Speaking of heroes, Ben Blaine (@ben)’s latest is about superhero culture, billionaires and Epstein – and is worth a read: “the mass public dumping of the Epstein files comes at the end of the Hero culture, where it is no longer quite enough to stick a cape on a body suit and count the dollars flowing in. For two decades though, the decades that saw Epstein at the impossible height of his power and influence, the dominant narrative of the age was that of a world in awe of the superhero. Who will save us? The lone billionaire with his secret identity and hidden palace. What slows him down? Fools who demand this figure is held accountable.” The Publish Press newsletter: if you don’t have the youth, guts or stamina to keep up-to-date about the ‘Creator Economy’ this weekly-ish newsletter has you. Founded by Colin and Samir who setup a popular YouTube channel, they’ve built a brand and remind me a tiny bit of Tom and me 25 years ago before the realism set in – except they’re phenome…

He is just finishing his fifth feature documentary – 2 in 1 – driven by his experience of stage four (aka incurable) bowel cancer. The film looks at the rapid rise in bowel cancer among young people, and while we’ve known each other since Netribution was two film-degree dropouts in a trenchcoat 25 years ago, it was this subject that I reconnected with David over. My sister June died of bowel cancer in 2010, an event that saw me abandon projects and question everything for many years after. It should be released in the Autumn (disclaimer: I’m an exec producer) and it will be released for free and for fundraising. He describes it as “a film that most people will never watch… but for some small number, it might save their life… and that’s a really good way of putting my skills to good use.” Fediverse Reactions

“I’m not an anti-tech person. Shooters was built on technology. But I am mindful that we want technology that doesn’t extract, technology that enables people.” In the mid-90s, long before social networks and smart phones, Cath entered the world’s first cyber-cafe in Soho, London to message a cyber-girlfriend in Australia. There she met Cyberia’s founder Eva Pascoe, and joined the woman-owned company that shaped the early-90s UK web-scene. Next she went to BBC Online, still a quirky start-up at the BBC figuring out How To Internet, befriended the late Jess Search who started producing her films. Using London Filmmakers Coop to borrow their kit they have a Big Idea – what if the film coop culture of filmmakers helping each other, met the Usenet lists, forums and chat-rooms Cath encountered at Cyberia? So together they founded Shooting People in 1998, a daily email bulletin running on GNU Mailman. It began with 60 email addresses and grew by the time I left in 2004 to 40,000, af…

Year 25, Issue 4. RE INTER MEDIA TION REINTERMEDIATION Humans over algorithms, the movement building a new web. Disintermediation. The idea had come from eCommerce – we’d stop buying from shops, and instead get directly from the manufacturer, farmer and tailor. It’s something the web makes easy, and without fees to the shopkeeper should make things cheaper, so seemed inevitable based on our idiot’s understanding of capitalism. But the reality of eCommerce is we mostly buy from Amazon and eBay, because few had predicted how important an easy user experience is*, especially when joined with the price-lowering power that comes from being a monopoly. This is what I wrote in 2007, two years after YouTube had launched, and in between the launch of Netflix Player and iPlayer in the 3rd Film Finance Handbook: “So it finally happened. After over a century of cinema, the power of moving image is in the hands of anyone with so much as a camera-phone and a web connection… The web shrinks t…

Jess Search & Web 1.5 As Shooting People closes after 27 years, remembering Jess & the time between the dotcom crash & Web 2.0 Intro Inbetween time Shooters culture Web pioneer The launch Year 2 Year 3 Epilogue Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Callie Giovanna / TED by Nic Wistreich, photos by Tom Fogg, from his 2001 interview with Jess. The death of Jess Search at 54 in 2023 left me stunned. Obituaries rightly focussed on her huge contribution to documentary and social impact filmmaking – but missed something key: Jess was a web pioneer. With ShootingPeople – the digital community she co-founded with Cath LeCouteur – now closing after 27 years I’m revisiting a piece I wrote after her death that looked back not only at her impact, but the tender era of the web before smart phones or social media addiction – and her impact on it all. It was this Jess that I knew and worked with for several years as Shooting Pe…

Douglas Adams’ 3 rules of technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. @tom and I came to the web as group 2 in the era of Web 1. So when I talk about the horrors of the modern web, I’m coming at it with the nostalgia of the early web promise, but am now firmly in group 3, Adam’s tech-grumps. But does that make us wrong? Thinking back to Web 1: there had been a tech giant: AOL and we’d all run away from it into the open web while it was gobbling up Time Warner, and there wasn’t another threat to the web until Microsoft, whose principle crime with Internet Explorer was writing shitty HTML and installing it by default on Windows, which the EU was able…

Like many who marched against the Iraq war (an estimated 36 million across 3,000 protests) only to see the popular turnout ignored by government followed by a devastating, illegal war, I’ve come to question the value of marches. 500,000 marching about Gaza in London each month doesn’t get a photo in the press, but an arrested 83-year old Priest holding a Palestine Action sign – or a Plasticine Action sign – does. But Epping was something different. If me – 6ft white guy – felt nervous amidst a crowd of 2,000 anti-fascist marchers, with police everywhere – I was struck by how on earth the asylum seekers in the Bell Hotel must feel, amidst the violence erupting outside their accommodation. And how must Epping’s BAME and migrant residents feel walking about? Unlike other marches I’ve been on, this was about strength in numbers. It was a way of saying to the rest of Epping ‘you’re not alone’ – and judging by the many waves and cheers from windows and doorsteps (some half-hidin…

An attempt to fess up to my biggest mistakes on this journey to the web we’ve got today. No-one excited about the web in the late ’90s pictured what we have for the web now – an attention economy that commodifies our consciousness, tied to a data-tracking surveillance industry spying on every human from birth, to produce saleable data to better target adverts and political propaganda. You could argue this was my first big mistake, but lots of people made that one so it’s not very interesting. And as Clay Shirky says, we’re only just two-thirds of the way thru the chaos; its not over yet. But every so often I remind myself of Douglas Adams 3 rules of tech and realise what I might sound like to youths who’ve only known smart phones and social media… Anything in the world when you’re born is normal, ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new, exciting, revolutionary and you can pr…

Continued from part 2: 16 years later, the indie no-budget web & Activity Pub Most recently we’ve seen Meta AIs trying to convince children they’re qualified therapists with fake registration IDs, while also selling to advertisers the moment when teenage girls delete selfies, as they’re more likely to be emotionally vulnerable and susceptible to marketing. The web wasn’t meant to be like this, users should be able to chose alternatives without losing their friends: you don’t lose your phone number when you go from iOS to Android, or Vodaphone to Three and the only reason the web isn’t the same is it wasn’t built that way from the start, and now there’s some powerful monopolies who have neither incentive or fiduciary duty to change it (and are lobbying hard to prevent any shifts that would force them to allow competition). But not all governments are susceptible to this lobbying, and the third, big reason this seems a good time to talk came with…