John Collins and the Future of Media

An intelligent man from Rochdale called John Collins produces YouTube videos from a scruffy-looking room in an ordinary house. It's not polished, but it's original and interesting and you can take something away from it, even if you don't agree with his quite trenchant opinions. You know when you get to the end of 10, 20 or 30 minutes, or however long it has been, that you've gained some insight.  Each of his videos attracts thousands of views.  

There are more polished YouTube content creators with more professional output, some of them producing at a standard comparable to the BBC and the major broadcasters; but we would prefer to see a media full of people like the man from Rochdale. Not all of us agree with John Collins, but at least he doesn't lie to us.  In our experience, the more polished the production values, the more lie-ridden the content.  A world that is harsher, rougher, smellier, and rawer is (as a rule) also truer.

The future should be an anarchist media. Digital technology and the web make this freedom possible on a scale never before imaginable. That's one important reason we want to see an end to the BBC, but that should only be the beginning.  The New Media is developing its own lie machines, with an emerging archetypal framework of Big Media and Big Platforms that smother and stifle new and dissenting voices - that is a problem too, but at least in the anarchist future, there will be choice.