanquish the bad guy and save the day. First, it was Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Then the hero was Attorney General Merrick Garland. Then it was Special Counsel Jack Smith. The state prosecutors and attorney generals would supposedly be a heroic firewall and last line of defense against Donald Trump and his perfidy. The walls never did close in. Trump would become more popular following his prosecutions and trial(s) than before. Trump now wears 'felon' as a badge of honor and courage, one that his MAGA followers and other Americans who are disgusted with the system flock to. These 'mainstream' and 'reasonable' voices — especially the mainstream liberals and progressives — were mostly exuberant that Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden in the 2024 election. To them, Harris was a historic and compelling leader. She would be the first Black woman to be President of the United States. She is a committed public servant, magnetic, charismatic, compelling, and would attract young voters and college-educated white women who want to defend their reproductive rights and freedoms. The vibes! The brat energy! Beyonce and Taylor Swift and other celebrities are on Kamala Harris' side! How can Donald Trump with his Village People "YMCA" dance, podcasts, the "manosphere" and professional wrestling and MMA fighters stop Kamala Harris and the Democrats? Impossible! These 'mainstream' and 'reasonable' voices concluded that Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden and how it channeled the infamous American Nazi rally of 1939 was a 'disaster' and would lead to his defeat. I warned, however, that Trump's MSG rally was actually a genius strategic and tactical move that made his MAGA people feel seen, as he was so bold as to launch a version of a military raid behind enemy lines in a solidly blue state and the Democratic Party stronghold of New York City. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans went on to easily defeat Harris and take control of all three branches of government. The fabled blue wall was easily pierced and then shattered. The Democratic Party's base did not show up to vote. A majority of white women, again, supported Trump. Trump's coalition grew and now includes a large number of Hispanics and Latinos — even as he threatened mass deportations against their community. Trump expanded his base of support in New York — as I warned and predicted — among a range of groups, including Hispanics and Latinos. A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows that the Democratic Party's favorable rating is 31 percent. 57 percent of the people polled have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. By comparison, the Republican Party has a 43 percent favorability rating and 45 percent unfavorable. For more than eight years, the mainstream news media and political class and other 'reasonable' and 'responsible' political voices and leaders could have adapted to the rise of Trumpism, American neofascism and the authoritarian populist moment. Instead, they continued with a habitual failure of imagination and the American people — and their democracy and society and future and freedom — are being made to suffer and are greatly imperiled. This did not have to happen. In an essay in the Atlantic in May of 2024, Tom Nichols diagnosed and warned about the dangers of a failure of imagination and Donald Trump's return to power: Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump's first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can't capture the magnitude of the threat. When I was in high school and taking driver's education, our teachers would show us horrible films, with names like Death on the Highway, that included gory footage of actual car wrecks. The goal was to scare us into being responsible drivers by showing us the reality of being mangled or burned to death in a crash. The idea made sense: Most people have never seen a car wreck, and expanding our imaginations by showing us the actual carnage did, I suspect, scare some of us into holding that steering wheel at the steady 10-and-2 position….We just don't have a similar conceptualization for the end of democracy in America…. Trump's most alarmist opponents are wrong to insist that he would march into Washington in January 2025 like Hitler entering Paris. The process will be slower and more bureaucratic, starting with the seizure of the Justice Department and the Defense Department, two keys to controlling the nation. If Trump returns to office, he will not shoot democracy on Fifth Avenue. He and the people around him will paralyze it, limb by limb. The American public needs to get better at imagining what that would look like. In a 2016 interview with On the Media, Masha Gessen offered this direct warning about the extreme danger(s) of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement: We need to start imagining what happens if he becomes president. Now, the American system doesn't actually give the chief executive a lot of power. There is an intricate system of checks and balances that will force him to mobilize things through rhetoric. And that basically means, I think, that we have to start imagining witch hunts, we have to start imagining kind of wars at home. We have to start imagining what kind of groups he is going to start blaming for all his problems and all our problems, whether real or imaginary.' Gessen would be proven correct in ways far worse than perhaps even they imagined at time….My advice to the news consumer is - imagine the a recent conversation with me here at Salon, Norm Orstein issued this ominous warning: 'This is part of the biggest problem. We have lost our guardrails against autocracy. The press is pathetic. The Republicans running Congress are pathetic. The Supreme Court is in Trump's pocket. Civil society, starting with the business community, is worthless. Be afraid. Be very afraid.' At the Bulwark, Jonathan Last says this about America's failure of imagination and the worsening national emergency that is Trump's return to power and his shock and awe campaign against American democracy and society: And here's the point I want you to remember: When I say today, on January 27, that Trump's gangster government is going to end badly—maybe even very badly—it sounds crazy and hysterical. But if I described the state of affairs as they exist on January 27 to you twelve weeks ago, you also would have thought that I was crazy and hysterical. You would have said, 'I guess that's possible, but you're talking about something close to a worst-case scenario.' Yes, Putinism would definitely be a worst-case scenario. But we are living the worst-case scenario right now. Maybe in the future something will slide us down the scale to one of the lower-variant scenarios. That would be nice. I hope it happens. But right now we are on track to a dark place. Ultimately, Trumpism and American fascism and authoritarianism are a symptom and not the cause of much deeper and profound problems in American society and life. There were some voices, most notably Black and brown people and others who are not enamored with or blinded by America's various myths of its own exceptionalism and greatness and the permanence of its 'democracy', that saw the danger clearly because they were not blinded by Whiteness and its many small and big lies that in total created the failure of imagination that led to Trump and MAGA's triumphant return to power. Donald Trump's autocracy is not a hypothetical or possibility far off in the future. It is here and now and very real. America's crisis and failure of imagination has been subsumed by a horrible reality — one that is not going away anytime soon.
