Guided by visual effects supervisor John Knoll, ILM embraced continually evolving methodologies to craft breathtaking visual effects for the iconic space battles in First Contact and Rogue One. By Jay Stobie Visual effects supervisor John Knoll (right) confers with modelmakers Kim Smith and John Goodson with the miniature of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E during production of Star Trek: First Contact (Credit: ILM). Bolstered by visual effects from Industrial Light & Magic, Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) propelled their respective franchises to new heights. While Star Trek Generations (1994) welcomed Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s (Patrick Stewart) crew to the big screen, First Contact stood as the first Star Trek feature that did not focus on its original captain, the legendary James T. Kirk (William Shatner). Similarly, though Rogue One immediately preceded the events of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), it was set apart from the episodic Star Wars films and launched an era of storytelling outside of the main Skywalker saga that has gone on to include Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), The Mandalorian (2019-23), Andor (2022-25), Ahsoka (2023), The Acolyte (2024), and more. The two films also shared a key ILM contributor, John Knoll, who served as visual effects supervisor on both projects, as well as an executive producer on Rogue One. Currently, ILM’s executive creative director and senior visual effects supervisor, Knoll – who also conceived the initial framework for Rogue One’s story – guided ILM as it brought its talents to bear on these sci-fi and fantasy epics. The work involved crafting two spectacular starship-packed space clashes – First Contact’s Battle of Sector 001 and Rogue One’s Battle of Scarif. Although these iconic installments were released roughly two decades apart, they represent a captivating case study of how ILM’s approach to visual effects has evolved over time. With this in mind, let’s examine the films’ unforgettable space battles through the lens of fascinating in-universe parallels and the ILM-produced fleets that face off near Earth and Scarif. A final frame from the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Credit: ILM & Lucasfilm). A Context for Conflict In First Contact, the United Federation of Planets – a 200-year-old interstellar government consisting of more than 150 member worlds – braces itself for an invasion by the Borg – an overwhelmingly powerful collective composed of cybernetic beings who devastate entire planets by assimilating their biological populations and technological innovations. The Borg only send a single vessel, a massive cube containing thousands of hive-minded drones and their queen, pushing the Federation’s Starfleet defenders to Earth’s doorstep. Conversely, in Rogue One, the Rebel Alliance – a fledgling coalition of freedom fighters – seeks to undermine and overthrow the stalwart Galactic Empire – a totalitarian regime preparing to tighten its grip on the galaxy by revealing a horrifying superweapon. A rebel team infiltrates a top-secret vault on Scarif in a bid to steal plans to that battle station, the dreaded Death Star, with hopes of exploiting a vulnerability in its design. On the surface, the situations could not seem to be more disparate, particularly in terms of the Federation’s well-established prestige and the Rebel Alliance’s haphazardly organized factions. Yet, upon closer inspection, the spaceborne conflicts at Earth and Scarif are linked by a vital commonality. The threat posed by the Borg is well-known to the Federation, but the sudden intrusion upon their space takes its defenses by surprise. Starfleet assembles any vessel within range – including antiquated Oberth-class science ships – to intercept the Borg cube in the Typhon Sector, only to be forced back to Earth on the edge of defeat. The unsanctioned mission to Scarif with Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and the sudden need to take down the planet’s shield gate propels the Rebel Alliance fleet into rushing to their rescue with everything from their flagship Profundity to GR-75 medium transports. Whether Federation or Rebel Alliance, these fleets gather in last-ditch efforts to oppose enemies who would embrace their eradication – the Battles of Sector 001 and Scarif are fights for survival. From Physical to Digital By the time Jonathan Frakes was selected to direct First Contact, Star Trek’s reliance on constructing traditional physical models (many of which were built by ILM) for its features was gradually giving way to innovative computer graphics (CG) models, resulting in the film’s use of both techniques. “If one of the ships was to be seen full-screen and at length,” associate visual effects supervisor George Murphy told Cinefex’s Kevin H. Martin, “we knew it would be done as a stage model. Ships that would be doing a lot of elaborate maneuvers in space battle scenes would be created digitally.” In fact, physical and CG versions of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E appear in the film, with the latter being harnessed in shots involving the vessel’s entry into a temporal vortex at the conclusion of the Battle of Sector 001. Despite the technological leaps that ILM pioneered in the decades between First Contact and Rogue One, they considered filming physical miniatures for certain ship-related shots in the latter film. ILM considered filming physical miniatures for certain ship-related shots in Rogue One. The feature’s fleets were ultimately created digitally to allow for changes throughout post-production. “If it’s a photographed miniature element, it’s not possible to go back and make adjustments. So it’s the additional flexibility that comes with the computer graphics models that’s very attractive to many people,” John Knoll relayed to writer Jon Witmer at American Cinematographer’s TheASC.com. However, Knoll aimed to develop computer graphics that retained the same high-quality details as their physical counterparts, leading ILM to employ a modern approach to a time-honored modelmaking tactic. “I also wanted to emulate the kit-bashing aesthetic that had been part of Star Wars from the very beginning, where a lot of mechanical detail had been added onto the ships by using little pieces from plastic model kits,” explained Knoll in his chat with TheASC.com. For Rogue One, ILM replicated the process by obtaining such kits, scanning their parts, building a computer graphics library, and applying the CG parts to digitally modeled ships. “I’m very happy to say it was super-successful,” concluded Knoll. “I think a lot of our digital models look like they are motion-control models.” John Knoll (second from left) confers with Kim Smith and John Goodson with the miniature of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E during production of Star Trek: First Contact (Credit: ILM). Legendary Lineages In First Contact, Captain Picard commanded a brand-new vessel, the Sovereign-class U.S.S. Enterprise-E, continuing the celebrated starship’s legacy in terms of its famous name and design aesthetic. Designed by John Eaves and developed into blueprints by Rick Sternbach, the Enterprise-E was built into a 10-foot physical model by ILM model project supervisor John Goodson and his shop’s talented team. ILM infused the ship with extraordinary detail, including viewports equipped with backlit set images from the craft’s predecessor, the U.S.S. Enterprise-D. For the vessel’s larger windows, namely those associated with the observation lounge and arboretum, ILM took a painstakingly practical approach to match the interiors shown with the real-world set pieces. “We filled that area of the model with tiny, micro-scale furniture,” Goodson informed Cinefex, “including tables and chairs.” Rogue One’s rebel team initially traversed the galaxy in a U-wing transport/gunship, which, much like the Enterprise-E, was a unique vessel that nonetheless channeled a certain degree of inspiration from a classic design. Lucasfilm’s Doug Chiang, a co-production designer for Rogue One, referred to the U-wing as the film’s “Huey helicopter version of an X-wing” in the Designing Rogue One bonus featurette on Disney+ before revealing that, “Towards the end of the design cycle, we actually decided that maybe we should put in more X-wing features. And so we took the X-wing engines and literally mounted them onto the configuration that we had going.” Modeled by ILM digital artist Colie Wertz, the U-wing’s final computer graphics design subtly incorporated these X-wing influences to give the transport a distinctive feel without making the craft seem out of place within the rebel fleet. While ILM’s work on the Enterprise-E’s viewports offered a compelling view toward the ship’s interior, a breakthrough LED setup for Rogue One permitted ILM to obtain realistic lighting on actors as they looked out from their ships and into the space around them. “All of our major spaceship cockpit scenes were done that way, with the gimbal in this giant horseshoe of LED panels we got from [equipment vendor] VER, and we prepared graphics that went on the screens,” John Knoll shared with American Cinematographer’s Benjamin B and Jon D. Witmer. Furthermore, in Disney+’s Rogue One: Digital Storytelling bonus featurette, visual effects producer Janet Lewin noted, “For the actors, I think, in the space battle cockpits, for them to be able to see what was happening in the battle brought a higher level of accuracy to their performance.” The U.S.S. Enterprise-E in Star Trek: First Contact (Credit: Paramount). Familiar Foes To transport First Contact’s Borg invaders, John Goodson’s team at ILM resurrected the Borg cube design previously seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), creating a nearly three-foot physical model to replace the one from the series. Art consultant and ILM veteran Bill George proposed that the cube’s seemingly straightforward layout be augmented with a complex network of photo-etched brass, a suggestion which produced a jagged surface and offered a visual that was both intricate and menacing. ILM also developed a two-foot motion-control model for a Borg sphere, a brand-new auxiliary vessel that emerged from the cube. “We vacuformed about 15 different patterns that conformed to this spherical curve and covered those with a lot of molded and cast pieces. Then we added tons of acid-etched brass over it, just like we had on the cube,” Goodson outlined to Cinefex’s Kevin H. Martin. As for Rogue One’s villainous fleet, reproducing the original trilogy’s Death Star and Imperial Star Destroyers centered upon translating physical models into digital assets. Although ILM no longer possessed A New Hope’s three-foot Death Star shooting model, John Knoll recreated the station’s surface paneling by gathering archival images, and as he spelled out to writer Joe Fordham in Cinefex, “I pieced all the images together. I unwrapped them into texture space and projected them onto a sphere with a trench. By doing that with enough pictures, I got pretty complete coverage of the original model, and that became a template upon which to redraw very high-resolution texture maps. Every panel, every vertical striped line, I matched from a photograph. It was as accurate as it was possible to be as a reproduction of the original model.” Knoll’s investigative eye continued to pay dividends when analyzing the three-foot and eight-foot Star Destroyer motion-control models, which had been built for A New Hope and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), respectively. “Our general mantra was, ‘Match your memory of it more than the reality,’ because sometimes you go look at the actual prop in the archive building or you look back at the actual shot from the movie, and you go, ‘Oh, I remember it being a little better than that,’” Knoll conveyed to TheASC.com. This philosophy motivated ILM to combine elements from those two physical models into a single digital design. “Generally, we copied the three-footer for details like the superstructure on the top of the bridge, but then we copied the internal lighting plan from the eight-footer,” Knoll explained. “And then the upper surface of the three-footer was relatively undetailed because there were no shots that saw it closely, so we took a lot of the high-detail upper surface from the eight-footer. So it’s this amalgam of the two models, but the goal was to try to make it look like you remember it from A New Hope.” A final frame from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Credit: ILM & Lucasfilm). Forming Up the Fleets In addition to the U.S.S. Enterprise-E, the Battle of Sector 001 debuted numerous vessels representing four new Starfleet ship classes – the Akira, Steamrunner, Saber, and Norway – all designed by ILM visual effects art director Alex Jaeger. “Since we figured a lot of the background action in the space battle would be done with computer graphics ships that needed to be built from scratch anyway, I realized that there was no reason not to do some new designs,” John Knoll told American Cinematographer writer Ron Magid. Used in previous Star Trek projects, older physical models for the Oberth and Nebula classes were mixed into the fleet for good measure, though the vast majority of the armada originated as computer graphics. Over at Scarif, ILM portrayed the Rebel Alliance forces with computer graphics models of fresh designs (the MC75 cruiser Profundity and U-wings), live-action versions of Star Wars Rebels’ VCX-100 light freighter Ghost and Hammerhead corvettes, and Star Wars staples (Nebulon-B frigates, X-wings, Y-wings, and more). These ships face off against two Imperial Star Destroyers and squadrons of TIE fighters, and – upon their late arrival to the battle – Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer and the Death Star. The Tantive IV, a CR90 corvette more popularly referred to as a blockade runner, made its own special cameo at the tail end of the fight. As Princess Leia Organa’s (Carrie Fisher and Ingvild Deila) personal ship, the Tantive IV received the Death Star plans and fled the scene, destined to be captured by Vader’s Star Destroyer at the beginning of A New Hope. And, while we’re on the subject of intricate starship maneuvers and space-based choreography… Although the First Contact team could plan visual effects shots with animated storyboards, ILM supplied Gareth Edwards with a next-level virtual viewfinder that allowed the director to select his shots by immersing himself among Rogue One’s ships in real time. “What we wanted to do is give Gareth the opportunity to shoot his space battles and other all-digital scenes the same way he shoots his live-action. Then he could go in with this sort of virtual viewfinder and view the space battle going on, and figure out what the best angle was to shoot those ships from,” senior animation supervisor Hal Hickel described in the Rogue One: Digital Storytelling featurette. Hickel divulged that the sequence involving the dish array docking with the Death Star was an example of the “spontaneous discovery of great angles,” as the scene was never storyboarded or previsualized. Visual effects supervisor John Knoll with director Gareth Edwards during production of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Credit: ILM & Lucasfilm). Tough Little Ships The Federation and Rebel Alliance each deployed “tough little ships” (an endearing description Commander William T. Riker [Jonathan Frakes] bestowed upon the U.S.S. Defiant in First Contact) in their respective conflicts, namely the U.S.S. Defiant from Deep Space Nine and the Tantive IV from A New Hope. VisionArt had already built a CG Defiant for the Deep Space Nine series, but ILM upgraded the model with images gathered from the ship’s three-foot physical model. A similar tactic was taken to bring the Tantive IV into the digital realm for Rogue One. “This was the Blockade Runner. This was the most accurate 1:1 reproduction we could possibly have made,” model supervisor Russell Paul declared to Cinefex’s Joe Fordham. “We did an extensive photo reference shoot and photogrammetry re-creation of the miniature. From there, we built it out as accurately as possible.” Speaking of sturdy ships, if you look very closely, you can spot a model of the Millennium Falcon flashing across the background as the U.S.S. Defiant makes an attack run on the Borg cube at the Battle of Sector 001! Exploration and Hope The in-universe ramifications that materialize from the Battles of Sector 001 and Scarif are monumental. The destruction of the Borg cube compels the Borg Queen to travel back in time in an attempt to vanquish Earth before the Federation can even be formed, but Captain Picard and the Enterprise-E foil the plot and end up helping their 21st century ancestors make “first contact” with another species, the logic-revering Vulcans. The post-Scarif benefits take longer to play out for the Rebel Alliance, but the theft of the Death Star plans eventually leads to the superweapon’s destruction. The Galactic Civil War is far from over, but Scarif is a significant step in the Alliance’s effort to overthrow the Empire. The visual effects ILM provided for First Contact and Rogue One contributed significantly to the critical and commercial acclaim both pictures enjoyed, a victory reflecting the relentless dedication, tireless work ethic, and innovative spirit embodied by visual effects supervisor John Knoll and ILM’s entire staff. While being interviewed for The Making of Star Trek: First Contact, actor Patrick Stewart praised ILM’s invaluable influence, emphasizing, “ILM was with us, on this movie, almost every day on set. There is so much that they are involved in.” And, regardless of your personal preferences – phasers or lasers, photon torpedoes or proton torpedoes, warp speed or hyperspace – perhaps Industrial Light & Magic’s ability to infuse excitement into both franchises demonstrates that Star Trek and Star Wars encompass themes that are not competitive, but compatible. After all, what goes together better than exploration and hope? – Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

While there’s more than one way to format Unity C# code, agreeing on a consistent code style for your project enables your team to develop a clean, readable, and scalable codebase. In this blog, we provide some guidelines and examples you can use to develop and maintain your own code style guide.Please note that these are only recommendations based on those provided by Microsoft. This is your chance to get inspired and decide what works best for your team.Ideally, a Unity project should feel like it’s been developed by a single author, no matter how many developers actually work on it. A style guide can help unify your approach for creating a more cohesive codebase.It’s a good idea to follow industry standards wherever possible and browse through existing style guides as a starting point for creating your own. In partnership with internal and external Unity experts, we released a new e-book, Create a C# style guide: Write cleaner code that scales for inspiration, based on Microsoft’s comprehensive C# style.The Google C# style guide is another great resource for defining guidelines around naming, formatting, and commenting conventions. Again, there is no right or wrong method, but we chose to follow Microsoft standards for our own guide.Our e-book, along with an example C# file, are available for free. Both resources focus on the most common coding conventions you’ll encounter while developing in Unity. These are all, essentially, a subset of the Microsoft Framework Design guidelines, which include an extensive number of best practices beyond what we cover in this post.We recommend customizing the guidelines provided in our style guide to suit your team’s preferences. These preferences should be prioritized over our suggestions and the Microsoft Framework Design guidelines if they’re in conflict.The development of a style guide requires an upfront investment but will pay dividends later. For example, managing a single set of standards can reduce the time developers spend on ramping up if they move onto another project.Of course, consistency is key. If you follow these suggestions and need to modify your style guide in the future, a few find-and-replace operations can quickly migrate your codebase.Concentrate on creating a pragmatic style guide that fits your needs by covering the majority of day-to-day use cases. Don’t overengineer it by attempting to account for every single edge case from the start. The guide will evolve organically over time as your team iterates on it from project to project.Most style guides include basic formatting rules. Meanwhile, specific naming conventions, policy on use of namespaces, and strategies for classes are somewhat abstract areas that can be refined over time.Let’s look at some common formatting and naming conventions you might consider for your style guide.The two common indentation styles in C# are the Allman style, which places the opening curly braces on a new line (also known as the BSD style from BSD Unix), and the K&R style, or “one true brace style,” which keeps the opening brace on the same line as the previous header.In an effort to improve readability, we picked the Allman style for our guide, based on the Microsoft Framework Design guidelines: Whatever style you choose, ensure that every programmer on your team follows it.A guide should also indicate whether braces from nested multiline statements should be included. While removing braces in the following example won’t throw an error, it can be confusing to read. That’s why our guide recommends applying braces for clarity, even if they are optional.Something as simple as horizontal spacing can enhance your code’s appearance onscreen. While your personal formatting preferences can vary, here are a few recommendations from our style guide to improve overall readability:Add spaces to decrease code density:The extra whitespace can give a sense of visual separation between parts of a lineUse a single space after a comma, between function arguments.Don’t add a space after the parenthesis and function arguments.Don’t use spaces between a function name and parenthesis.Avoid spaces inside brackets.Use a single space before flow control conditions: Add a space between the flow comparison operator and the parentheses.Use a single space before and after comparison operators.Variables typically represent a state, so try to attribute clear and descriptive nouns to their names. You can then prefix booleans with a verbfor variables that must indicate a true or false value. Often they are the answer to a question such as, is the player running? Is the game over? Prefix them with a verb to clarify their meaning. This is often paired with a description or condition, e.g., isPlayerDead, isWalking, hasDamageMultiplier, etc.Since methods perform actions, a good rule of thumb is to start their names with a verb and add context as needed, e.g., GetDirection, FindTarget, and so on, based on the return type. If the method has a bool return type, it can also be framed as a question.Much like boolean variables themselves, prefix methods with a verb if they return a true-false condition. This phrases them in the form of a question, e.g., IsGameOver, HasStartedTurn.Several conventions exist for naming events and event handles. In our style guide, we name the event with a verb phrase,similar to a method. Choose a name that communicates the state change accurately.Use the present or past participle to indicate events “before” or “after.” For instance, specify OpeningDoor for an event before opening a door and DoorOpened for an event afterward.We also recommend that you don’t abbreviate names. While saving a few characters can feel like a productivity gain in the short term, what is obvious to you now might not be in a year’s time to another teammate. Your variable names should reveal their intent and be easy to pronounce. Single letter variables are fine for loops and math expressions, but otherwise, you should avoid abbreviations. Clarity is more important than any time saved from omitting a few vowels.At the same time, use one variable declaration per line; it’s less compact, but also less error prone and enhances readability. Avoid redundant names. If your class is called Player, you don’t need to create member variables called PlayerScore or PlayerTarget. Trim them down to Score or Target.In addition, avoid too many prefixes or special encoding.A practice highlighted in our guide is to prefix private member variables with an underscore (_) to differentiate them from local variables. Some style guides use prefixes for private member variables (m_), constants (k_), or static variables (s_), so the name reveals more about the variable.However, it’s good practice to prefix interface names with a capital “I” and follow this with an adjective that describes the functionality. You can even prefix the event raising method (in the subject) with “On”: The subject that invokes the event usually does so from a method prefixed with “On,” e.g., OnOpeningDoor or OnDoorOpened.Camel case and Pascal case are common standards in use, compared to Snake or Kebab case, or Hungarian notations. Our guide recommends Pascal case for public fields, enums, classes, and methods, and Camel case for private variables, as this is common practice in Unity.There are many additional rules to consider outside of what’s covered here. The example guide and our new e-book, Create a C# style guide: Write cleaner code that scales, provide many more tips for better organization.The concept of clean code aims to make development more scalable by conforming to a set of production standards. A style guide should remove most of the guesswork developers would otherwise have regarding the conventions they should follow. Ultimately, this guide should help your team establish a consensus around your codebase to grow your project into a commercial-scale production.Just how comprehensive your style guide should be depends on your situation. It’s up to your team to decide if they want their guide to set rules for more abstract, intangible concepts. This could include rules for using namespaces, breaking down classes, or implementing directives like the #region directive (or not). While #region can help you collapse and hide sections of code in C# files, making large files more manageable, it’s also an example of something that many developers consider to be code smells or anti-patterns. Therefore, you might want to avoid setting strict standards for these aspects of code styling. Not everything needs to be outlined in the guide – sometimes it’s enough to simply discuss and make decisions as a team.When we talked to the experts who helped create our guide, their main piece of advice was code readability above all else. Here are some pointers on how to achieve that:Use fewer arguments: Arguments can increase the complexity of your method. By reducing their number, you make methods easier to read and test.Avoid excessive overloading: You can generate an endless permutation of method overloads. Select the few that reflect how you’ll call the method, and then implement those. If you do overload a method, prevent confusion by making sure that each method signature has a distinct number of arguments.Avoid side effects: A method only needs to do what its name advertises. Avoid modifying anything outside of its scope. Pass in arguments by value instead of reference when possible. So when sending back results via the out or ref keyword, verify that’s the one thing you intend the method to accomplish. Though side effects are useful for certain tasks, they can lead to unintended consequences. Write a method without side effects to cut down on unexpected behavior.We hope that this blog helps you kick off the development of your own style guide. Learn more from our example C# file and brand new e-book where you can review our suggested rules and customize them to your team’s preferences.The specifics of individual rules are less important than having everyone agree to follow them consistently. When in doubt, rely on your team’s own evolving guide to settle any style disagreements. After all, this is a group effort.

Science & technology | Digital archaeologyThe decoding of ancient Roman scrolls is speeding upMore data, and a more powerful particle accelerator, should pay dividendsPhotograph: ESRF/Vuedici May 28th 2025|HerculaneumIF YOU WANTED to read an ancient Roman scroll, you might reach for a dictionary, and perhaps a magnifying glass. You would probably not think of using a particle accelerator. But that is what is required to unravel the papyrus scrolls found in Herculaneum, a Roman town buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. Even then, success is far from guaranteed: since 2023 researchers attempting to unravel the scrolls have been stuck on the first few. Now, armed with more data and a more powerful particle accelerator, they expect to make more rapid headway.Explore moreScience & technologyThis article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Hitting the accelerator”From the May 31st 2025 editionDiscover stories from this section and more in the list of contents⇒Explore the editionReuse this content

The idea of becoming a real estate investor for as little as $5 may seem too good to be true. And for many users of Landa, a proptech company that promised just that — it has been. Landa emerged from stealth in August 2022, announcing a total of $33 million in funding and a pledge to help everyday Americans access residential real estate investment through fractional shares. CEO Yishai Cohen and former CTO Amit Assaraf founded Landa in 2019 in an effort to make real estate investment more inclusive. The app’s only requirements were that users be over age 18 and U.S. residents. They could start investing with just $5, and buy and sell shares as well as see real-time updates on their properties from the Landa app. (Assaraf left the company in December of 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has not responded to requests for comment.) Today, Landa’s investment portal site is down and its app is inoperable. Users claim they can’t access their funds and haven’t been paid dividends in months. The startup is embroiled in litigation, including a lawsuit from its early venture investor Viola. One early user told TechCrunch that Landa stopped paying dividends to him on his shares in January. When he asked Landa about it, they “punted the question,” he said. “I repeatedly emailed them about it and just got deflecting answers, nothing real,” the user said. “Then a few months after that, the app became unusable. It would not open.” Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW The user then asked if he could delete his account, which he had opened in 2021, and sell the shares. But he found Landa had disabled his ability to sell shares. “They have essentially frozen me out of my funds and just shut down the app,” the user said. “Where is the money? Why won’t they return it to me?” Over 130 complaints have been filed against Landa to the Better Business Bureau, with dozens of people echoing similar allegations. For instance, on May 1, one user who filed such a complaint shared they had invested over $8,000 through Landa and stopped receiving dividends last fall. The user said Landa customer service replied to their emails by saying that the company is “working on it.”  In mid-April, when TechCrunch asked Landa about the issue — including the status of its downed site and whether the company itself had shut down — CEO Cohen said:  “Of course not. The site will be back up.” When asked why the app was not working and why users had not received dividends in months, Cohen’s terse reply still seemed to refer to the website, blaming the servers: “It’s unrelated to dividends. It’s from our servers. We are on it.” Upon further prodding, Cohen on April 18 shared the following statement: “We are aware of the issues currently affecting our platform and product, and want to assure all investors that we are actively working to restore full functionality as soon as possible. We have kept investors informed through all updates, including the server access issue. We appreciate the continued support of our investors and resident community, and remain committed to delivering on our vision of making real estate investing accessible to everyone.” Cohen did not respond to our request for a status update on May 20. Investors NFX and 83North did not respond to our multiple requests for comment.  Embroiled in a lawsuit  It’s not just users who are upset with Landa. The company’s primary lenders are suing.  Viola Credit and L Finance filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against Landa in November 2024, accusing it of “numerous defaults” on more than $35 million worth of loans they extended to the company. (Viola is also an investor in Landa through its venture division.) The lenders also accused it of missing property tax payments that led to the forced sale of those properties, neglecting properties, and even failing to collect rents. The lawsuit — first reported by real estate industry publication Bisnow — states that after over a year of attempting to get Landa to honor their commitments, the lenders removed Landa as manager of the homes and appointed an independent property manager and a chief restructuring officer.  After further negotiations failed, the creditors later asked the court for, and were granted, an injunction blocking Landa from accessing bank accounts, interfering with their attempts to restructure the business, and reclaiming money they say is owed — including proceeds from property sales. Despite the injunction, the lenders returned to court in January 2025, claiming Landa told tenants to send rent payments to a different bank account not covered by the ruling. They discovered this while making repairs to one property’s septic system. They also accused Landa’s CEO of trying to sell or refinance some properties. The court ordered Landa to explain itself. Instead, in early March, Landa asked the court for a restraining order against Viola Credit and L Finance, claiming the independent manager was “installed unlawfully.”  Judge Jennifer G. Schecter was not pleased. In March, she ordered both sides to find a solution “that’s good for all of your clients.” She denied Landa’s request for an injunction and ordered the company to pay nearly $100,000. A few weeks later, Landa filed a formal countersuit. The case is still pending. Challenging model Landa is just one of several startups that emerged in recent years offering fractional real estate investing. It is also apparently not the only one that has struggled — especially after mortgage interest rates began soaring in 2022.  Fintor raised millions of dollars before seemingly pivoting to offer an “AI Agent to automate finance and real estate operations with human level performance.” Dallas-based Nada, which offered index-like real estate investment products called “Cityfunds,” allowing non-accredited investors to buy into a city’s home equity market with as little as $250, also appears to have pivoted. Its website now promotes a new tagline: “Access home equity to finance anything.”  Arrived was perhaps the highest-profile of the bunch — and the only one that seems to be actively operating under the same model. In May of 2022, TechCrunch reported that Arrived raised $25 million in a Series A funding round including Bezos Expeditions, to allow people to buy shares in single-family rentals with “as little as $100.” According to its website, the startup has to date paid out over $13 million in dividends and interest and has 766,000 registered investors. As for those people who invested with Landa, the future of their money appears uncertain. As of May 23, Landa’s investor portal website still redirects to a “come-back-soon” maintenance message. 

This article contains some Mission: Impossible – The Final reckoning spoilers. In the most recent and supposedly final Mission: Impossible film, Ethan Hunt receives his briefing on a VHS cassette tape. That is a marvelous wink to the era in whichMission: Impossible, but these films have remained consistently at the zenith of quality blockbuster cinema. And through it all remains Tom Cruise, running, gunning, and smoldering with his various, luxuriant haircuts. Indeed, the first M:I picture was also Cruise’s first as a producer, made under the banner of Cruise/Wagner productions. Perhaps for that reason, he has stayed committed to what was once viewed as simply a “television adaptation.” It might have begun as TV IP, but in Cruise’s hands it has become a cinematic magnum opus that sequel after sequel, and decade after decade, has blossomed into one of the most inventive and satisfying spectacles ever produced in the Hollywood system. The final decade of the series’ run in particular has been groundbreaking. After five movies with five very different directors, aesthetics, and sensibilities, Christopher McQuarrie stuck around—alongside stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood. Together with Cruise, they turned the series into an old-fashioned, in-camera spectacle that harkens back to the earliest days of cinema. In the process, Cruise has added another chapter to his career, that of an onscreen daredevil like Harold Lloyd or Douglas Fairbanks. It’s been an amazing run, and honestly it’s a bit arbitrary to quantify it with any sort of ranking. But if we were going to do such a thing, here is how it should go… 8. Mission: Impossible II (2000) It’s hardly controversial to put John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II dead last. From its overabundance of slow-mo action—complete with Woo’s signature flying doves—to its use of Limp Bizkit, and even that nonsensical plot about manmade viruses that still doesn’t feel timely on the other side of 2020, MI:-2 is a relic of late ‘90s Hollywood excess. On the one hand, it’s kind of marvelous that Cruise let Woo completely tear down and rebuild a successful franchise-starter in the Hong Kong filmmaker’s own image. On the other, it’s perhaps telling of where Cruise’s ego was at that time since Woo used this opportunity to transform the original all-American Ethan Hunt into a god of celluloid marble. And make no mistake, there is something godlike to how Woo’s camera fetishizes Cruise’s sunglasses and new, luxuriant mane of jet black hair during Hunt’s big introduction where he is seen free-climbing across a rock face without rope. It would come to work as metaphor for the rest of the movie where, despite ostensibly being the leader of a team, Ethan is mostly going it alone as he does ridiculous things like have a medieval duel against his evil doppelgänger (Dougray Scott), only both men now ride motorcycles instead of horses. The onscreen team, meanwhile, stares slack-jawed as Ethan finds his inner-Arnold Schwarzenegger and massacres entire scores of faceless mercenaries in multiple shootouts. While gunplay has always been an element of modern spy thrillers, the Mission: Impossible movies work best when the characters use their wits (and the stunt team’s ingenuity) to escape elaborate, tricky situations. So there’s something banal about the way M:I-2 resembles any other late ‘90s and early ‘00s actioner that might’ve starred Nicolas Cage or Bruce Willis. Technically the plot, which involves Ethan’s reluctance to send new flame Nyah Hall (Thandiwe Newton) into the lion’s den as an informant, has classical pedigree. The movie remakes Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) in all but name. However, the movie is so in love with its movie star deity that even the supposedly central romance is cast in ambivalent shadow. 7. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) Yes, we admit to also being surprised that what is allegedly intended to be the last Mission: Impossible movie is finishing near the very bottom of this list. Which is not to say that The Final Reckoning is a bad movie. It’s just a messy one—and disappointing too. Perhaps the expectations were too high for a film with “final” in the title. Also its reportedly eye-popping $400 million only fueled the hype. But whereas the three previous Mission films directed by Christopher McQuarrie, including Dead Reckoning, had a light playfulness about them, The Final Reckoning gets lost in its own self-importance and grandiosity. Once again we have a Mission flick determined to deify Ethan Hunt with McQuarrie’s “gambler” from the last couple movies taking on the imagery of the messiah. Now the AI fate of the world lies in his literal hands. This approach leads to many long expository sequences where characters blather endlessly about the motivations of an abstract artificial intelligence. Meanwhile far too little time is spent on the sweet spot for this series: Cruise’s chemistry with co-stars when he isn’t hanging from some death-defying height. In fact, Ethan goes it pretty much alone in this one, staring down generals, submarine captains, and American presidents—fools all to think for one instance Ethan isn’t the guy sent to redeem them for their sins. The action sequences are still jaw-dropping when they finally come, and it is always good to see co-stars Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, and an all too briefly used Ving Rhames again, but this feels less like a finale than a breaking point. If Mission does come back, it will have to be as something wildly different (and presumably less expensive). 6. Mission: Impossible III (2006) Before he transformed Star Trek and Star Wars into remarkably similar franchises, writer-director J.J. Abrams made his big screen debut by doing much the same to the Mission: Impossible franchise. With his emphasis on extreme close-ups, heavy expository dialogue dumps, and intentionally vague motivations for his villains that seem to always have something to do with the War on Terror, Abrams remade the M:I franchise in the image of his TV shows, particularly Alias. This included turning Woo’s Übermensch from the last movie into the kind of suburban everyman who scores well with the Nielsen ratings and who has a sweet girl-next-door fiancée (Michelle Monaghan). Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Your mileage may vary with this approach, but personally we found M:I-3 to be too much of a piece with mid-2000s television and lacking in a certain degree of movie magic. With that said, the movie has two fantastic aces up its sleeve. The first and most significant is a deliciously boorish performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the franchise’s scariest villain. Abrams’ signature monologues have never been more chilling as when Hoffman cuts through Cruise’s matinee heroics like a knife and unsettles the protagonist and the audience with an unblinking declaration of ill-intent. Perhaps more impressively, during one of the franchise’s famed “mask” sequences where Ethan disguises himself as Hoffman’s baddie, the character actor subtly and convincingly mimics Cruise’s leading man charisma. That, plus introducing fan favorite Simon Pegg as Benji to the series (if in little more than a cameo), makes the movie worth a watch if not a regular revisit. According to more than a few critics in 2023, the then-newest installment in the series was also the best one. I respectfully disagree. The first half of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise’s Dead Reckoning In terms of old school spectacle and breakneck pacing, Dead Reckoning is easily the most entertaining action movie of summer 2023’s offerings. However, when compared to the best entries in the M:I franchise, Dead Reckoning leaves something be desired. While McQuarrie’s counterintuitive instinct to script the scenes after designing the set pieces, and essentially make it up as they went along, paid off in dividends in Fallout, the narrative of Dead Reckoning’s first half is shaggy and muddled. The second act is especially disjointed when the film arrives in Venice, and the actors seem as uncertain as the script is over what exactly the film’s nefarious A.I. villain, codename: “The Entity,” wants. That this is the portion of the film which also thanklessly kills off fan favorite Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) does the movie no favors. Elsewhere in the film, Hayley Atwell proves a fantastic addition in her own right as Grace—essentially a civilian and audience surrogate who gets wrapped up in the M:I series’ craziness long enough to stare at Cruise in incredulity—but the inference that she is here to simply interchangeably replace Ilsa gives the film a sour subtext. Still, Atwell’s Grace is great, Cruise’s Ethan is as mad as ever with his stunts, and even as the rest of the ensemble feels underutilized, seeing the team back together makes this a good time—while the unexpected return of Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge is downright great. 4. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) There are many fans who will tell you that the Mission: Impossible franchise as we know it really started with this Brad Bird entry at the beginning of the 2010s, and it’s easy to see why. As the first installment made with a newly chastened Cruise—who Paramount Pictures had just spent years trying to fire from the series—it’s also the installment where the movie star remade his persona as a modern day Douglas Fairbanks. Here he becomes the guy you could count on to commit the most absurdly dangerous and ridiculous stunts for our entertainment. What a mensch. And in terms of set pieces, nothing in the series may top this movie’s second act where Cruise is asked to become a real-life Spider-Man and wall-crawl—as well as swing and skip—along the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It’s a genuine showstopper that looms over the rest of the movie. Not that there isn’t a lot to enjoy elsewhere as Bird brings a slightly more sci-fi and cartoonish cheek to the proceedings with amusing gadgets like those aforementioned “blue means glue” Spidey gloves. Even more amusingly, the damn things never seem to work properly. This is also the first Mission: Impossible movie where the whole team feels vital to the success of the adventure, including a now proper sidekick in the returning Pegg and some solid support from Paula Patton and Jeremy Renner. For a certain breed of fan that makes this the best, but we would argue the team dynamics were fleshed out a little better down the road, and in movies that have more than one stunning set piece to their name. 3. Mission: Impossible (1996) The last four entries of the series have been so good that it’s become common for folks to overlook the movie that started it all, Brian De Palma’s endlessly stylish Mission: Impossible. That’s a shame since there’s something admirably blasphemous to this day about a movie that would take an ancient pop culture property and throw the fundamentals out the window. In this case, that meant turning the original show’s hero, Jim Phelps (played by Jon Voight here), into the villain while completely rewriting the rulebook about what the concept of “Mission: Impossible” is. It’s the bold kind of creative move studios would never dare make now, but that’s what opened up the space to transform a novelty of ‘60s spymania TV into a ‘90s action classic, complete with heavy emphasis on techno espionage babble and post-Cold War politics. The movie can at times appear dated given the emphasis on floppy disks and AOL email accounts, but it’s also got a brisk energy that never goes out of style thanks to De Palma’s ability to frame a knotty script by David Koepp and Robert Towne (the latter of whom penned Chinatown) into a breathlessly paced thriller filled with paranoia, double crosses, femme fatales, and horrifying dream sequences. In other words, it’s a De Palma special! The filmmaker and Cruise also craft a series of set pieces that would become the series’ defining trademark. The finale with a fistfight atop a speeding train beneath the English Channel is great, but the quiet as a church mouse midpoint where Cruise’s hero dangles over the pressure-sensitive floor of a CIA vault—and with a drop of sweat dripping just out of reach!—is the stuff of popcorn myth. It’s how M:I also became as much a great heist series as shoot ‘em up. Plus, this movie gave us Ving Rhames’ stealth MVP hacker, Luther Stickell. 2. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) In retrospect there is something faintly low-key about Rogue Nation, as ludicrous as that might be to say about a movie that begins with its star literally clinging for dear life to the outside of a plane at take off. Yet given how grand newcomer director Christopher McQuarrie would take things in the following three Mission films, his more restrained first iteration seems charmingly small scale in comparison. Even so, it remains an action marvel in its own right, as well as the most balanced and well-structured adventure in the series. It’s the one where the project of making Ethan Hunt a tangible character began. Rightly assessing Ethan to be a “gambler” based on his inconsistent yet continuously deranged earlier appearances, McQuarrie spins a web where Hunt’s dicey lifestyle comes back to haunt him when facing a villain who turns those showboat instincts in on themselves, and which pairs Ethan for the first time against the best supporting character in the series, Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust. There’s a reason Ferguson’s MI6 double (triple, quadruple?) agent was the first leading lady in the series to become a recurring character. She gives a star-making turn as a woman who is in every way Ethan’s equal while keeping him and the audience on their toes. She, alongside a returning Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, solidify the definitive Mission team, all while McQuarrie crafts elegant set pieces with classical flair, including a night at the opera that homages and one-ups Alfred Hitchcock’s influential sequence from The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), as well as a Casablanca chase between Ethan and Ilsa that’s the best motorcycle sequence in the series (if only they stopped by Rick’s). Also McQuarrie’s script ultimately figures out who Ethan Hunt truly is by letting all those around him realize he’s a madman. And Alec Baldwin’s Alan Hunley gets this gem of a line to sums the series up in total: “Hunt is uniquely trained and highly motivated, a specialist without equal, immune to any countermeasures. There is no secret he cannot extract, no security he cannot breach, no person he cannot become. He has most likely anticipated this very conversation and is waiting to strike in whatever direction we move. Sir, Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny—and he has made you his mission.” 1. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) If one were to rank these movies simply by virtue of set pieces and stunts, pound for pound it’s impossible to top Mission: Impossible – Fallout (forgive the pun). A virtuoso showcase in action movie bliss, there are too many giddy mic drop moments to list, but among our favorites are: Tom Cruise doing a real HALO jump out of a plane at 25,000 feet and which was captured by camera operator Craig O’Brien, who had an IMAX camera strapped to his head; the extended fight sequence between Cruise, Henry Cavill, and Liam Yang in a bathroom where the music completely drops out so we can hear every punch, kick, and that surreal moment where Cavill needs to reload his biceps like they’re shotguns; and did you see Cruise’s ankle bend the wrong way in that building to building jump?! For action junkies, there was no better adrenaline kick out of Hollywood in the 2010s than this flick, and that is in large part a credit to writer-director Christopher McQuarrie. As the first filmmaker to helm more than one M:I movie, McQuarrie had the seemingly counterintuitive innovation to meticulously hammer out all of the above action sequences as well as others—such as a motorcycle chase across the cobblestones of Paris and a helicopter climax where Cruise is really flying his chopper at low altitudes—with stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood and Cruise, and then retroactively pen a surprisingly tight and satisfying screenplay that continues to deconstruct the Ethan Hunt archetype into a man of flesh and blood. McQuarrie also reunites all the best supporting players in the series—Rhames, Pegg, and his own additions of Rebecca Ferguson as the ambiguous Ilsa Faust and Sean Harris as the dastardly Solomon Lane—into a yarn that is as zippy and sharp as you might expect from the screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, but which lets each action sequence unfurl with all the pageantry of an old school Gene Kelly musical number. Many will call this the best Mission: Impossible movie, and we won’t quibble the point.

OnlyFans, the internet’s kingdom of smut, may be changing hands soon. Reuters reports that the porn platform’s parent company, Fenix International, Ltd., is in talks to sell the business for some $8 billion to a U.S. investor group. The New York Post previously reported that Leonid Radvinsky, the billionaire owner of the site, was looking to “cash out,” but had not yet found a buyer. Reuters now identifies at least one potential buyer as the Forest Road Company, an investment firm based in Los Angeles that is reportedly leading an investor group that wants to buy the porn platform. On its website, Forest Road describes itself as “not your average investment firm” and says it embraces “complexity and creativity to extract value where others see limitations.” The site also expresses an interest in “media & entertainment” and “digital assets.” Not much else is known about the talks. Citing sources familiar with the potential deal, Reuters writes that Fenix is also talking to other interested parties. Gizmodo reached out to OnlyFans for more information. OnlyFans was founded in 2016 and rose to prominence during the pandemic by helping horny web users satisfy their libidos whilst otherwise avoiding human contact. Since then, the business has only continued to grow. Other than a weird brief moment in 2021 (when the company bizarrely claimed it would ban “sexually explicit content”), it has served as a premier destination for dirty content, and has helped re-shaped the porn industry through its gig-worker model. Last year, the company reported that payments made through the platform had surged by 19 percent since 2023, topping some $6.6 billion. Radvinsky purchased the company in 2019 and it has made an absolute killing since then. Bloomberg reported last year that the mogul had made $1 billion in three years through corporate dividends from the business. The company has also been the subject of considerable criticism, as well as numerous legal complaints. Critics accuse the platform of being frequented by sex traffickers, and claim that the site has also become a portal for child sexual abuse material. The company was also recently sued by two customers who were outraged to discover that they may have not been messaging with real models (creators often outsource their customer communications to third-party firms).

One of the most momentous developments of the new Trump era is how major billionaires in the tech industry — frequently known as the broligarchs — have thrown their weight behind the president. During the 2024 election, they offered high-profile support and made big donations; after the inauguration, they announced new company policies that aligned them with President Donald Trump’s regressive cultural ideologies. Elon Musk had already turned Twitter into a right-wing echo chamber since purchasing it in 2022, and spent several chaotic months earlier this year as Trump’s government efficiency henchman. Jeff Bezos has revamped the Washington Post’s editorial section to build support for “personal liberties and free markets.” Mark Zuckerberg decided to get rid of fact-checkers at Meta. It was a massive show of power that revealed how possible it is for these wealthy men to remake our culture in their own image, transforming how we speak to each other and what we know to be true. Using that power on Trump’s behalf seems to have paid mixed dividends for Silicon Valley, but it nonetheless makes clear how important it is to understand their worldview and their vision for the future. Which is why it is striking to note that Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg share a favorite author: Iain M. Banks, the Scottish science fiction writer best known for his Culture series. Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich.“The Culture series is certainly, in terms of more modern science fiction, one of my absolute favorites,” Bezos told GeekWire in 2018, adding, “there’s a utopian element to it that I find very attractive.” Bezos has attempted twice to adapt the series for TV at Amazon, once in 2018 and again in February. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg picked the Culture novel Player of Games for his book club in 2015. Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich.The most avowed Culture fan among the broligarchs, however, is Musk. Musk has named Space X drone ships after the starships in the Culture books. His original name for the neuralink — a computer chip that can be implanted in human brains, pioneered by his neurotechnology company — was the neural lace, a piece of telepathic technology that Banks came up with in the Culture books. In 2018, Musk declared himself “a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” (It’s worth noting that in 2018, Musk was under fire for union busting but had not yet waded so far into national politics or declared public war against the “woke mind virus.”)Plenty of us like and even identify with pieces of pop culture whose politics we don’t entirely agree with, like the libertarian Little House on the Prairie books or the Christian Chronicles of Narnia. Still, the Banks Culture series, which consists of 10 books released between 1987 and 2012, is not politically coded so much as it is downright didactic. “The Culture is hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism,” Banks said in an interview with Strange Horizons in 2010, in a line that’s only barely more explicit than the books themselves.The Culture series takes place in a post-scarcity galactic society known only as the Culture, which strictly values empathy, pluralism, and social cooperation. Most of the volumes of the series see the Culture navigating an altercation with another civilization, usually one with a much less progressive ethos, and figuring out how to handle the resulting tension. Does the Culture intervene in the affairs of another planet to, for instance, stop the spread of a theocratic empire? What does it do about civilizations where slavery is legal?The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether? Nearly every aspect of the Culture seems to be diametrically opposed to the worldview of the tech right.Banks takes as his starting principle for the Culture the idea that a space-faring civilization will have to be socialist to be effective. In the hostile environment of the vacuum of space, he argues, you will need to be able to count on the collective. Banks further reasons that each spaceship or planet in the Culture will have to be reasonably self-sufficient to survive. At the same time, the Culture is stringently non-hierarchical and non-individualistic. There is no money and no want; therefore, there can’t be any billionaires or any economic inequality. There are no laws and almost no crime. This is not a world in which supremely wealthy people who use their power to influence the social fabric make sense. “Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without,” Banks concluded in a 1994 Usenet post in which he lays out his full theory of the Culture. In the Culture, should someone commit an action that most people agreed was unacceptable, everyone responds with social shaming rather than the rule of law: They stop inviting the person in question to parties. In other words, like a group of proper leftists, they deal with misbehavior by social cancellation, that great threat against which the broligarchs have declared war.Even work-life balance in the Culture exists in opposition to the ethos of Silicon Valley. The Culture’s citizens have invented vastly powerful AIs that take care of governance for them. This delegation frees up the Culture citizens themselves to indulge in what Banks describes as “the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.” Those who are burdened with too much ambition to be content in such a soft life take on (unpaid) jobs managing the Culture’s relationships with other civilizations, mostly for the prestige and the adrenaline rush of it all. This vision appears to have influenced Musk’s idea of a future in which AI has rendered work “optional,” so that “if you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job.” Musk allows that there would need to be “universal high income” for this plan to work, but outlines no ideas as to how such an ambitious policy could take effect. In the meantime, in our own world, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla are all infamous for requiring employees to work abusively long hours. Elon Musk is one of the most ardent fans of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesFinally, and perhaps most discordantly given the broligarchs’ current gender politics, the Culture is genderfluid. Anyone can change gender just by thinking about it, and most people do at least once in their lives, a state of affairs Banks argues is responsible for its strict regime of gender equality. Meanwhile, Musk is notoriously anti-trans, Zuckerberg has been leaning into the retrograde gender ideologies of the manosphere as he tweaks Meta’s policies to allow more hate speech, particularly toward LGBTQ+ people, and Amazon has removed LGBTQ+ rights support from its website.But it’s not just that the Culture holds the inverse of the ideology these men stand for. The most detestable villain in Banks’s series is Joiler Veppers, a wealthy man in a civilization less evolved than the Culture, who uses his riches to purchase and influence media outlets, undercut labor unions, and rape his indentured servants. Veppers’s money comes from a family fortune built in the computer game industry, and he compounds that fortune by investing in the servers to a series of virtual reality hellscapes, where unfortunates are horribly tortured for all eternity.If you want to know how Banks views capitalist tech billionaires, you don’t have to hunt very hard. In the Culture series, a capitalist tech billionaire is the literal devil, only he couldn’t be bothered to build hell himself. So why are the broligarchs so into the Culture books?So what’s the appeal of the Culture series if you actually are a capitalist tech billionaire? Probably the tech itself.If politics offer the Culture books their intellectual framing, the tech is what gives them their zing, their spectacle. Throughout the series, Banks lovingly describes spaceships and AIs (and lots of spaceships that are also AIs), and artificial planets and gizmos and gadgets. Generally, at the end of the book, the Culture uses one of those gizmos in an inventive way to win a big, explosive space war. Read through this light, the Culture’s technological prowess offers the brute force that backs up its warm and fuzzy ideology. The Culture can afford to be idealistic and worry about its moral culpability because it has better technology than all the other civilizations it faces off with, which means it will nearly always win in a fight.If you think of yourself as a titan of industry who is making that technology for your own culture — who is providing the brute force that allows for wishy-washy moralizing — there is a certain easy comfort that comes with this alignment. You know you are on the correct side of history because you’re on the side that is building the strongest and most advanced technology. Yet within the larger metaphor Banks is building, the relationship between politics and strength is supposed to be the other way around. The Culture is not good because they are strong. Their strength is a metaphor for their goodness. They have the best technology because that shows that they are rational, that they value intelligence, that they are motivated to give their citizens the best possible quality of life. The Culture is not good because they are strong. Their strength is a metaphor for their goodness.To avoid this idea when reading Banks, you would have to be exquisitely attuned to the pleasurable spectacle of technology and the power that tech offers its users, and then ignore everything else. In that case, what the broligarchs’ love of the Culture series reveals is that they see the world through the lens of power and spectacle first and foremost, and have no particular problem evading the work’s deeper meaning. That’s why this group has a propensity for big, pointless stunts, like trips to almost-space and carting a kitchen sink through Twitter headquarters and threatening to punch one another in a public fight. It’s as though they feel entitled to their power because their favorite book taught them that the side with the best tech always wins, and the most important thing you can do with that tech is put on a show. They seem not to have read deeply enough to understand what the book was really trying to say: that the most important thing powerful people can do is use their power to make the world freer, fairer, and more pleasurable for everyone else.See More: