Cool is a slippery thing. One minute you have it, the next minute it’s out your hands like a water balloon.
For an older generation, Marty Scorsese epitomized cool. That hasn’t been the case for a while — I’d say sometime after The Wolf of Wall Street and before his third consecutive manicured period drama. When he made a deal a few weeks ago with an AI startup and enthused how he’d use it to storyboard, it only reminded of the cool he no longer had, even as he tried to use his well-earned legend credibility to boost the firm.
For a younger generation A24 has been cool for a while. It’s probably still the case, but the slightly head-scratching Google DeepMind partnership it announced Monday doubtless cost it some cool — you don’t take $75 million from the world’s largest tech company in the name of slop tools and keep your counterculture cred for long. That became evident just a day later, when the company’s trailer for a totally unrelated (non-AI) movie from Jesse Eisenberg about community theater brought a pile-on of roasts about the tech. (“Why would I pay and support a company that doesn’t support or believe in the power of human creativity?” and “a24 was so cool until you chuds sold out to AI monoliths for some monopoly bucks” were among the nicer ones.) I suspect A24 will, eventually, regain some of that cool, but let’s hold off on that for one second.
What can be easy to forget in all this is that tech itself used to be cool, perhaps the quintessence of the form — back when the first Tron came out, back when Steve Jobs would make cinematic entrances at Apple WWDC to talk up the iPod and iPhone, back when the second Tron came out, back in all the stories of early founders in their garages and the pop-cultural works that glazed them. The era of tech across these decades converged two of the things Americans love most — a feelgood bootstrapping story with playable toys, and who couldn’t get down with that?
Tech was even still cool in late 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT and everyone started giddily re-doing Taylor Swift lyrics as Shakespearean sonnets.
But since that moment the whole vibe ebbed away. We live in a post-hardware age in which tech is defined not by the machines we use but by the ghost who lives in them, and we increasingly look at him and realize he’s not Casper. The unseeable threat has come to take our jobs and our souls, and while in some cases I think we’re actually underestimating the dangers even as in other ways we’re overplaying them, this essential tech vibe shift — from something fun we hold in our hands to something intangible that billionaires will use to control us — has been at the heart of this ebb. (A new book this summer from the Financial Times journalist Sarah O’Connor examines these angles shrewdly.)
OpenAI, which had that last moment of tech cool, has now been a primary driver in tech losing it. Converting your nonprofit to a moneymaker will do that; so will your leader’s series of smarmy pronouncements about the future. To the cognoscenti, this plunge became clear a year later almost to the day of the ChatGPT release when said leader Sam Altman rebuffed a coup from staffers and board members concerned about safety by using some borderline backstabbery, casting a whole bunch of well-intentioned safety-minded players out the door (including the wife of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who incidentally has retained his cool).
To more casual followers, the cool fled a year after that, when Altman, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai attended and donated to the Donald Trump inauguration. At that moment the water-balloon didn’t just slip out — it burst and landed in the front row. (Elon Musk, who it can be hard to remember actually was cool back in the early Tesla days, lost it a lot earlier when he ruined Twitter, but made doubly sure it would stay away with his whole DOGE adventure.)
That many of these entrepreneurs overseeing AI purportedly — by their own boast! — will put us out of work also helped shoo away the cool. Ironically Apple, the most jeans-pocket ubiquitous of the tech giants, stayed cool even if it barely came out with popular new products simply by staying out of the AI game. But then, it also fired Jon Stewart because he asked a few questions about AI and China on his show, and you don’t fire Jon Stewart and keep your cool. The past few years also brought a growing awareness of the dangers of smartphones and social media, with the inevitable legislative responses, sealing the deal.
(The last cool tech company standing, Anthropic, is hanging in because Dario Amodei stared down Pete Hegseth, the antonym of cool, and because Claude works a lot better than ChatGPT. But how long will that last? Probably not long. The cheers Claude gets at the expense of ChatGPT will fade when Claude likely becomes dominant and people realize that a billion-dollar automation-peddler can only square the circle so many ways.)
There are advantages to being a tech company that was never cool in the first place. Which is why Amazon can lean in to its calculated Big Tech mentality full-on — “let’s make a sweetheart deal with Melania!” “let’s abandon a movie critical of Sam Altman!” — and not miss a beat of sleep.
That Altman moment that happened a few days ago was, needless to say, a juicy opportunity missed. Amazon’s planned release of the Luca Guadagnino film, which chronicles that exact survived 2023 boardroom coup, presented a chance for the Bezos-led company and even tech as a whole to regain a little cool. But the company decided to drop the film, and the ball. Of course when you want to sell your cloud technology to OpenAI — or just sell toothbrushes at scale — cool is of secondary concern.
With the Artificial drop and lack of subsequent pickup, including from A24, came a realization (how many more do we need?) of the toxic effects of mixing Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Many of us have long understood that selling your country’s main creative engine to the technocapitalist machine was probably not going to end well for creativity (one personal marker came in 2020 when no streamer would pick up Bryan Fogel’s excellent doc The Dissident about the Saudi role in Jamal Khashoggi murder lest MBS be deterred from dealmaking) but the universe just keeps reminding us of it again and again. That Hollywood now won’t touch the moment when Sam Altman squandered tech’s cool feels almost too symbolic — an industry that once defined the country’s cool now actively siding with the very people who know best how to lose it, so deep in the tank they refuse to even release a movie about the moment that happened.
This kind of complicity is how cool is lost. This is of course also how state media happens, not with government takeovers but an industry so executive-level powerful your biggest platforms cower in its presence.
Which brings us back to A24’s stature. The company was supposed to stand against all this — in an era of 21st-century capitalism it brought back the ‘70s; in an era of franchises it embraced Ari Aster and Greta Gerwig and Barry Jenkins and Ti West and Josh Safdie; in a time of pushbutton sequels it went all in on Kane Pixels. Not a month ago the headlines weren’t just about how A24 was cool — it was about how that cool was out-earning Star Wars. Now it’s getting trolling threats of boycotts. (And A24’s key revenue-driver is its cool factor.) That’s the power of Big Tech: it can make things uncool as sharply as it once made them the opposite.
(The DeepMind deal is headscratching, by the way, not because A24 shouldn’t have experimented with AI but because they rolled out the experiment entirely wrong: they should have waited until they had something good, released it and then silenced naysayers/validated the partnership that way, instead of announcing a corporate deal with nothing more to show for it than a trust-us-bro — a strategic decision that seemed to have been led by the very corporate mindset we thought A24 was here to fight.)
I think the anti-A24 vibe will change — somewhat — not because the Google partnership will necessarily yield some great moment of Oscar or hipster glory but because our attitudes on AI and creativity will change. Yes, right now Guillermo del Toro and Vince Gilligan are cool for eschewing AI, Scorsese and Jim Cameron uncool for embracing it. But these are artists we know as great from their work before and unrelated to AI, and we’re no more likely to imagine or cheer their greatness with a gamechanging tech tool than we are to applaud Dudamel for his use of the vocoder.
But a native group of AI artists will emerge that will distinguish themselves with the tech (already there are hints of this). And so while there will surely be too much studio slop and moneygrabbery for even a supercomputer to count, we will land in the middle thanks largely to genuine artists using the tech to produce something interesting that they couldn’t have, either financially or technologically, produced before. “Somebody’s going to make a scary fucking horror movie using this technology. Somebody’s going to make a really fucking funny comedy using this. Like really funny shit that couldn’t be made — that’s native,” Matt Stone says, and when it comes to the subject of auteurish iconoclasm I’m inclined to believe him. After an era of tech as the epitome of cool and an era of AI as the epitome of evil, we will land in a more Hegelian place that allows us to mentally balance both, probably not just in creativity but society at large.
None of that helps A24 now. Right now the once high-flying studio is the best test case and the tragic object lesson for a truth that Silicon Valley has known for years: It takes many years to build cool. And just one awkward business maneuver to give it away.
