Mastodawn

Just catching up with the MediaWatch I missed while at Splore. In last Sunday's episode, they covered disgraceful anti-immigrant soapboxing in the media;

https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/mediawatch?share=4e4a93bf-fe10-466a-8641-d40256829d06

Let's be clear; the comments by Winston First MPs Dogwhistle Peters and Shame Jones are the symptom, not the disease. These scumbags are not ideological purists, they are opportunists. If they are saying it, it's because they think there's votes in it. *That's* the problem we need to solve.

#podcasts #RNZ #MediaWatch

Mediawatch podcast

A critical look at the New Zealand media.

RNZ

"There's only so much time a day we can spend looking at screens. The trend is increasingly towards User-Generated Content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and the rise of AI is going to make it even easier for people to cheaply generate their own professional-looking video content."

#PeterGriffin, 2026

https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/mediawatch?share=4e4a93bf-fe10-466a-8641-d40256829d06

Aaaaaaahahahahahaha 🤣

(1/?)

Mediawatch podcast

A critical look at the New Zealand media.

RNZ

Peter Griffin is pretty good at the 'isn't this new household surveillance gadget cool!' style of tech journalism. But he doesn't even begin to understand media or the arts. So when asked to comment on platforms, especially entertainment platforms, he's totally out of his depth.

(2/?)

Self-recorded voxpops and ad-choked video clickbait channels may be a replacement for "reality TV" and other low-effort commercial slop that populates the ghettos of our struggling free-to-air stations. But they're no substitute for feature-length or series-length scripted narratives. Professionally produced and performed by competent actors who know their craft.

(3/?)

As for a Trained #MOLE enabling anyone to "cheaply generate their own professional-looking video content", and thus displace professional movie and series production, I can't think of a better response than to quote The Castle; "Tell him he's dreaming!".

(4/?)

Believing this requires drinking the kool-aid. Believing the industry hype that the capabilities of "AI" will continue to increase exponentially. When all the evidence points to the current technology having basically peaked, despite the trillions of dollars being set of fire in pursuit of the better Trained MOLE. Not to mention the fact that nobody anywhere is excited to watch the irritating slop they vomit up.

(5/?)

So how can we ensure both a steady stream of quality audiovisual entertainment, and a reasonable living for people producing and distributing it?

Companies who make money charging for streaming video believe they rely on governments criminalising all the ways we can potentially watch without paying. From BitTorrent downloads to third-party apps doing adversarial interoperability. This gives governments far more leverage over streaming companies and studios than anyone has so far noticed.

(6/?)

A forward-looking government would legislate for a competitive market where citizens can choose one streaming provider, and get access to any program they want to see. So streaming platforms have to compete on the quality of their customer service. While videomakers in Aotearoa (and elsewhere) can seek investment for productions, with a guarantee of distribution on all available platforms, without discrimination.

(7/?)

If platform companies don't like it, and threaten to withdraw from the country, the government can say 'fine, if you don't want to comply with our market rules, we'll have to decriminalise noncommercial sharing of video files, and the development of third party apps for watching video from streaming platforms without paying them'. That would set such a bad precedent that the companies would comply with the new pro-competiton rules so fast it would make your head spin.

(8/8)

𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦)Mar 2

if we dont want totalitarian governments, the only way i can see is to embrace a culture of voluntarily supporting creators - making it a value and a culture and celebrating it and building tools that support this and make it easy for people and cutting out intermediaries, because ppl want to support the creators, but dont want to enrich billionaire intermediaries.

We have peer to peer tech that can pull it off. we have ligjtning payment rails ready for it, but a lack of willingness

(1/?)

@serapath
> if we dont want totalitarian governments

Bit late for that buddy. Turns out that opting out of representative government leaves it in the hands of people with totalitarian motives. Who knew?

Even those of us who want to see a post-state world need to actively participate in electoral politics. Not because we think it's The Way to fix everything (although it does have its uses in specific cases). But just to prevent fascists from having uncontested control of it.

(2/?)

@serapath
> embrace a culture of voluntarily supporting creators

Absolutely. Nothing in my policy proposal requires making it compulsory to have a streaming video subscription. If people would rather buy downloads or physical media from a video BandCamp, fine. If video makers want to try the VODO model again (crowdfund production, distribute over BitTorrent, accept tips from fans) that's fine too. @nicol has a great proposal here;

https://25.netribution.co.uk/nic/reintermediation/

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Reintermediation: humans over algorithms, restoring the web we lost

We swapped human curators for a profit-seeking algorithm. We replaced the independent record store manager who knows exactly the right tune to play at this moment, the video store clerk who's watched 10,000 films, the magazine racks at the giant bookstores where you could spend a day ploughing thru

Netribution @ 25

(3/?)

@serapath
> ppl want to support the creators, but dont want to enrich billionaire intermediaries.

The policy in the post you're replying to is very much about preventing billionaires intermediaries from keeping most of the ticket price without actually providing any value. So we definitely agree on that.

(4/?)

@serapath
> cutting out intermediaries

1990s-to-mid-2000s Strypey is with you 100% on total disintermediation. There's a reason that when I started getting disillusioned with Indymedia I chose the domain name disintermedia.net.nz ; )

But if the last couple of decades have taught us anything about media, it's that there can be genuine value in intermediary functions; curation, moderation, hosting, quality control, aggregation, etc. The key is to prevent them being monopolised.

(5/?)

@serapath
> We have peer to peer tech that can pull it off. we have lightning payment rails ready for it, but a lack of willingness

I'm not convinced that quality movies or series, or other large-scale artistic productions, can be funded and coordinated in a pure P2P social network. Go ahead and prove me wrong! Nothing would make me happier.

(6/6)

But in my experience, large scale cooperation requires coordinating institutions of some kind. I think experiments like VODO and the Participators Culture Foundation's early projects with BitTorrent-based distribution (Democracy Player, Broadcast Machine, the VideoBomb portal, etc) exposed that reality.

Having said that, coordinating institutions can certainly be much more democratic and networked than our current ones. I'm keen to support any experimentation in that direction.

𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦)Mar 3

i agree that it needs institutions, but i believe we can build "open source institutions" that dont look anything like traditional institutions.

i have some ideas, but its all being built out as we speak and we'll see what works and what doesnt. imho most foundational part is a social process od collaboration that captures everyones contributions so if there will be ever payments (e.g. donations), everyone can get rewarded transparently and its a fair process.

𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦)Mar 3

fair enough - its an unproven hypothesis i have and working on trying it out soon.

goal is to have transparent supply chains and trivial "paying forward" mechanisms to fund the deep end of content creators and open source and not just "the end user facing frontend".

the dat-ecosystem visualisation is meant to be upgraded to show donations/contributions across open source supply chains transparently and in real time eventually

𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦)Mar 3

@strypey agree.
...i feel that must be part of p2p.

just like cabal chat has "subjective moderation", where peers can voluntarily subscribe to feed moderators of their choice, i want to have communities/groups indepwndent from instance server operators and i want self chosen intermediaries and no lock-in because they own "the platform".

platform coupled to intermediaries means network effect lock in and coordination problem to switch away when needed. this has to end imho.