An excellent video talk from YouTuber, Iconoclast:
Showing posts with label YouTubers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label YouTubers. Show all posts
Monday, 24 September 2018
Wednesday, 29 August 2018
Way of the World and the Future of Media
An important role of the BBC was to bind the country together by propagating shared values and providing, through its media, a virtual space in which the knowledge, science, arts and culture of Britain could be celebrated and discussed, and in which public affairs could be rigorously debated.
The BBC has failed in this mission and has become instead a propaganda outlet for a narrow social agenda. Technology is providing choice and self-empowerment and allowing us to compare the BBC's output with others and recognise its limitations and distortions. We no longer have to rely on one single source or a few sources for our information, we now have a multiplicity of sources and the BBC's lies and shortcomings are becoming painfully apparent.
The future of media once the BBC is gone will be marked by an expansion of media diversity. Some providers will be quite sizeable and focused on advertising revenues through the provision of escapist entertainment - films, sports, sensationalist news and so on. Other providers will cater to more considered tastes, aiming at viewers and listeners who want to be informed. Each type of broadcaster and media provider will be building its own virtual community: we self-identify and associate with others through our tastes and interests.
In this digital landscape of virtual interest communities, there will also be a need for the recognition of a meta-community, the basis for overall cohesion in society - embodying the civic norms and values that regulate daily life and represent the vision and ideation of Britain shared by the country's different and disparate interest groups. The BBC was supposed to be a pillar of Britain's meta-community and was meant to uphold it, but it can't and won't, and it must go. The beginnings of what might take its place are emerging, in voices on the web and in a radical political movement out in the country that aims to counter and ultimately upturn the Leftist dispensation.
Way of the World's channel represents a style of media that has emerged over the last 10 years or so in which content creators use digital platforms to broadcast a coherent polemic, and rather like the vigorous debates of the coffee shops of early modernism, anyone can comment underneath and begin a dialogue with others. In this environment, discussion is 'de-socialised' and opinion is 'de-publicised'. The truth is not handed-down to us on a plate from a Platonic broadcasting elite; instead, there is argument and debate and views and opinions become 'private' again, because we have re-learnt that views are based on interests. Emerging from this are renewed calls for a reactionary dispensation; not just a simple free market, but an older type of society that is really a complex, architectonic ecosystem with certain essential features: Borders, Independence, Culture, Families, Tradition, Hierarchy, Freedom and Identity. The "British' Broadcasting Corporation has no place in this future, nor does any state media.
Saturday, 25 August 2018
Lauren Southern and the Future of Media
A new documentary on the way from Lauren Southern. And we like the message in this trailer.
You want a product?
You can support it and pay for it, and creators take the risks. That’s how media should work.
Down that road is editorial freedom, independence – and
truth. Even if it’s only truth gained by
splitting the difference, it’s an improvement: let the viewer/listener decide.
This radical thinking scares the top-down statists because
they have a didactic mindset in which they ‘look after’ us. “Inform, educate and entertain…”
State broadcasting is finished, and the paternalist culture of so-called 'public service broadcasting' should be considered archaic - it belongs to a previous time and its structures
are functionally redundant.
Time to abolish the BBC and let a billion flowers bloom.
Friday, 24 August 2018
The Problem of Apathy
A YouTuber called ChilliJonCarni argues in the below video that the TV licence will never be scrapped.
Our comments on the video:
1. First, while we completely oppose the TV licence and agree that non-payment is the right tactic, we believe political campaigning should be focused on the BBC itself. We argue for abolition rather than reform. It is our view that reform, including ending the TV licence, will only make matters worse.
2. Petitioning is not an automatic law-making process. You don't collect 125,000 or however many signatures and then simply secure the desired change in the law. Parliament is sovereign and can do what it likes. Petitions are just a method of campaigning and Parliament is free to accept or reject the case made in a petition. We explain more about petitions here.
3. The issue with the BBC as a state broadcaster isn't that it can take over the airwaves and dictate editorial content in times of national emergency. In fact, even in an entirely private sector broadcasting environment, we would expect there to be provisos in place that reserve state control of the various media outlets for the purposes of emergency broadcasting, as part of the usual civil contingencies. The real issue with state broadcasting is the influence that it has on society under normal, everyday circumstances. State broadcasting is offensive in concept and indubitably leads to political influence on the broadcaster and its content. That is the problem, not the extreme, fictitious scenario referred to in the above video.
4. The issue with bias - to the extent that exists - is not that the government-of-the-day is dictating to the BBC what it should broadcast. Nobody with a proper understanding of the matter would suggest that the government does that in most ordinary circumstances. While we do call the BBC a state broadcaster, we acknowledge that there is editorial and operational autonomy. What we do say, however, is that the BBC is a state broadcaster because the government can and does set the tone and institutional culture of the BBC, influences key appointments and uses its own appointees to determine the BBC's strategic direction. Furthermore, in extraordinary and unusual circumstances, it is open to the government to intervene more closely in the BBC's editorial policies - usually this happens in times of war (most recently, that we know of, it happened during the Iraq War of 2003).
5. It is perfectly true that the BBC, as a massive bureaucracy and state media conglomerate, is a source of lucrative employment for the political elite and the broader Left, and we make that point ourselves as part of our case for abolition. But again, the issue there isn't specifically that the relevant people are paid a lot - they could be paid a lot elsewhere, the Left have bases in the private sector too - it is more fundamentally that the BBC is a base of support and secure employment, contracts and prestigious titular roles for the Left, and acts as a pivot for the Left's cultural war against the rest of the country. The line of 'Look at how much they pay Gary Lineker or some ex-government minister' is a good populist talking point, but at the same time, we can't really begrudge the BBC for paying people their market worth. (Note: How 'market worth' is defined and determined is quite another matter - some of it may well be pay-offs and bribes, and some of it certainly is subtle influence-buying).
6. This man, ChilliJonCarni, has sadly slipped into being negative and defeatist. We hope we are not being too harsh in saying so, and we hope he recovers his enthusiasm, but he is basically telling anti-TV licence campaigners (and us, by extension) to give up any active campaigning and instead just rely on not paying. We disagree. If anything, we think the time is ripe to step up the campaign of non-payment and resistance. Our only point is that the political direction should be explicitly towards abolition and a campaign with that goal is needed, with a street movement, petitions, posters, events, legal activism and policy work. The aim will be to persuade a major political party to adopt abolition of the BBC as policy, and thereby head-off the BBC and influence the strategic direction of the debate once it becomes clear that the TV licence system is no longer sustainable.
7. It is true that the political and parliamentary system is rigged and there are very strong vested interests among the political class in keeping the TV licence system and the BBC itself. The outrageous 2017 parliamentary debate - mentioned in the video and also mentioned several times on this blog - demonstrates this, but that is not a reason to give up.
There will have been a time during the mid-19th. century when anti-slavery campaigners in the United States were convinced that they would never succeed. They will have been told that slavery is natural and that there are too many vested interests in the American South against abolition and so emancipation will never happen, but it did and the slaves were legally freed. Likewise, campaigners for women's suffrage at the turn-of-the-century will have been told that female participation in public affairs is unnatural and wrong and that there are too many vested interests ranged against it, but they didn't give up, they carried on - and eventually won.
We were once told that Britain's withdrawal from the European Union would never happen, that too many people favour the EU, that business is vested in our membership and that anybody who proposes withdrawal is a fruitcake. Yet here we are in a national conversation about how to withdraw from the European Union - not whether to, but how to.
We must fight on. One day we will win.
Our comments on the video:
1. First, while we completely oppose the TV licence and agree that non-payment is the right tactic, we believe political campaigning should be focused on the BBC itself. We argue for abolition rather than reform. It is our view that reform, including ending the TV licence, will only make matters worse.
2. Petitioning is not an automatic law-making process. You don't collect 125,000 or however many signatures and then simply secure the desired change in the law. Parliament is sovereign and can do what it likes. Petitions are just a method of campaigning and Parliament is free to accept or reject the case made in a petition. We explain more about petitions here.
3. The issue with the BBC as a state broadcaster isn't that it can take over the airwaves and dictate editorial content in times of national emergency. In fact, even in an entirely private sector broadcasting environment, we would expect there to be provisos in place that reserve state control of the various media outlets for the purposes of emergency broadcasting, as part of the usual civil contingencies. The real issue with state broadcasting is the influence that it has on society under normal, everyday circumstances. State broadcasting is offensive in concept and indubitably leads to political influence on the broadcaster and its content. That is the problem, not the extreme, fictitious scenario referred to in the above video.
4. The issue with bias - to the extent that exists - is not that the government-of-the-day is dictating to the BBC what it should broadcast. Nobody with a proper understanding of the matter would suggest that the government does that in most ordinary circumstances. While we do call the BBC a state broadcaster, we acknowledge that there is editorial and operational autonomy. What we do say, however, is that the BBC is a state broadcaster because the government can and does set the tone and institutional culture of the BBC, influences key appointments and uses its own appointees to determine the BBC's strategic direction. Furthermore, in extraordinary and unusual circumstances, it is open to the government to intervene more closely in the BBC's editorial policies - usually this happens in times of war (most recently, that we know of, it happened during the Iraq War of 2003).
5. It is perfectly true that the BBC, as a massive bureaucracy and state media conglomerate, is a source of lucrative employment for the political elite and the broader Left, and we make that point ourselves as part of our case for abolition. But again, the issue there isn't specifically that the relevant people are paid a lot - they could be paid a lot elsewhere, the Left have bases in the private sector too - it is more fundamentally that the BBC is a base of support and secure employment, contracts and prestigious titular roles for the Left, and acts as a pivot for the Left's cultural war against the rest of the country. The line of 'Look at how much they pay Gary Lineker or some ex-government minister' is a good populist talking point, but at the same time, we can't really begrudge the BBC for paying people their market worth. (Note: How 'market worth' is defined and determined is quite another matter - some of it may well be pay-offs and bribes, and some of it certainly is subtle influence-buying).
6. This man, ChilliJonCarni, has sadly slipped into being negative and defeatist. We hope we are not being too harsh in saying so, and we hope he recovers his enthusiasm, but he is basically telling anti-TV licence campaigners (and us, by extension) to give up any active campaigning and instead just rely on not paying. We disagree. If anything, we think the time is ripe to step up the campaign of non-payment and resistance. Our only point is that the political direction should be explicitly towards abolition and a campaign with that goal is needed, with a street movement, petitions, posters, events, legal activism and policy work. The aim will be to persuade a major political party to adopt abolition of the BBC as policy, and thereby head-off the BBC and influence the strategic direction of the debate once it becomes clear that the TV licence system is no longer sustainable.
7. It is true that the political and parliamentary system is rigged and there are very strong vested interests among the political class in keeping the TV licence system and the BBC itself. The outrageous 2017 parliamentary debate - mentioned in the video and also mentioned several times on this blog - demonstrates this, but that is not a reason to give up.
There will have been a time during the mid-19th. century when anti-slavery campaigners in the United States were convinced that they would never succeed. They will have been told that slavery is natural and that there are too many vested interests in the American South against abolition and so emancipation will never happen, but it did and the slaves were legally freed. Likewise, campaigners for women's suffrage at the turn-of-the-century will have been told that female participation in public affairs is unnatural and wrong and that there are too many vested interests ranged against it, but they didn't give up, they carried on - and eventually won.
We were once told that Britain's withdrawal from the European Union would never happen, that too many people favour the EU, that business is vested in our membership and that anybody who proposes withdrawal is a fruitcake. Yet here we are in a national conversation about how to withdraw from the European Union - not whether to, but how to.
We must fight on. One day we will win.
Friday, 17 August 2018
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)