HOLLYWOOD -- Now there was a telling moment. On the red carpet at the Oscars, a network-broadcast celebration of movies, there was ABC host Robin Roberts asking Kevin Spacey about "House of Cards." Which is neither broadcast or a movie. It's streaming video. Mind you, "House of Cards" is significantly more interesting than the others (at least until the next vice president of the United States shoves a reporter in front of a moving train}, but can we agree that from the ruins of the media economy a future is beginning to take shape?

Peter Sealey, I owe you an apology. Surely you remember him. He's the Bay Area consultant and former Hollywood executive who back in the early '90s was the CMO of Coca-Cola Co. At the time, in addition to presiding over history's best Coke slogan (Always Coca-Cola), Peter was flogging what he called a "New Paradigm" of marketing, in which brands like Coke were not merely goods but media unto themselves.

Remember Comcast Must Die? It was a blog jihad I mounted back in 2007 not to kill the cable provider, but to shame it into some modicum of customer-service responsibility. The project had not one but two jingles, and a horrifying/funny video and a podcast. But what it mainly had going for it was righteousness. Thousands upon thousands of frustrated customers used the blog as a CRM tool of last resort -- and so did Comcast, which was reduced to employing a site called Comcast Must Die to fix problems it was incapable of solving through its own vast but …

When good people die young, we mere mortals are hard pressed to divine Divine Purpose. Not in this case. God's plan was evident the moment the Hollywood elite began converging on the funeral chapel on the Upper East Side. In the race to the moral bottom that defines the fashion industry, there is a difference between mere opportunism and malice aforethought. Yes, the human frailty of celebrity obsession is pathetic, and the surrounding ecosystem of parasites contemptible. But better a parasite than a scavenger.

I picked up the phone and it was Al Jazeera, seeking my opinion on Super Bowl ads. "Gotta put you on hold," I said. "I've got E! on the other line asking me about Egypt's constitution." Okay -- that's not what I said, although I would have if I'd thought of it.

There's a new TV spot for TurboTax and it is very, very interesting. Not because it's a tax-prep ad. What caught my attention about the ad was the story Wieden+Kennedy contrived to pound home the self-reliance message. The video opens tight on a baby girl, about 6 months old. Her face is covered in what looks like strained carrots and green beans. Then comes the voiceover.

Once again, those haughty French are mocking us. To fund its anti-imperial campaign of terror, the French government is greedily eyeing the coffers of our very own Google, our Netflix -- merciful heavens -- our Apple. Yes -- your iPhone will be more expensive so the world can have the next Marcel Proust, as if the world weren't already overstocked. That is war -- a French government-hatched insurgency against the American Cultural Empire.

Last night, my 12-year-old cried herself to sleep, heartbroken and inconsolable. Nobody had died. Her parents hadn't battled in a drunken rage. She hasn't been reading "Little Women." And there was no seventh-grade romantic melodrama afoot. It was just a case of lost innocence, more or less my fault. I don't know what came over me. She's still a little girl, yet I had told her something no child should have to reckon with: "Literally" is now deemed an acceptable synonym for "figuratively."

When it comes to digital mayhem, no medium has been more disintermediated than independent film. Twenty years ago, with the likes of Sundance and Miramax building both distribution channels and demand, indies briefly enjoyed something akin to an orderly marketplace. Now it is utter and nearly irretrievable chaos. I's kind of like an auto race. To prevent a mass pile-up, obviously, first everybody needs to be headed in the same direction.