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 theviolence 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-hiding for fear), that was welcomed.
By some. But not by others – it’s sobering walking down a street 30 minutes from where you live – even in a crowd of 2000, majority women – to cries of ‘shame on you’ and ‘pedophiles’ from families stood in their drives with their kids.
But it’s not that the marchers didn’t have our share of inflammatory chants – from ‘Nazi scum’ and ‘kill yourself like Adolph Hitler’, this social media-friendly tendency to paint the other side in the extreme worst place struck me as lose-lose for everyone, other than the companies who depend on polarised content to feed to audiences around the world safe at home, screen-stroking. On this level it’s not a community crisis it’s a content strategy – it’s the social media equivalent of premium content – violence on British streets, with something for both sides. It’s not tribes, its not a community story, it’s two different dramas with two different audiences, who each can look at it and say how the other side are a sign of how Britain is doomed.
Campaign groups need to get better at communicate to both two audiences
A danger of these ‘filter bubbles’ is not knowing how to communicate to the other bubble; the strongest messages can be heard by both groups and the majority will agree with it. That’s why ‘save our kids’ works and ‘migrants out’ doesn’t. Organisers Stand up Against Racism have to be better at communications. Take this reasonably balanced report from the BBC of the march –
Carmen Edwards, from the anti-migrant protest, said: “It was all happy, people were dancing, we were singing. There weren’t no far-right.” Sharon Smith, who had travelled from nearby Harlow, said she wanted to attend the protest to “protect my grandkids”. She said: “A lot of people showed up; it was good humoured and [there was] music. Everyone wants the same, [which is to] save our children.” However, Lewis Nielsen, officer at Stand up to Racism, said: “We think it is a quite dangerous situation in Epping. “They are potentially heading towards the same kind of violence we saw in August last year, so we think it is important that anti-racists and anti-fascists come out and mobilise against them. “People are right to be angry about the cost-of-living crisis, the NHS, the housing crisis. None of that was caused by the refugees in that hotel.”
Stand up to Racism sound like a politician who’s dodged a question from a journalist. The anti-migrant crowd in Epping aren’t talking about the NHS or housing, they’re talking about ‘protect our kids’. That has to be the first sentence in any response:
“We absolutely agree every community should feel safe, and nothing is more important than keeping all of our children safe. Unfortunately some of the refugees staying at the hostel have been attacked and beaten up while just going to the shops – and we’re here to say they must feel safe too.”
That’s the headline statement. And then they can pivot to the hard truths:
Nigel Farage has tried to split this community over a sexual assault of a teenager, but champions pro-rape figures like Andrew Tate. Some of the loudest voices weaponising the concerns of this community pay no interest when those accused are white. Tommy Robinson planned to come here today – he co-founded the EDL with Richard Price who was convicted for creating and possessing child pornography; Tommy defended him for long after that. The EDL – which he founded – had 20 members charged with child exploitation offences. This has continued for years – dozens of people close to him charged with child sexual abuse material, his spokesman in 2019 convicted for domestic abuse, and what’s key is he NEVER condemned these white supporters when the crimes came to light.”
Of course this isn’t a new story – a horrible attack on a teenager, weaponised by Britain’s newest Nazi group Homeland through a Facebook Group ‘Epping Says No’ (who openly boast of their orchestration), instrumentalised by a click hungry right wing press, conflict-hungry social media platforms and shameless politicians – to divide a community into ‘racists’ vs ‘threats to children’; or at the extremes ‘Nazi scum’ and ‘Pedophiles’.
Is this something new?
Is there anything meaningful to take from all this? From Tulsa to Ballymena – sexual assault is the ignition on an initial furious community backlash against the minority group where the accused comes from; and other forces then mobilise to defend them. In Ballymena 107 police officers were injured; in Tulsa in 1921 35 blocks were burned down and 39 of the local black community were killed. In Epping’s march on Sunday night thankfully no-one was hurt, a week before tho a dozen were – and Nigel Farage spent the week in between complaining that the police had let more get injured.
Reading the press in the aftermath, listening to the chants on the day, looking at the range of people who opposed our march through Epping I think there is. I think what’s new in all this, that’s different to Tulsa or previous such fights was how many of the men lining the streets was how many of them were filming.
Unlike the race battles of the 80s and 90s that we thought we’d left behind, this is also about content production and distribution. It’s both social-capital generating content for the creator, and money-making, attention-grabbing content for the platforms.
This is a relatively new thing. And so a relatively routine far-right weaponised concern for the safety of women and kids and a similarly common concern for the safety of refugees and minorities – is prevented from finding that natural common ground of ‘safety and care for all’ on social media, because this is social media’s version of a football match – choose your side and attack the other. A resolution would be bad for business.
Where once community leaders – from the local church to pub, cabbies and newspaper – would do the work of trying to repair fractured communities, the business model here is the opposite. The attention model is built on conflict, not the calming down and compromises which community peace and restoration is built on. At its worst unregulated extreme, we can picture a full cycle where social media companies –who don’t invest in content production– benefit so much from these conflicts that their algorithms continually reinforce the conditions for conflict, encouraging each ‘side’ to behave in ways that are most triggering to the other, all as a path to generate high-value content.
I began to write a screenplay a few years back about a developer who discovers the algorithm he’d written to grow a newspaper’s engagement and clicks was triggering geopolitical conflicts to meet its objectives of ‘more news’. It was a fun/scary Black Mirror-esque idea, but increasingly it feels like a logical conclusion of the business model of the attention economy, when coupled with the lack of transparency or regulation over the algorithms that decide who sees what.
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).
CommonsDB will be a database of public domain works to try to prevent unlawful take-down, and help creators find works to build on, and is a collaboration between Open Europe’s Paul Kellar and Liccium’s Sebastian Posth – two of the few individuals in the world to have demo’d our tool MOVA – alongside former Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda. The European Union’s backing of them isn’t just an endorsement of our designs and goals with MOVA, or my suggestion to Keller he work with the ISCC, but means we’re freed from ‘first mover curse’ – someone else, backed by the EU, is first to normalise mass free, open media fingerprinting with all the risks and possibilities surrounding that. It’s time to share what we built and learned, and – as their system so far appears to be closed source – maybe it’s time to publish our code.
So that’s my goal for Act 2 of this year of issues – to present finally our proposal for independent creators to operate independently of monopolies online (or, more precisely, with the same freedom that lets a micro-brewery or artisan chocolate bar sell its products to both tiny shops and supermarket chains). But to avoid too much tech talk we will keep a balance of more traditional Netribution stuff.
On that note – in this issue I profile two of the most interesting filmmakers who are pioneering in their use of ActivityPub to distribute and market their work, and build their community: Elena Rossini and Dilman Della. Tom has a story from Paros with his dogs (who were popular in the last issue on the ‘#dogs’ hashtag), and there’s a Stephen Applebaum archive interviews from the archive with Rachel Weisz, Lexi Alexander and Nobel-winner Imre Kertesz. Next time there’s a great interview lined up…
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 monopolised, despite Spotify’s bestefforts).
But I’m a parent now – I don’t need to be popular, I can stick to my principles and hope the world changes, as the arrival of [New Tech Concept Incoming] ActivityPub offers for the first time since Web 2.0 exploded in 2005/06, a path for that. That’s why I moved from Netribution’s 18-years old (!) Joomla to a brand-new, still being finished WordPress site – WordPress recently added ActivityPub with Matthias Pfefferle‘s plugin. This web-changing technology was central in Netribution’s final 2022 R&D project: Monetizing Open Video and is something we’ve been dreaming of in Netribution at least since 2007, when I wrote this:
“With social networks evolving into operating systems for how you stay in touch with your friends and family – as well as share and consume media – the advantages of an open system (like the web itself) over a closed system, controlled by one company (like Microsoft) are pretty clear… Sooner or later a user-owned and run system will evolve, and we can finally talk about web 3.0. If only someone, like a public agency, would invest in creating an open source / open standards social network…” August 2007
ActivityPub?
The name refers to ‘publishing’ but pubs make a good analogy for the problem with giant social media – it’s like a pub with 100 million drinking in it. You have to shout to get heard, and if the Nazis don’t get kicked out, then you’ve ended up in a Nazi bar, but one that’s really hard to leave because your friends are spread all over the place in the middle of conversations.
ActivityPub is a protocol – like email, jpeg, MP3 and ‘http’ (behind every website) – that’s built for a world with millions of ‘pubs’ with 1000s or 100 or even just one or two people in them. But it’s not just a mini-social network builder – there’s the key extra ability to connect with anyone in any pub, and chat/subscribe/like/repost not-to-mention change venue, at any point. So I can be sat a the table in The Lion, and have a chat with a pal at The Plough, provided their landlord hasn’t barred me or my local pub. This is a completely new approach to the challenge of moderating social media: break it into smaller human-run ‘pubs’, and then let those pubs federate with those with similar values and moderation skills, and block those that are only bots selling crypto and conspiracy theories. So the technology itself isn’t where censorship happens – but between communities (just like many English towns have a bar known for Nazis it’s very easy to avoid).
A driving philosophy – in principle– is that small pubs are easier to manage than 100 million user mega-pubs, as you can have a human landlord (aka moderation team). I’m a believer because I witnessed this being how Shooting People worked as an open publishing email list of 40,000 users 25 years ago, without bringing the hate-filled rage that’s normal online today: community guidelines and paid, human moderators, keeping the calm in the Sony vs Canon DV camera wars.
I didn’t explain this in the first two issues, because most film people I know love technology when it helps make or watch films, but start to glaze over with web tech talk. Maybe it’s because, like most tech, it’s easy to sound authoritative and difficult –without investing lots of time– to know if the authoritative person is talking crap. At least if James Cameron used the ‘widgie-dongle with Pro X glide’ on his last movie, then it’s probably ok, but most web talk is normally about how the biggest platforms (and superstars like Musk or Zuckerberg) have got it wrong. It sounds like a classic geek-supremacist ‘I’m an expert and everyone else an idiot’, rather than someone explaining in the 50s what a seatbelt is.
So WordPress + ActivityPub is fascinating as it turns a tiny blog like this one into a node of a network of millions of users, 10,000s of communities and hundreds of new apps and platforms – all using ActivityPub, allowing users on any of them to like, subscribe, read, boost, comment and bookmark to all of the authors on the little blog. The goal is ‘create once, publish everywhere‘ and it’s growing: WordPress, like its competitor Ghost have adopted, and platforms from Flipboard and Medium to Threads and Tumblr are rebuilding things around ActivityPub. This takes us closer to the small, personal website publishing that Netribution was built on 25 years ago, but with the network effects that Web 2.0 brought.
What about BlueSky? Isn’t that ‘decentralised’?When Jack ‘Twitter’ Dorsey founded BlueSky, like many in tech, he figured he could do it better than those who’d come before (ie the many people working with the W3C to develop ActivityPub), so created his own: Authenticated Transfer Protocol (‘AT Proto’). It has some nice things ActivityPub doesn’t have, but also seems to have added making it impossibly expensive to run your own independent server, meaning for now there’s just BlueSky running it. With some 33 million BlueSky users it’s a bit of a VHS vs Betamax split – but it’s not too much of a problem as there is a good bridge to/from ActivityPub/Mastodon.
I find all of this vaguely hopeful as it’s the first viable architectural alternative to the web monopolies – all the previous attempts are versions of ‘here’s a nice new social network who promise not to be evil – please help them rule the world’.
When I first tried out the video tool built on ActivityPub in 2020 (PeerTube) I rewrote Netribution’s last funding project to work with it. This tech isn’t just a concept, it works really well, has millions of users, and it’s not owned by VCs or big monopolies, (even if Meta, with Threads, are on standby for ActivityPub ‘Fediverse’ to take off). It’s like the old web.
Our project – Monetising Open Video Architecture (openvideo.tech)– finished at the start of 2022 and looked at ActivityPub as a way to recreate the 20C indie media ecosystem of indie producer >indie distributors >art cinemas/video stores (ntm indie bands > indie labels > indie record stores / radio stations). These structures resisted monopolisation, and supported a world of music and film, and the careers of those who created them. We see in ActivityPub the potential to do the same online – but without the old media gatekeeping that the web broke down.
But we finished our work at the end of 2022 and I went quiet, and didn’t talk about why. A week after our project finished, Russia invaded the Ukraine, calling it a ‘special military operation’. The world was at war and ‘truth’ as always was its first victim: that’s not new, but the web facilitates this, and I could picture how one part of the tech we’d developed might facilitate easier, cheaper state censorship (it was open tech that already existed, but we gave it a nice, friendly interface) – and there were too many unknowns for me. There were other reasons to go quiet but this was the one that scared me. Our history of championing new empowering media web tech before it goes mainstream, be it crowdfunding, the new craze YouTube, or a promising college-run alternative to Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, ‘TheFacebook’ – has left me cautious-bordering-paranoid about championing new tech with too many known unknowns. In 2013 I went to meetups from a group of guys plotting to launch a competitor to Bitcoin called Ethereum – and after questioning their founder, Vitalik, ran a mile (they’re now valued at $300bn). So I spent a year quietly presenting MOVA’s three components (RevShare, Mova.claims, open.movie) alongside three events, and then went quiet.
“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.”
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 everything.
After Netribution 1 ended in early 2002 – our capacity for working hand-to-mouth on a weekly magazine exhausted – I raised the book with Jess and Cath at Shooting People who I was negotiating joining as their first hire after they’d borrowed some money to go from free email list to subscription service. Jess proposed we publish it together: their funding and audience, our writing, a 50-50 collaboration. David Hancock, then editor of Screen Digest (now, also of Informa) suggested his sister Caroline as co-author, who had just finished her first feature as film producer. The ‘banana book’ was hard to finish, but sold out it’s 2,000 first print run in half a year.
But I didn’t publish the follow-up 2005-06 book with Shooting People for a selfish reason – I wanted the freedom to also put the funding info on Netribution as a subscription service to try to revive the site. Jess and Cath understandably wanted it to be part of Shooting People, which we’d then built up to 40,000 members, 25% paying. We parted ways, as my contract allowed, and I headed to Glasgow with a list of damaged relationships, debts and regrets. Perhaps reflecting how I felt, the cover took a photo of a pig cookie jar I’d found on the street in Glasgow as cover.
After several therapists, a new flat, circle of friends, day job (which included setting up the first Scottish Theatre company YouTube account for an interview with Ewen MacGregor I’d blagged) – Netribution 2.0 launched – and in it’s first six months was getting lots of traffic, attention and good original contributions. I was persuaded to do a third bigger, better book, this time expanding beyond the UK to the world, with 50 countries and 40 legal experts as co-authors, alongside Leslie Lowe’s chapter on microbudget techniques (an incongruous add-on motivated by my wish to pay him something). I picked a strawberry as cover as it looked tasty, and bookshops responded mostly by putting it cover-out on shelves. The launch in Cannes was my first trip to the festival and began with getting off the train to overhear a couple talking about the book. It was surreal: I was still battling depression and imposter syndrome, but spent a morning signing copies in the Cannes English Bookshop and managed to hide it. The following spring – with a second print-run underway and an improving sense of self– I decided to make a ‘big trip’ to India.
It was my first adult experience of a majority world country and I’d never seen poverty like my first taxi drive from the airport. I found myself blogging more politically on Netribution – about the US presidential election, food speculation, inequality and police corruption in Goa. The corruption piece got republished as an editorial in the Goa Herald without me knowing, and concerningly, as the police descended on the town I was writing from, hassling tourists. It lead one filmmaker and ex-interviewee to comment ‘maybe just write about films again?’ but I struggled to, after that trip.
‘Westerner returning from India wanting to change their life’ is a cliché, but the tipping point was a preview of Wall*E at the Edinburgh Film Festival a few months later. Perhaps India laid the groundwork for that screening that left me sitting in a car park stunned afterwards and deciding I had to return to filmmaking. I’d had enough of the web and publishing life – and wanted to try making something both popular and meaningful. I also that day decided to add something on carbon-neutral filmmaking to the reprint of the funding book I was in the middle of organising.
However when I got home from the screening there were two letters waiting saying Netribution had won two funding applications: from the UK Film Council (now BFI) to turn the funding book into an online subscription service, and from the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) for a practical R&D project investigating possible futures for alternative cinema, somewhat inspired by AV events funded by Publicis & Hewlett Packard five years before I’d done in a short-lived collective called 0.1 (which survives as a Wikipedia citation).
I had been fighting so long to get any public funding for Netribution I was lost. Time Out had first tipped the UK Film Council were about to fund us in 2004 – who we’d harassed with 100 letters from readers when we first closed in 2002. I’d parted company with Shooting People for this goal of one day running an online funding guide, but the moment it became possible, after that moment in an Edinburgh car-park, I caught a glimpse of a lifetime of data entry and admin to help other people make films through public grants and tax breaks, and the appeal evaporated. The TSB funding however was for a light-touch project investigating the future of cinema outside of cinemas – popup spaces, and mixed-media, immersive screenings with funding to build a test studio in Glasgow and run some free test events in Newcastle and South London. Our vision was something between Secret Cinema, the live AV of NinjaTune’s Hexstatic and the Outernet of huge wraparound visuals you see in central London.
The long UKFC funding contract also said I could be forced to pay back the funding if I failed to meet one of the many deliverables I’d promised; TSB only asked for a report at the end. There was no capacity to do both, and – most significantly – the only collaborator I had to work with was on the Living Cinema project, as we called it – was visual artist and editor Francis Morgan Giles, who I’d collaborated with since university (including 0.1).
So I picked Living Cinema (left), leaving a space for Olffi to replace us as Marché sponsors and build a film funding web service, ending Netribution’s Act as a publisher, and beginning our 16 years of R&D. The banking crash began a week or so later.
16 years later and the indie no-budget web of Netribution 1 & 2 has gone…
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 (left) and a wonderful tour around one of Paris’s best kept secrets when we met in April.
It’s a strange time to be trying to build a standalone publication tho – 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 bestefforts).
But I’m a parent now – I don’t need to be popular, I can stick to my principles and hope the world changes, as the arrival of [New Tech Concept Incoming] ActivityPub offers for the first time since Web 2.0 exploded in 2006 a path for that. That’s why I moved from Netribution’s 18-years old (!) Joomla to a brand-new, still being finished WordPress: not because I’ve got too much time, but because WordPress recently added ActivityPub. This web-changing technology was also central in Netribution’s final 2022 R&D project: Monetizing Open Video and is something we’ve been dreaming of in Netribution at least since 2007, when I wrote this:
“With social networks evolving into operating systems for how you stay in touch with your friends and family – as well as share and consume media – the advantages of an open system (like the web itself) over a closed system, controlled by one company (like Microsoft) are pretty clear… Sooner or later a user-owned and run system will evolve, and we can finally talk about web 3.0. If only someone, like a public agency, would invest in creating an open source / open standards social network…” August 2007
ActivityPub?
The name refers to ‘publishing’ but pubs make a nice analogy for the problem with giant social media – it’s like a pub with 100 million drinking in it. You have to shout to get heard, and if the Nazis don’t get kicked out, then you’ve ended up in a Nazi bar, but one that’s really hard to leave because your friends are spread all over the place in the middle of conversations.
ActivityPub is a protocol – like email, jpeg, MP3 and ‘http’ (behind every website) – that’s built for a world with millions of ‘pubs’ with 1000s or 100 or even just one or two people in them. But it’s not just a mini-social network builder – there’s the key extra ability to connect with anyone in any pub, and chat/subscribe/like/repost not-to-mention change venue, at any point. So I can be sat a the table in The Lion, and have a chat with a pal at The Plough, provided their landlord hasn’t barred me or my local pub. This is a completely new approach to the challenge of moderating social media: break it into smaller human-run ‘pubs’, and then let those pubs federate with those with similar values and moderation skills, and block those that are only bots selling crypto and conspiracy theories. So the technology itself isn’t where censorship happens – but between communities (just like many English towns have a bar known for Nazis it’s very easy to avoid).
A driving philosophy – in principle– is that small pubs are easier to manage than 100 million user mega-pubs, as you can have a human landlord (aka moderation team). I’m a believer because I witnessed this being how Shooting People worked as an open publishing email list of 40,000 users 25 years ago, without bringing the hate-filled rage that’s normal online today: community guidelines and paid, human moderators, keeping the calm in the Sony vs Canon DV camera wars.
I didn’t explain this in the first two issues, because most film people I know love technology when it helps make or watch films, but start to glaze over with web tech talk. Maybe it’s because, like most tech, it’s easy to sound authoritative and difficult –without investing lots of time– to know if the authoritative person is talking crap. At least if James Cameron used the ‘widgie-dongle with Pro X glide’ on his last movie, then it’s probably ok, but most web talk is normally about how the biggest platforms (and superstars like Musk or Zuckerberg) have got it wrong. It sounds like a classic geek-supremacist ‘I’m an expert and everyone else an idiot’, rather than someone explaining in the 50s what a seatbelt is.
So WordPress + ActivityPub is fascinating as it turns a tiny blog like this one into a node of a network of millions of users, 10,000s of communities and hundreds of new apps and platforms – all using ActivityPub, allowing users on any of them to like, subscribe, read, boost, comment and bookmark to all of the authors on the little blog. The goal is ‘create once, publish everywhere‘ and it’s growing: WordPress, like its competitor Ghost have adopted, and platforms from Flipboard and Medium to Threads and Tumblr are rebuilding things around ActivityPub. This takes us closer to the small, personal website publishing that Netribution was built on 25 years ago, but with the network effects that Web 2.0 brought.
What about BlueSky? Isn’t that ‘decentralised’?When Jack ‘Twitter’ Dorsey founded BlueSky, like many in tech, he figured he could do it better than those who’d come before (ie the many people working with the W3C to develop ActivityPub), so created his own: Authenticated Transfer Protocol (‘AT Proto’). It has some nice things ActivityPub doesn’t have, but also seems to have added making it impossibly expensive to run your own independent server, meaning for now there’s just BlueSky running it. With some 33 million BlueSky users it’s a bit of a VHS vs Betamax split – but it’s not too much of a problem as there is a good bridge to/from ActivityPub/Mastodon.
I find all of this vaguely hopeful as it’s the first viable architectural alternative to the web monopolies – all the previous attempts are versions of ‘here’s a nice new social network who promise not to be evil – please help them rule the world’.
When I first tried out the video tool built on ActivityPub in 2020 (PeerTube) I rewrote Netribution’s last funding project to work with it. This tech isn’t just a concept, it works really well, has millions of users, and it’s not owned by VCs or big monopolies, (even if Meta, with Threads, are on standby for ActivityPub ‘Fediverse’ to take off). It’s like the old web.
Our project – Monetising Open Video Architecture (openvideo.tech)– finished at the start of 2022 and looked at ActivityPub as a way to recreate the 20C indie media ecosystem of indie producer >indie distributors >art cinemas/video stores (ntm indie bands > indie labels > indie record stores / radio stations). These structures resisted monopolisation, and supported a world of music and film, and the careers of those who created them. We see in ActivityPub the potential to do the same online – but without the old media gatekeeping that the web broke down.
But we finished our work at the end of 2022 and I went quiet, and didn’t talk about why. A week after our project finished, Russia invaded the Ukraine, calling it a ‘special military operation’. The world was at war and ‘truth’ as always was its first victim: that’s not new, but the web facilitates this, and I could picture how one part of the tech we’d developed might facilitate easier, cheaper state censorship (it was open tech that already existed, but we gave it a nice, friendly interface) – and there were too many unknowns for me. There were other reasons to go quiet but this was the one that scared me. Our history of championing new empowering media web tech before it goes mainstream, be it crowdfunding, the new craze YouTube, or a promising college-run alternative to Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, ‘TheFacebook’ – has left me cautious-bordering-paranoid about championing new tech with too many known unknowns. In 2013 I went to meetups from a group of guys plotting to launch a competitor to Bitcoin called Ethereum – and after questioning their founder, Vitalik, ran a mile (they’re now valued at $300bn). So I spent a year quietly presenting MOVA’s three components (RevShare, Mova.claims, open.movie) alongside three events, and then went quiet.
Three things have changed that…
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.
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).
CommonsDB will be a database of public domain works to try to prevent unlawful take-down, and help creators find works to build on, and is a collaboration between Open Europe’s Paul Kellar and Liccium’s Sebastian Posth – two of the few individuals in the world to have demo’d our tool MOVA – alongside former Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda. The European Union’s backing of them isn’t just an endorsement of our designs and goals with MOVA, or my suggestion to Keller he work with the ISCC, but means we’re freed from ‘first mover curse’ – someone else, backed by the EU, is first to normalise mass free, open media fingerprinting with all the risks and possibilities surrounding that. It’s time to share what we built and learned, and – as their system so far appears to be closed source – maybe it’s time to publish our code.
So that’s my goal for Act 2 of this year of issues – to present finally our proposal for independent creators to operate independently of monopolies online (or, more precisely, with the same freedom that lets a micro-brewery or artisan chocolate bar sell its products to both tiny shops and supermarket chains). But to avoid too much tech talk we will keep a balance of more traditional Netribution stuff.
On that note – in this issue I profile two of the most interesting filmmakers who are pioneering in their use of ActivityPub to distribute and market their work, and build their community: Elena Rossini and Dilman Della. Tom has a story from Paros with his dogs (who were popular in the last issue on the ‘#dogs’ hashtag), and there’s a Stephen Applebaum interviews from the archive with Rachel Weisz, Lexi Alexander and Imre Kertesz. Hopefully next time there’ll be some original interviews…
Self-declared ‘geriatric millennial’ Elena Rossini (@_elena) 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.
The Illusionists
Sex sells. What sells even more? Insecurity.”
A critically acclaimed independent documentary about the globalization of beauty and the dark side of advertising.
29-part blog series by Elena Rossini that celebrates the careers of unsung heroines from the world of film and television, that links with her film ‘the Power of Visibility’ (below).
The Realists: how to take back power from big tech?
The sequel to The Illusionists, this is a multimedia project that promotes digital literacy to help people develop a healthier relationship with their devices, encouraging them to use technology in a mindful way – and not be used by it.
“There are some people who suffer from this ‘[Auschwitz] disease’ for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these events. I’m a writer, so I don’t belong to any one of these three categories. I view my experience as being raw material and I process it in the process of writing. And as I go along, I get rid of this experience. You know, this is how I go on and on and on and on, until I reach a stage, as a writer, where I will have run out of raw material. Then it’s time to die.”
“I was teaching a martial arts class and a couple of guys showed up in my class. They were talking about my team, Mannheim, and because of the way they were dressed and because they were talking about my team, I immediately knew they were hooligans, they were in a firm. Being 15 and having this whole urban myth about hooligans, I was like, ‘You got to take me to a game. I want to stand with you guys.’ They were like ‘No, no, no. No girls allowed.’
I said: ‘You have to take me because after all I’m teaching you martial arts here, so you can’t really convince me that I can’t take care of myself.’ So, in the end, to the guys and in general, I was like the little sister. One they could accept. I wasn’t necessarily a girl’s girl. They took me and for two years it became somewhat of a family for me. Everything I portrayed in the film was really what I saw. Like I thought it was really cool and really fun. I thought it was their way of choosing an extreme sport, they were just adrenalin junkies, it was alright; they didn’t hurt anybody that wasn’t in the same game. They didn’t attack families. They basically were 30 guys running against 30 guys from another team who wanted to do the same thing. I thought, ‘What’s the big fuss? Why can’t they just let them do what they want to do? They’re just a bunch of boys wanting to get into fisticuffs.’ So at first you think it’s very cool and you see a certain attraction about it, and then you start noticing what happens when somebody does break the rule, you know? You notice that even though they have this unspoken law of don’t kick anybody when he’s down, there will always be somebody who breaks it. You just cannot rely on a bunch of guys all following these rules. Even in a boxing fight you have a referee because somebody will always go low.”
“I’ve never seen poverty on that level. A million people living in a very small space with no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, there’s a very high level of disease, HIV, and yet there’s that scene in the movie where the children come running up to you and they say, ‘How are you?’ They welcome you. I remember coming back and saying this to my sister and saying they’ve got such – I mean the kids have got nothing, they’ve got no toys, literally no toys, so they make footballs from plastic bags scrunched together and they just wrap string around it, and they kick it around, or they take a piece of string with a button on the end and they pull it as if it’s a dog. Toddlers of three or four are already carrying their siblings on their back. And yet their spirit is so welcoming and there’s a life going on. There’s little cafes and they’re barbecuing meat. There’s a life. Anyway, I came back and I said this to my sister and she was like, ‘You’re being so sentimental. You can’t say that. You’re a wealthy white person. How can you go there and say that?’ They said to me, ‘Where you come from, do children welcome strangers?’ and I said, ‘Where I come from children are told not to speak to strangers.’ We live in a different culture but you do ask a question whether with material wealth there can be spiritual poverty and vice versa. It’s a dangerous territory, though, isn’t it?”
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 @dilmandila@mograph.social & on PeerTube and, like Netribution@25, 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.
How I quit my job to become a full-time artist
“It started with Maisha Film Lab. When I was selected in 2006, I got the green light I had been searching for all my life. Before that, I stumbled about blindly, not knowing if my writing was any good, not knowing if I had that something that makes you a good artist. I did not have confidence to even think of becoming a full-time artist, so I snuggled comfortably in my salaried job. In Maisha I met people like Steve Cohen (RIP), who thought I had something. He took me under his wings taught me screenwriting, by helping develop The Felistas Fable, over a four year period. That was my film school. Then there was Musarait, the then Program Coordinator of Maisha, who pulled me aside one day and asked, ‘Have you ever thought about directing?’” Continued…
The inequality facing African filmmakers seeking film funding
I did not want to rant, but as I researched crowdfunding options for my next feature film, Big Tree, it pissed me off to discover that all major platforms, including kickstarter, backerkit, and indiegogo, allow creators only from certain countries to set up campaigns. Yet, anyone anywhere can give them money? Funny.” Continued…
Why my film crew is full of women
“There’s something you are doing right,’ a male Ugandan film director told me, as we discussed the crew of this TV series I created, Mama and Me. ‘Do you follow some kind of feminist agenda? Why is your crew so full of women?’ I’d just told him that I was the only male in the writer’s room, and that most heads of department were female. ‘It wasn’t a conscious decision,’ I replied. ‘It somehow just happened.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you can put together a film crew that is sixty percent female, then you are surely doing something right.’ I got similar remarks about Her Broken Shadow, with some critics saying it as feminist, and lauding me for having an all-female cast.” Continued…
Returning up the house road one hazy afternoon I was curious about the little orchard walled in on the T junction. I’d only seen it as an olive grove but this day a clementine caught my eye. In we loped, to have a mooch about, off leash, before dinner time. We were all tired and floppy but I was now no longer aware of Raja. I’d noticed his instinct was up, as we approached the house road, but I hadn’t paid the attention due. I missed him, for I’d say no more than 17 seconds, which was all he needed.
Anyway, there I was muttering to myself while trying to peel an unripe clementine when I heard a commotion across the road. ‘Raja.’ I called. ‘Raja!’ Nothing.
At once, the commotion announced itself in my mind as ‘very upset fowl’ and a neurological microsecond later I found myself sprinting, with Chili in toe, shouting Έλα!! for my beautiful killer friend. I was bellowing his name in my deepest, angriest voice even while one of these quite ridiculous, exotic birds (it was enormous) flapped in hysterical protest into a tree above my head.
I swear, I thought of a childhood cartoon by Quentin Blake.
At the neighbours locked gate I spotted Raja. He was in the garden, beneath a tree more suited to first love, ravaging the neck of his fresh prey. Feathers littered the very air.
I yelled from the depths of Hell,
!! RAJA !!
!! Όχι !!
!! Έλα !!
….and come he did, slowly and in deep obeisance, while the blood and adrenaline surged through his exquisite brown frame and quivering to his paws with the thrill of pure mammalian violence. I had aged considerably by the time he arrived at the gate. His mouth was a mess of stubborn feathers. He coughed and licked and spluttered to no avail, knowing he was in the most awful trouble with his all powerful leader.
I admit that I was experiencing a powerful cocktail of desperate emotions at this point. These included;
Rage, Shock, Horror, Deep Shame and Fear.
We went at once to the house where I left the hounds to immediately return to the scene of the crime.
‘Τι συνέβη?’
The turkey farmer waited at the gate. He seemed confused and cross. We attempted to communicate the events of the past three minutes.
and
‘που έχει?’ He said, again and again. I didn’t understand but described the story with internationally recognised gestures, feeling like Captain Haddock.
‘Kaput?’ he asked, drawing a knife across his throat.
‘No. Όχι. Not kaput. It flew away’ I flapped, in a direction vaguely to the north east.
‘που έχει?’ He asked again.
‘I don’t know what that means. I’m very sorry.’ We walked the walk of shame around this rather idyllic, feathery murder scene, with me practising one of most important words an Englishman needs abroad.
‘Συγνώμη!’
He was very cross but in a now private way that reminded me of displeasing a parent. He called his son and we went on in silence to the turkey enclosure. His son appeared, a gentle, concerned young man, who mediated between the shamed and the wronged.
I was completely devastated, standing there, dressed inexplicably, in my December wardrobe of blue shorts, blue T and near death trainers. I explained that I was very sorry, that it was entirely my responsibility and would of course pay for any damage. The son was gracious but they wanted to know where the ravaged bird had gone. So we looked, forlornly until sunset.
I had to explain all this to my hosts, on their long awaited holiday. I had to pay for the bird. I asked the son what his father liked to drink, as this was Christmas week and likely some unknowing islander would no longer be eating turkey for Christmas lunch.
The next day I bought the father a bottle of whisky and gave him a large banknote. The whiskey was a surprise, but he accepted both it and my apologies and we parted, shaking hands. My kind hosts too, were phlegmatic but agreements regarding Raja’s future stewardship were quickly created.
Bird never found. Presumed dead.
On my last day with them I cried a lot. They came to me in turn then, and through the rest of the day. Our last walk was an epic ramble around Lageri. I told them both how I appreciated them. Dear friends.
As we approached home I saw some Joe Frazier in Chili, and an unmistakable Fred Astaire in Raja.
On our last night I realised that Chili has eyebrows like Nikita Khrushchev, and that I am completely in love with Raja.
There are ‘lasts’ all through life. Why are those that involve animals we love so very, very painful?
