The Sunday Digest: Consolidation, Censorship, and Creators' New Best Friend

Happy Sunday!

Ever notice product placement in sci-fi blockbusters? Not the Reese’s from E.T.—we mean the future: IBM’s eerily accurate FaceTime setup in 2001. The airborne McDonald’s drive-thru in The Fifth Element. Wall–E’s first-gen iPod.

It’s easy to dismiss that as cynical advertising. But these monolithic brand presences are also hints at the business climate of imagined futures. Are the corporations we’re seeing the only ones left? What else survived? What got bought? Is everyone else in I, Robot obsessed with Converse, or is it just Will Smith?