Justin Bratton

One can only think here of what the Delphic oracle said to Croesus of Lydia in the Histories: if you march against the Persians, you will destroy a great empire. I hope someone remembers how this prophecy was fulfilled.

Netflix just made the most DANGEROUS move in Hollywood. They didn't buy Warner Bros but instead bought something far more threatening. An AI company, built in secret and founded by one of Hollywood's own. Ben Affleck. The company is called InterPositive and you've never heard of it. And that was the point. Affleck quietly registered it under a shell company called Fin Bone LLC. He filed patents under his legal name. He built a proprietary AI dataset on a closed soundstage, all while making movies. Here's what InterPositive does. It takes the raw footage from a film shoot, the dailies and trains a custom AI model on it. That model can then relight scenes, reframe shots, remove stunt wires, fix missing angles, color correct entire films and add visual effects. Work that currently employs thousands of people in post production. Netflix now owns all of it, exclusively and no other studio gets access. Think about the timing. One week ago, Netflix walked away from an $83 billion bid to buy Warner Bros. Wall Street cheered and the stock jumped 14%. Days later, they quietly acquired the technology that could make traditional studios obsolete. They just bought Hollywood's replacement. And they made Ben Affleck an Oscar winner, a director, a guy people trust, the face of it. SAG-AFTRA's contract expires in June. AI is the single biggest issue on the table and the last fight over AI shut Hollywood down for months in 2023. And Netflix just acquired an AI production company, right before negotiations. They're calling it tools for filmmakers and they say it empowers storytellers. That's what they always say. The real question, how many jobs disappear when a machine can do in seconds what a VFX team does in weeks? Netflix won't answer that but the technology already did.

China releasing this video right before Chinese New Year (down to the hour), is significant