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…

Continued from Part 1: Netribution’s first act revisited My shock and sadness at Stephen Applebaum‘s death, within a year of Leslie Lowes and Jess Search passing, was a big motivation for this year of issues to reconnect with others from that time. While some of my emails have fallen into a ghosting-or-spam filter pit, others have paid off many times over; e.g. with old friend Eric Dubois that brings Netribution our first new book in 15 years and a wonderful tour around one of Paris’s best kept secrets when we met in April. But it’s a strange time to be trying to build a standalone publication – just as most of the planet is focussed on funnelling their audience onto monopolistic platforms whose algorithms filter content like a dealer cutting attention-crack. If Tom and I were starting out today we’d probably be forced to use Substack, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn – even if we had our own Podcast (one of the few decentralised parts of the old web that’s not yet been m…

“The first act is usually used for exposition, to establish the main characters, their relationships, and the world they live in. Later, a dynamic, on-screen incident occurs that confronts the main character… and leads to the first plot point.” Wikipedia Netribution’s Publishing ‘Act 1’ and its end The original Netribution site (1999-2002) was funded through some odd side-projects: one was writing a £695 book for Informa Media on Digital Asset Management, thru my co-author on the film & TV rights book that had inspired Netribution in the first place, Adam Thomas. That helped us get a book deal with Focal Press to turn the site’s funding listings (above) — which had been meticulously developed by Stephen Salter, from a starting list I’d taken from Chris Chandler’s BFI Lowdown Film Funding Guide pamphlet — into print. It was a standard low £1200 advance against 10% of sales and the First Film Foundation wisely advised us to self-publish, and keep ever…

Over 800 members of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Science signed an open letter against the body’s response to the attack by West Bank settlers on the Hamdan Ballal, co-director of this year’s Best Documentary Oscar winner, No Man’s Land. Ballal reported that the settlers in the West Bank referenced the Oscar during the attack, which his Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham described as a ‘lynching’. The letter, signed by stars including Natasha Lyonne, Olivia Colman, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, Riz Ahmed, John Cusack, Joaquin Phoenix, Ava DuVernay, Alfonso Cuarón, Penélope Cruz, Emma Thompson, Tony Kushner and Jonathan Glazer comes after the Academy belatedly condemned the attack in a statement that didn’t mention Ballal by name and referenced the Academy membership’s “many unique viewpoints”. In response to the members’ letter, the Academy’s board has called an extraordinary meeting to discuss a new response. Following the meeting an apology to Ballal was released by AMPAS…

The Palestinian co-director of the 2025 Academy Award winner for best picture, Hamdan Ballal has been attacked, arrested and is – at time of writing – out of contact. Yuval Abraham, the Israeli co-director of the Oscar-winning said Ballal was attacked and wounded by settlers. Witnesses say Israeli soldiers removed him from an ambulance while he was receiving treatment. Abraham posted on social media: “A group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Ballal, co director of our film no other land. They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him. No sign of him since.” According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “the attack began around 6 P.M. near a school in the village of Susya, where Ballal is from. A settler approached Palestinian homes, and when residents asked him to leave, dozens of settlers arrived and attacked them with stones and blows with their fists. “The settlers destroyed water tanks, stole security…

It’s a cold night and we walk across the dark Bushwood flats to a building that’s a bright coffee shop and co-working space by day, mottled light spilling in from a community garden outside – and a somehow cosy two-screen cinema by night. I see a familiar form – is that Gareth Evans? – I wonder. It is – the screening is the brainchild of the Whitechapel Gallery’s film curator, who I last saw around Eelyn Lee’s Barbican residency for her Monster film. It’s not just a screening of Ken Loach’s 2014 film (which I’d neither seen nor knew anything of), but a post-screening interview with star Barry Ward and legendary Sixteen Films producer Rebecca O’Brien, followed with a small ceilidh band, which baby-sitter demands we don’t get much of. For host Gareth Evans the reason for this screening in this place, at this time seems obvious: Jimmy’s Hall is as much about the Hall – gathering space for a rural community struggling 10 years after the Irish Civil War against the church, state and bo…

I won’t pretend I knew him well, beyond one quite legendary evening at the festival that went from an unprintable story with a Hollywood A lister at a premiere party to a punch-up at the TV festival hotel bar. We met a few more times. But I knew some of his work intimately and always looked forward to reading his next submission, the interviews overflowed with insight. He seemed able to coax wisdom and fascinating stories from anyone he spoke with, he had that essential way of keeping them relaxed, I guess. Initially we paid him for a few reviews for FilmFestivals.com, but even when we had none, he continued to send us and upload Q&As that no-one else would publish. I’m not sure if it was so he could demonstrate to the publicists that the interview had been useful, or because he liked what we doing – either way we benefitted. For Netribution 1 he brought Mark Ruffalo, Kelly Reilly and Michael White at the very start of their film careers, and Jack Cardif or John Boorman la…

I inevitably thought of King Vidor’s Fountainhead, which I’d loved when I saw it in my late teens before better understanding what Ayn Rand was saying (tldr: pesky society and democracy standing in the way of individualists / wannabe dictators). I maybe should rewatch it, the lone uncompromising ‘genius’ is an entire political project in the US now, taking a chainsaw to a civil sector collectively crafted over decades. There’s of course parallels between Howard Rourke and Tóth – the uncompromising triumph of the self – but the difference in the Brutalist strikes me that the relationship with the wife is everything. It’s not a marriage of equals, it is ‘woman supports man’s drive to manifest an absolutely singular vision’. Yet she’s also his saviour and better half, who unlocks him from himself, and here Rourke seems the closer analog to Musk than Tóth. László and Erzsébet’s stressed but concrete love reinforces the rest of the story and is enough to suggest this coul…