22: China's Sputnik Moment, Metaverses!, DFW on Federer, A Portrait of Truffaut, Lous And The Yakuza
I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between - François Truffaut
Investing & Business
China’s Sputnik Moment
Reading time: ~16 minutes
Very high quality article about the US/China relationship, a subject I’ve already commented in some of the recent issues but I feel will mark a turning point.
That article focuses about the notion of a “Sputnik moment”, or as the author put it:
An event that would trigger widespread unease in the country about its perceived technological lag
The balance between the two nations (the US and China) has been evolving very quickly, sometimes letting us bewildered about where it was actually standing, and with the occasional show of strength giving a rough estimate. But the latest events are really telling the story in full when you place it within the broader frame:
China’s true Sputnik moment has been its realization that it cannot count on the United States to supply its technology—and that it must cultivate domestic alternatives. Washington bristled at Beijing’s ambitions for semiconductor self-sufficiency and then proceeded to punish Chinese companies naive enough to depend on American technologies.
U.S. companies are now facing uncomfortable questions on whether they can be counted on to be reliable suppliers. For all the complaints about Xi’s efforts to drive “offensive decoupling,” it is the United States, not China, that is forcing Chinese firms to abandon American products—and now these companies are pursuing domestic self-sufficiency with a vengeance.
Metaverses!
Reading time: ~15 minutes
Interesting (and rather short compared to the usual length) Stratchery post on the subject of metaverses following the increased interest from GAFAM (namely Microsoft and Facebook) in building metaverses and communicating about it.
As usual, very well documented, with references to Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, and even back to the first novel where the word was coined (FYI, it’s called Snow Crash)
A narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro’s goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro’s view of Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic sound track.
Thought-provoking stuff…
DFW on Federer
Reading time: ~10 minutes
Thanks to David Perell, a hardcore DFW fan, I discovered that David Foster Wallace actually wrote an essay on Federer. And it turned out to be more than I expected:
A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke […] You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.
Arts & History
A (great) long-form on Truffaut by MonCinémaAMoi
Reading time: ~35 minutes
A different kind of posts than what the author usually writes, this long-form is about Truffaut, both the director and the man.
“My first two hundred films," wrote François Truffaut, "I saw them in a state of secrecy, by playing hooky, or by entering the theater without paying - through the emergency exit or the windows of the washrooms - or by taking advantage, in the evening, of the absence of my parents and with the necessity of finding myself in my bed, pretending to be asleep, at the moment of their return.
So I paid for this great pleasure with strong stomach pains, my stomach in knots, fear in my head, invaded by a feeling of guilt that could only add to the emotions provided by the show.
💡 Others portraits can be found here
Treat for the Ears
Lous (anagram for Soul) is noted for her public image, namely the graphic symbol painted on her forehead, which has been described as the letter 'Y' with a dot in the middle and has drawn comparisons to Prince's Love Symbol #2. She designed the tattoo, titled les mains levées vers le ciel (hands lifted toward the sky), as a symbol meant to represent two arms connecting the earth to the sky. Her religious faith and belief in God served as her primary motivation for the creation of the symbol
Until next week!
Antoine