25 years ago tonight Wendy Bevan-Mogg, Tom Fogg and I arrived at Dawn & Pete’s Peeping Toms Screening Night in Soho to unveil Netribution, having announced it to nice comments on Shooting People earlier in the day. This feels a time where some reflection may be helpful, so to mark this, Tom and I have decided to make a 12 x monthly mini-edition of Netribution.
In the last few days, a theme of ‘home’ has emerged. Maybe it’s on my mind – in the middle of moving house – yet the two pieces to arrive before copy deadline were from people I lived with in the two incarnations of the site…
The first came from Elio España, who I shared a student flat with, and author of Netribution’s first interview – with Steven Soderbergh. He’s one-half of one of the hardest working documentary duos you’ve probably never heard of (making over 100 feature docs) and brings good insight into the last 25 years for indie film distribution.
The second is from Eric Dubois, who moved into my Glasgow flat as Netribution 2 was taking off – on an adventure before settling down as an art professor in Paris. He ended up illustrating every Carnal Cinema satire interview, and all of the regular writers.
25 years ago we’d cockily call ourselves ‘the home of UK film’, which I later attributed to Private Eye after they’d copied the phrase on their links page, in cheeky self-promotion. But after that Web 1 era of home pages was fully replaced by Web 2’s algorithmic home feeds, it’s hard not to wonder whose home, exactly, independent creators ended up in?
The heart of this update, however, is in tribute to Leslie Lowes, know to many as James MacGregor. originally our Northern editor – but known across Shooting People, Moviescope and the Film Finance Handbook. Les played Claudius to Alun Armstrong’s Hamlet at school (and beat him to the role of King Lear), and later was the voice of BBC Radio Shetland, and helped run Radio Riyadh. Thanks to everyone who shared memories – especially his son Robert. My planned memorium for Stephen Applebaum unfortunately must wait until next month.
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We’re in this strange point as a species. The speed of change seems to accelerate while we’re over-informed about a climate emergency we’re mostly incapable of impacting. Wealth inequality is growing while the web deepens division by reinforcing bubbles of belief, making the co-operation we need to improve stuff seem less likely than ever. It feels (thinking of my young kid) it’s simultaneously hard to picture we all get thru this, YET *essential* to believe we do: we get thru this, or we’re done for.
Maybe Jacobean Londoners said the same, having in one generation gone from watching the premiere of The Tempest to surviving civil war, the decapitation of the king, the bubonic plague and the fire of London. The world must have felt almost over, but it wasn’t. Each of us are the surviving descendants of billions of generations of survivors, who got here bringing out a new release, evolving, trying again. If we only look back thru time, the odds seem ok.
Discussing these last 25 years with Tom this last six months has awakened in me a sense that this is a good time to look back. Netribution was born between the forest fire of the first dotcom crash, and the exponential growth of Web2 & smart phones, out of its smoldering, fertile soil. It feels we may be in a similar transition era – a time of shepherding the new and hospicing the old, to use the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops Model lingo.
Tom has a wonderful idea to launch a podcast interviewing everyone we interviewed or knew back then on the lessons of the last two and a half decades. The challenge is time, the story, as ever, is working unpaid: because the funding model still isn’t solved.
*Will it be? Can it be?*
I’ve only really had one question in relation to the web, publishing and film – can we fix web1’s major bug of paying creators without needing a paywall? A few years ago I got incredibly hopeful that we could, just before America split in two over the events of Jan 6, and Russia invaded Ukraine, then October 7th. The web is wilder and more fragmented now than it’s ever been.
But the reasoning that a medium billions of people gaze at and stroke rhythmically for hours every day shouldn’t be exclusively in the hands of a few unpredictable techno-feudal demigods has never been more clear. What happens next, though, is anyone’s guess.
Still, **We get thru this or we’re done for.** So, for what it’s worth, here’s a kind-of issue, or one 12th of an issue at least. Til next month…
@nic
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