This isn’t how it was meant to be. No-one excited about the web in the late ’90s pictured an attention industry commodifying our consciousness to power a surveillance economy spying on us from birth, trading our data to segment & silo us, target adverts, propaganda and flagging pre-crime potential. That was my first big mistake, but many made that one so it’s not that interesting. And if Clay Shirky’s right, we’re 2/3s of the way thru the web’s chaos; Act 3 is yet to come… But every so often I think of Douglas Adams’ 3 rules of tech and imagine what I might sound like to anyone who’s only known smart phones and social media…

First the ActivityPub universe has gone from tech curiosity to something viable and used daily by millions. Second, mainstream monopoly tech – sacking moderating teams, trying to sway elections, and general indifference to the harms their huge power can cause – has accelerated the urgency to find alternatives: the planet need a media space not exclusively run by a few centi-billionaires trying to rule the world on their terms. Perfection can be the enemy of the good here: it’s mostly ok to move fast and fix things. But most importantly the European Commission announcing in March that they will be funding a project very similar to part of our 2022 project – using the same underlying technology ISCC – means I no longer have first mover anxiety.

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 monopolised, despite Spotify’s best efforts). 

With Netribution’s 25 years fitting into three 8-ish year acts (publishing, research & development) I’ve applied Syd Field’s screenwriting framework to this year of issues and realised this issue would be the end of Act One. That seems a good time to reflect on the end of Netribution’s Publishing phase in 2008 – and setup what’s next in the rest of our issues this 25th year…

Self-declared ‘geriatric millennial’ Elena Rossini (_elenamastodon.social) isn’t content to just make documentaries, self-distribute and market them thru a web of nicely designed sites – she’s pioneering in her use of tech away, and at home on the ‘Fediverse’ – the decentralised alternative to Big Tech, which her next film looks at.

It’s not easy to quickly summarise award-winning Ugandan Dilman Dila’s work: he’s made Nepalese documentaries like The Sound of One Leg Dancing, published a short story collection A Killing in the Sun and acclaimed novels, made hit YouTube shorts like What Happened in Room 13, shot an African Academy Award-nominated feature the Felista’s Fable, and thru his production company Dil Stories, produced multiple TV series for DStv (pan-African Satellite TV channel). He blogs and advocates extensively, and has made the Fediverse his home at dilmandilamograph.social & on PeerTube and, like Netribution25, turned his WordPres blogs into a subscribeble social media node. His next film is the Night Dancer – about a deadly dance-off, with crowdfunding invited here – on his own site because Kickstarter and IndieGogo disallow projects from much of Africa (unlike Patreon), which he discusses here.

Over 600 members of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Science have condemned 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.

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. The Israeli co-director of the Oscar-winning Yuval Abraham 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.”

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 boredom – as about Jimmy Gralton, the only Irishman to be exiled from the country (Irish President Michael Higgins apologised in 2016). It’s uncommon for a film to focus on a building – which is why it contrasts well for me with The Brutalist. By bringing this film to a community cinema in a community building, Evans as curator deftly remind us of cinema’s original power, like theatre and stories around campfire: the gathering of a group of strangers to share in a tale. It was such a welcome and needed reminder.