Saturday, April 26, 2025

#116 / Inflection Point




A story in the February 7, 2025, edition of The New York Times reported that a "Top Documentarian" had teamed up with "A Billionaire." The "documentarian" featured in the story is Alex Gibney, the owner of Jigsaw Productions. Gibney's new "billionaire backer" is Wendy Schmidt, who has now acquired a majority stake in Gibney's company.

Why does a billionaire want to make documentary movies? Well, according to the story in The Times, Schmidt wants Jigsaw to "broaden its editorial focus to include more stories on climate change and ocean health." 

"Human society, in my view," says Schmidt, "is at an inflection point. We are existentially threatened by the technology we've created as well as by the failure of systems on this planet to support us becuse they've become so compromised."

I have no doubt that we are at an "inflection point," as Schmidt says - politically, socially, economically, and environmentally. The way Schmidt phrases it, though, it almost seems as though she is blaming those "systems on this planet" for failing to "support us." 

Just to be clear, the failures begin with us, not "the planet." I am not speaking to Wendy Schmidt in particular, since I don't know anything about her, personally, but a lot of the systems that Schmidt says are failing "us" are doing so because we have failed "them." 

You could check my blog posting from yesterday for an example. It references an article in the February 7, 2025, edition of The Wall Street Journal that comments on the real estate activities of the "billionire class," in and around Palm Springs. 


No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for your comment!