The Matrix, a self-reflective progeny no less alert than Lucas' first Star Wars, was culled from equal parts THX-1138 and Tron. Both films (Tron and THX) shared unique cybernetic ratios of digital journeys far before the dominance of the PC and are brilliantly contrasted in chroma styles, hues, dialogue nuances and physicality versus 'virtual' or software avatar'd beings. What they shared was more crucial, both failed to make their budgets back, both posed anonymous guards with long poles, both involved escaping speeding bikes, and pivotally, both films lack a coherent and sustained crescendo. Flynn merely did what Neo does, he jumps without fear, but with little build-up to get an audience to root. Tron is the almost-masterpiece, and is perhaps the most informed animated film of the 80's. Lisberger and company take the Disney tower hostage for a late summer in 1982 and alter the rules by cutting away before morphs and tweens finish, pretending as if these glistening lights in transition are normal everyday happenings, subtley they advanced the craft of the virtually exotic.  Now forced to eat its own children (The Matrixes) made at other studios (Warner Bros), Disney has crafted the Tron reboot as a 'legacy' film with falsely iconic hacker Flynn and child now dealing with a more complex INNER. The strains of adding credibility shows in Legacy's design choices, what was hallucinatory as digital is now solid, credible. As a film forced to compete somewhat with its spawn, Legacy now has to make note of The Matrix's possibilities, and since the rules in Tron:Legacy cannot change: it's much easier to suggest them visually (note the furniture overlapping). Tron's Bally-Midway arcade game outgrossed the film 10:1.

below, taking it too literally, too early: tron: LEG-acy

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

In the 1990's, a sharp thinking, Brooksley Born was on the shortlist for Attorney General, but Clinton thought she wasn't riveting enough so he instead offered her the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. This obscure commission was the pulpit from which Born would issue a prediction that unregulated markets would eventually implode. Her logic, though basic, almost unassailable, brought her notoriety. As she decided derivatives needed oversight, eventually she would come up against Clinton's "working group," Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and then in congressional hearings, Phil Gramm. Eventually she would resign, and the first warning of things to come, the collapse of Long Term Market Capital in 1998, would be swept under the rug as an anomaly.

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

Paid Content dot org is the industry's webletter of debate and news on whether these old models can figure out how to convert to the google dispersal model. Can they? Their first conference in NYC is heavily geared towards old standards (NYT, WSJ, FT) leading the way, just look at their discussion topics.

Industry Analysis: Why Consumers Want to Pay for Access to Content
8:25am - 8:45am • Auditorium

Hulu started it, now Vevo, Next Issue Media, Epix, Canoe and others are following: companies in the same vertical banding together for joint ventures and consortiums. What happens when companies that haven’t been able to crack the code on their own combine for scale, reach and sales power? When does it make sense? And when is it a barrier?

The Business of Digital News
10:55 am – 11:55 am • Auditorium

As ad revenues decline, publishers continue to experiment with new areas of content and distribution platforms. What will users pay for? What’s working, or rather, what holds the most potential for growth? Local, niche? Subscriptions, metered? When the internet levels the playing field and anyone can be a publisher or reporter, how do news outlets create the kind of value that equals real revenue?

Lunch with The New York Times
Q&A: The Future Will Be Metered
12:20pm - 1:45pm

The Truth About the Subscription Business
1:50 pm - 2:45 pm • Auditorium

Digital subscriptions are all the buzz now but the idea is far from new—and far from certain. How can the needle be moved on an idea that worked so well for newspapers and magazines so well for so long? Does selling music by the song or news by the article have a better shot than subscriptions? How does the advent of cloud computing change the view? Do mobile apps make it easier to sell subscriptions? And can multi-platform access shore up traditional sources like print, cable, ISP?

The Rise of Content Super-Distributors
3:10pm - 4:10pm • Auditorium

Content-generating machines like Demand Media, Associated Content, Mahalo and About.com, are fueled by SEO and, of course, Google. Is this the future for a big subsector of the content industry? Will this mass amount of content swamp the smaller scale work of traditional and new outlets – and their chances for new pay models?  How can super-distributors avoid being viewed as content farms?

A Plethora Of Portability: How Smartphones, E-Readers And, Yes, Tablets, Are Changing The Game
4:10pm - 5:00pm • Auditorium

A premium ecosystem has been spawned by the advent of smartphones and e-readers. News outlets unwilling to charge for online news don’t flinch at fees for news by app. Book publishers are pushing aside the idea that digital means cheaper. New dedicated e-readers are closer than any before to fulfilling the promise of formats that work for magazines and newspapers. And the advent of the tablet – years after Bill Gates proclaimed it the future – offers everyone a chance to ride a new wave of creativity – and commerce. Where do we go from here?

It was Arthur Demarest who referred to the irregular shapes of Mayan polity borders in his and Conrad's seminal Ideology suggesting there was a function to their shape (it should be read). Here is another view of Maya polity relations, in the genre of Edward Tufte's books, from Nikolai Grube and Simon Martin's Chronicle of the Maya Kings. Here we have a simplified chart of major polities arrayed to provide the user with a view of how complex the Maya civilization's exchange was. Smaller and distant polities are necessarily omitted.

Masters of the sub-universe, Goldman Sachs looks as if it simply games out no-loss situations in 'proper' precentages that have the potential to trigger collapses at its own reward (nothing new or self destructive until the edges of the market are pushed). While buying into full range mortgage securities, cash-swap defaults to 'insure' them, staking other banks to take similar positions and also having them insured (in this case Societie General), and then making trades planning for a housing collapse, it became Goldman's best interest to destroy AIG by both being paid its 'insurance' and retaining control of the securities. By carefully observing its structure from a puppetmaster level, Goldman survives and thrives while massive shops like Bear Stearns and Lehman are revealed as mere amateurs whose planning and percentages skewed slightly too positive. If this activity remains legal and underwritten by our Government, there will be no end to this exotic envelope pushing. Greed will destroy our species. A metaphor would be building a plane that breaks the sound barrier but is always destroyed attempting it, the occupant's survival only possible if the military steps in to rescue. Sure we broke the sound barrier, but did we? The U.S. spends taxpayer's dollars insuring the smart and help liquidating the dumb.

sectional quotes from a brilliant narrative in the NY Times:

“Al probably did not know it, but he was working with the bears of Goldman,” a former Goldman salesman, who requested anonymity so he would not jeopardize his business relationships, said of Mr. Frost. “He was signing A.I.G. up to insure trades made by people with really very negative views” of the housing market.

By July 2007, when Goldman demanded its first payment from A.I.G. — $1.8 billion — the investment bank had already taken trading positions that would pay out if the mortgage market weakened, according to seven former Goldman employees.

On Nov. 1, 2007, for example, an e-mail message from Mr. Cassano, the head of A.I.G. Financial Products, to Elias Habayeb, an A.I.G. accounting executive, said that a payment demand from Société Générale had been “spurred by GS calling them.

On Aug. 18, 2008, Goldman’s equity research department published an in-depth report on A.I.G. The analysts advised the firm’s clients to avoid the stock because of a “downward spiral which is likely to ensue as more actual cash losses emanate” from the insurer’s financial products unit.