Yesterday, I wrote about what I think is one of the central cruxes of making streaming video profitable: whether we’re willing to give content distributors more data about us and permission to distribute more of it to advertisers in order to make streaming more profitable and potentially cheaper for us. Turns out the Federal Trade Commission is considering exactly the same challenge in its report laying our recommendations to businesses and policymakers about protecting consumer privacy while satisfying consumer desires in an age when technology is undergoing rapid change. A key section:

Many commenters expressed support for the general principle that companies should limit the information they collect from consumers. Despite the broad support for the concept, however, many companies argued for a flexible approach based on concerns that allowing companies to collect data only for existing business needs would harm innovation and deny consumers new products and services. One commenter cited Netflix’s video recommendation feature as an example of how secondary uses of data can create consumer benefits. The commenter noted that Netflix originally collected information about subscribers’ movie preferences in order to send the specific videos requested, but later used this information as the foundation for generating personalized recommendations to its subscribers.

In addition, commenters raised concerns about who decides what a “specific business purpose” is. For example, one purpose for collecting data is to sell it to third parties in order to monetize a service and provide it to consumers for free. Would collecting data for this purpose be a specific business purpose? If not, is the only alternative to charge consumers for the service, and would this result be better for consumers?

The FTC lays out a very basic principal from these challenges, the idea that “Companies do not need to provide choice before collecting and using consumer
data for practices that are consistent with the context of the transaction or the company’s relationship with the consumer, or are required or specifically authorized by law.” But we’re a long way from defining “consistent with the context of the transaction.” And consent and will are not necessarily among the things companies can grok about us from the data they’re gathering.

Given some of the sillier elements that crept into the later movies in the Matrix trilogy; given the semi-disaster that was their adaptation of beloved cartoon Speed Racer; given the lurid way the media portrayed Lana Wachowski’s gender transition in the press; given the way the Wachowskis were treated for trying to make a hard-R love story that would have depicted a gay American soldier and an Iraqi man (I’d be curious how the trade press would have treated someone else trying to get a similar project into production); given that The Matrix itself is thirteen years old, it’s easy to forget how amazing it was to see that movie for the first time, how visionary the Wachowskis seemed all the way back in 1999. And maybe The Matrix will never register to a generation the same way it did to mine, those of us who grew up without the Internet and then had it open up before us. But if anything, we’re still living in the world they laid out for us, and grappling with the questions they posed before us. There may be less black leather and fewer mechanical nasties, but we still haven’t figured out how closely we can be tied to our technology and still stay healthy, and hackers still have cachet and the power to poke hard at our government and businesses.

All of which is a long way of saying that whatever has happened to them creatively and personally in the years since The Matrix was released, I want the Wachowskis to have a hit again, and I’m willing to give them a lot of credit and leeway as they try. I’m glad they got a shot at adapting Cloud Atlas. And I’m pretty excited to hear that they’ve signed up Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum to star in their next original movie, a science fiction project about which little is known called Jupiter Ascending. They did a nice job of working with Keanu Reeves’ blankness in the Matrix trilogy, and while I think Tatum’s proved that he’s more than a slab of beef, this might be an opportunity for him to convince those who are unmoved by A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints or 21 Jump Street.

The news of Jupiter Ascending also makes me feel like, despite my grumbling about the SyFy network yesterday, we might be entering a nice little moment for original sci-fi. Prometheus looks downright incredible, visually gorgeous and scary, and a reminder of the risks of our drive for exploration. I hadn’t even realized that Guy Pearce’s latest, Lockout, was a science fiction thriller until I saw a trailer for it in front of The Hunger Games this weekend. But I’m always down for a nasty, industrial view of space, where instead of the final frontier, it’s a place of exile and danger, in this case, for criminals and a few innocents. The Wachowskis found transcendence in metal, and wire, and castoff clothes once. I have such hopes for them taking us somewhere new, and frightening, and beautiful again.

Yesterday, Forbes’ Roger Friedman asked if Fox would pull Neighborhood Watch, an action comedy about overzealous neighborhood watchmen whose vigilance turns out to be justified when they have to battle an alien invasion. Today, in light of the ongoing investigation into the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, Fox has pulled a teaser trailer and poster for the movie from theaters.

The trailer shows the neighborhood watch volunteers, including Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Jonah Hill as feared (if somewhat over the top) figures in the suburban streets they patrol, dragging a white child into a police department for pelting them with eggs:

A Fox spokesman told the Hollywood Reporter that, “We are very sensitve to the Trayvon Martin case, but our film is a broad alien invasion comedy and bears absolutely no relation to the tragic events in Florida.” That’s probably true. But it’s worth interrogating why we find images of over-the-top approaches to law enforcement funny or compelling, whether it’s the main characters in 21 Jump Street busting out their guns to keep the peace in a sun-filled, peaceful public park, or Elliot Stabler beating up a suspect on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It’s not just laughable when this sense of puffed-up bravado is played out in the real world. It’s downright dangerous.

“Bending is the coolest thing in the world!” Avatar Korra, a rebellious teenager who’s just arrived in Republic City, the metropolis founded by her predecessor Avatar Aang, declares towards the middle of the premiere episode of The Legend of Korra. Fans of the first show in this series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, about a little boy who can manipulate earth, air, water, and fire in a process called “bending,” might be inclined to agree with her. The concept around which the series was based—that there are people who can manipulate each element, but one person in each generation who can manipulate all four, and gets special responsibilities along with his special powers—set the stage for stories that combined spectacular animated action sequences with intelligent meditations on the proper use of power and our relationship with the natural world. In Avatar: The Legend of Korra, which skips forward two generations to follow Korra, a young Avatar who is training with Aang’s airbending son Tenzin, flips our assumptions upside down, and gives us something very exciting in its place.

When I saw the trailer for this new incarnation of the show, I wondered whether the decision to include steam-punky technology, including airships, crime-fighting equipment, and cars, would pull the series away from its core. Instead, it’s turned out to be a brilliant decision. Aang’s model city, a place he intended “to be the center of peace and balance in this world,” may have advanced technology. But it also has many deeply poor people, something that comes to a shock to Korra who tells a vagrant she shares a meal with that “I thought everyone in the city was living it up.” Triad gangs made up of benders extort protection money from shopkeepers.

And a political movement believes that bending, the very device that made Avatar: The Last Airbender so cool, is responsible for the city’s problems. “Are you tired of living under the tyranny of Benders? Then join the Equalists,” a political speaker tells a crowd, setting off Korra’s initial outburst. “For too long, the bending elite of this city have forced the non-benders of this city to live as lower-class citizens…Together, we will tear down the bending establishment.” Korra’s not wrong that bending’s a cool concept. But the speaker appears to be right about individual benders: he embarrasses Korra by revealing that her first instinct is to shut him down, rather than to work with him. Similarly, Republic City law enforcement may be coming down on Korra pretty hard, but she did act like a vigilante in trying to round up the Triad gang, and caused an enormous amount of damage. Without regulation, bending isn’t exactly producing peace and prosperity in Republic City.

Hopefully, we’ll see more of those themes, particularly bending’s relationship to economic inequality, in future. We’ve heard “with great power comes great responsibility” a million times, but almost always in the context of an individual struggle for self-control. Tackling the role of special powers and special advantages in society on a larger scale is something entirely different, and very interesting.

The bridge is yours.

-My decision in the Tournament of Books is up!

-One of the best things I’ve read on the season premiere of Mad Men.

-Which real world villains would you like to see Iron Man take on?

-Brazil’s arts agency benefits from a tie between bread and roses.

I was quite charmed by NBC’s Bent, the sitcom about a stressed-out lawyer, Alex, (Amanda Peet) and her cutie of a contractor, Pete (David Walton), it’s inexplicably burning off to embarrassingly low ratings. Anything that stars Joey King and Jeffrey Tambor deserves at least some strong effort at promotion. And one thing stood out to me while watching the pilot and the second episode (NBC is showing them two at a time, a sad demonstration of the network’s eagerness to get rid of what should have been a solid fall season premiere). Pete’s character is a perfect example of a growing category of characters on television: the charming gambling addict.

It’s not as if gambling addicts are entirely new to television screens. Seeley Booth, the dapper FBI agent portrayed by David Boreanaz on Bones, has a serious gambling problem that the show has played to both dramatic and comedic effect. On How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson includes problem gambling among his other compulsive proclivities—he’s well-known enough in Atlantic City to have a regular gang of Asian gaming buddies. It was inevitable that Luck, HBO’s recently-canceled show about the world of horseracing, would have a gambler somewhere in the mix, as it did with Jerry, who can pick winners but inevitably lets his winnings slip through his fingers. Switched at Birth even has a teenage gambler.

Gambling addiction is a perfect fit for television in a number of ways. Gambling addicts don’t have to be kept out of bars, a common default social setting for shows with younger characters, particularly on multi-camera sitcoms. Other than stress, problem gambling doesn’t take an inherent physical toll or come with nasty side effects, so you don’t have to worry about compromising on Hollywood’s standards of attractiveness. And it’s a convenient, but not omnipresent dramatic device that can be deployed when you want to introduce risk or temptation into a character’s storyline.

But gambling addiction is also the perfect television flaw for a recession fueled in part by easy access to credit and a collective gamble that the economy would only continue to grow. These characters are the collective manifestation of a sense that we could beat the system, a sense that we now know is false and is prompting some serious reassessments. They’re charming and handsome (and interestingly, universally male)—in other words, they’re people we want to identify with, rather than condemn or push away, a balance that lets us assign them responsibility but also encourages us to stick with them through the process of managing their addictions. We can’t run away from the problems we’ve created for ourselves, and neither can they. And they make the point that all kinds of people can fall prey to the lure of easy wealth, whether they’re corporate honchos with unidentified functions like Barney, otherwise-upstanding FBI agents like Booth, or regular guys like Pete. It’s nice, but unrealistic, to believe that we all could have seen around corners and avoided trouble when trouble was presented in such a tempting package. Gambling addict characters don’t help us grapple with the larger financial system that benefitted from this collective delusion. But they can help us understand temptation, and the perpetual struggle not to fall for easy promises.

This news came down last week, but street artist Shepard Fairey is teaming up with two movie studios to produce a new film adaptation of 1984. Normally, I’d complain about Hollywood dipping back into the same well time and again. But I’m actually fairly excited for this. We still need mass art that grapples with what it means to torture people and to be tortured in the wake of the Bush administration’s distortion of our language and morals and our still-incomplete efforts to eradicate the sins of torture root and branch from our national psyche.

Now, I understand that 1984 isn’t completely or only about the power of torture. It’s about how propaganda shapes thought, how language changes over time, how difficult it is to break away from consensus, how cultural artifacts survive through oral tradition. If Fairey’s involved, this could be an opportunity for some incredibly sweet movie graphic design, and successful proof that you can conjure an uncomfortably foreign world without spending an enormous amount of money.

But what’s always stuck with me most about the book is Room 101, the cruel genius of a regime that figures out what its enemies fear most and forces them to confront it. Winston Smith, the cage, the rats—this, like waterboarding, is the stuff of nightmares even if you’ve never experienced it, the kind of thing you would give anything not to experience. The Hunger Games deals with torture, too. In Mockingjay, the third book in the series which will now inevitably be adapted into a movie, Katniss Everdeen, who becomes a political symbol of a rebel movement, has to deal with the consequences after the Capitol takes her partner in the arena, Peeta Mellark, captive and tortures and brainwashes him. While we don’t see these tortures directly, we do learn about them as Katniss learns about them, and feel her pain as she absorbs the full emotional impact of what could have been done to her.

It’s a good thing we’ll get two big-screen adaptations that take on the full and persistent impact of torture. We need to feel a visceral disgust for the tactics our government employed on our behalf, rather than to see them as proof of some sort of ludicrous manly resolve. But it’s one thing to see torture as repellant, and another to accept that our government did it, and we need to accept responsibility for that and move forcefully to make sure it never happens again. That’s a harder thing to accomplish in a narrative, particularly one displaced from our own place and time. It would require a character we’ve come to know and love to commit torture, and for him or her to make amends in a sustained way. Homeland‘s Carrie Mathison may not exactly be up to the task, especially now that she doesn’t have access to the CIA’s resources. But I wonder if she’s paved the way for a character who could take us on that journey, on television where it could happen over more time and with greater depth and clarity than in a two-hour movie.

The latest exhibit in the desperate squareness of right-wing cultural production is The Conservative Teen, a magazine clearly designed more for parents who want to hold back the tide on their children’s inevitably progressing adolescence than for children themselves. Everything about it is wrong, from the weird interstitial definitions of terms like “cameo” and “eugenics,” which ought to be familiar to reasonably well-educated kids in the target demographic, to the fact that it’s being distributed in an awkward PDF reader rather than being made available as an app or in shareable pages that are well-integrated with social media.

And then there’s the content itself, in, say, this wildly outdated piece about Glee:

Conservatives have to wonder what’s “quirky and sweet” about a show in which half the teenagers are sexually confused and the other half are sleeping around, or how ridiculing conservative principles and figures equals a “nonpartisan funfest.”…In between the songs and the jokes, “Glee’s” audience is treated to homosexuality, underage drinking, hookups and teen pregnancy. The production numbers themselves are often smutty (smutty: obscene, indecent), as when the character of “Rachel” wore a belly-showing, bra-bearing shirt and an extremely short skirt, channeling Britney Spears’ infamous Catholic school-girl outfit when she performed the hit “Baby One More Time” in a Spears tribute episode.

Rachel Berry’s midriff is coming for your children, and if you can’t convince them to resist it, there is nothing you can do to stop it.