Or so that’s what Hunter Walk, of the Silicon Valley venture firm Homebrew and formerly of Google and YouTube, thinks we might say about his screed that defended his brief suggestion that people who don’t go to movies because they want to be able to text during them should be able to have their own screenings.
The original post on August 3 started, “In my 20s I went to a lot of movies. Now, not so much. Over the past two years becoming a parent has been the main cause but really my lack of interest in the theater experience started way before that. Some people dislike going to the movies because of price or crowds, but for me it was more of a lifestyle decision. Increasingly I wanted my media experiences plugged in and with the ability to multitask.” He goes on to list a number of things he might want to do — visit IMDb, chat with others, or do work — during a film like “Superman” or “Pacific Rim.”
But before you get all up in arms, he doesn’t want to ruin your experience. “Instead of driving people like me away from the theater, why not just segregate us into environments which meet our needs.”
Walker should know that his idea is not new. The Grand Poobah of the anti-texting-in-theaters set, the Alamo Drafthouse’s Tim League, wrote a long post discrediting people like Walk in 2012. Midnight screenings at Regal of the so-bad-it’s-good “Sharknado” encourage tweeting, making it a real-life Mystery Science Theater 3000.
People online already gave Walk a hard time for his proposal. In an August 5 post defending himself, called “You Literally Represent Everything Wrong with the World,” he groups the backlash into three categories:
“This shouldn’t exist, you’ll ruin my movie experience.”
“You are disrespectful to the movie industry.”
“You literally represent everything wrong with the world.”
After saying he’s being misunderstood (thinking like this is just what venture capitalists do!), he defends the first attack by reiterating that he wants to segregate movie audiences into people addicted to their Twitter feed and, well, people who can go two hours without a tweet.
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