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simonjadis · 7 months ago

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Jesus christ. I'm scared to ask but... what the hell happened with The Watcher fandom?

I don't even go here, but here's my understanding

Several years ago, Shane and Ryan left Buzzfeed to launch their own company, teaming up with Steven Lim. Watcher has grown, producing multiple shows. Initially, people were supporting them on Patreon (for discord + early access) and YouTube. both of these are increasingly notorious platforms that take cuts from profits. YouTube payouts are massive if you're just 1-2 people getting a million views per video and a new successful video every week. but it doesn't cover a growing company's needs

To be blunt, for Watcher to continue as a company, they need cut out "middleman" services that both regulate their content and take a cut of their earnings. That means moving off of YouTube and it means changing the Patreon to just be for the podcast.

So, on Friday (April 19) Watcher announced that they're launching their own streaming model. Everything that they'd already shared would remain on YouTube, but future content was coming out on their own service for a $5.99 sub. Which in turn would be lower than or about the same as anyone subscribing on Patreon, and would also be without the horror of YouTube ads

(Again, I don't go here, but I will not watch advertisements voluntarily, least of all on yewchube. I have ublock origin/firefox and when it comes to streaming, I have the ad-free subscription or I don't watch it at all)

To be clear, they made this announcement well in advance of launching, and were making sure that international viewers would still be able to view (something that some major corporate streamers have not done). They also emphasized that they're unbothered by profile sharing, so that $5.99 per month could come down to $2 per month for three friends, or just (as I often do) one person buying it and sharing the login with friends.

Also you can gift subs. All of this is unfortunately moot, and it seems that many of the people reacting to the announcement did not learn or care about any of this.

The reaction to this news was, to be blunt, unhinged. Obviously, it's normal for some people who cannot afford $5.99 per month to feel disappointed. And any change can be unnerving for a fandom. But the vitriol (some of it, like the person who accused them of "ruining Taylor Swift's day," was admittedly very funny) was pretty vicious.

I think that a lot of it was disinformation based (unclear on where the idea that they were removing old content from YouTube originated, as it certainly was not from their announcement video) and a lot of it was (predominantly younger) viewers looking for social media clout by coming out with the coveted "worst new take" to impress their friends.

And so, SO much of it was racism. For some reason, a lot of people have invented a narrative where Shane is being held hostage by the other two co-owners, and desperately wants to release content for free to the detriment of his company, but Ryan and Steven have somehow conspired to make their company profitable so that they can continue to (evilly) pay their employees.

From what I can tell (again, I don't even go here), the bulk of the backlash ended up targeting Steven. People in the fandom are already weird about him and have an ugly tendency to invent mean things about him (a couple of years ago, some of these same ill-behaved "fans" decided that he was homophobic, not because of anything that he did or said).

So this was an excuse for these vicious little beasts to let loose. They were leaving abhorrent comments on his loved ones' Instagram photos -- some from months ago.

On the less overtly racist front, backlash included people saying that they just want Shane and Ryan sitting in a room talking about stuff. It is unusual for creatives to not care about the quality of what they make; of course Shane and Ryan and Steven care about production quality, about being able to film ghost-hunting and other shows. They're not 23-year-olds scraping by, they're artists and storytellers and they are also employers.

I don't know these men and I don't generally feel sorry for men, as a rule, but it must have been pretty devastating to find out how many of their most vocal "fans" seem to despise them, feel entitled to their art for free, and will rage against them like this.

Which leads to Monday's grim announcement, which as I understand it was that they're going to put new Watcher content up on YouTube with a delay. I'm not saying that it's a bad policy; I'm saying that it means that they remain tethered to YouTube for what content they can include, and it's showing these rancid trolls that their cruelty works.

I'm not going to say that this is "letting the terrorists win" because I'm not trying to victim-blame Watcher here. But I worry about what these rotten little beasts will do now that they've felt the rush of victory.

I cannot emphasize enough that I do not even go here. plenty of people very much go here and have written at greater length and in greater detail than i have. I'm just horrified. I don't even go here

#watcher #watcher entertainment #I don't even go here #anon #ask #anon ask

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sureuncertainty · 1 year ago

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so as a former employee of RMS Titanic Inc, I have some thoughts I need to get out about this whole current situation, or I will literally explode.

for context, I worked for RMST Inc. for a year and a half as a tour guide and artifact specialist. The company owns the salvage rights to the wreck site, and partners with Oceangate and other companies to retrieve artifacts. the artifacts are used for educational purposes only, in the museum that I worked at, although they weren’t above selling little bits of coal from the Titanic in stupid little tchotchkes like snowglobes and hourglasses.

i dedicated so much of my life and passion to that company and that museum and was treated like absolute dirt lol. and I didn’t even get the worst of it, I had friends and coworkers whose safety and wellbeing was consistently disregarded for the sake of profit, fighting desperately for corporate to stop pretending to care about the legacy of Titanic when all they really cared about was making money

so despite my initial shock at reading about what was going on with the missing submersible, I can’t say I’m surprised. This is what fucking happens when you cut corners and put profit over everything else. If only there was some big historical event that we could look to that would show us just exactly how dangerous that can be... oh wait.

Jack Thayer, who was 17 when he survived Titanic, said that “the world woke up on April 15, 1912″, which pretty much sums up how SURE people were in 1912 that they would never make those same mistakes again. They realized had gotten complacent and swore things would be different. They enacted safety laws, pointed fingers at survivors, created conspiracy theories to try to explain what happened, all out of fear of it happening again. And yet, history always repeats itself

and now people are fucking OBSESSED with the Titanic, they find it fascinating, they won’t fucking leave it alone, and the company I worked for, and Oceangate, and others, capitalize on that because they’re greedy and want to make money off of it. all they care about is how to profit off of it. they PRETEND to care about Titanic but they don’t. They never did.

I also actually have a personal connection to one of the five members of the team in the submersible. I met P.H. Nargeolet at the event our museum did commemorating the 110th anniversary of the sinking, I spoke to him and heard firsthand some of his accounts of dives to the wreck site, I even took a picture with him. He cared, he cared so much about Titanic and its legacy, and so do I and so did so many of my friends I worked with. The company we worked for took advantage of our caring, it took advantage of how passionate we were about it in order to line its executives’ fucking pocket

I’m horrified, I’m devastated, I’m vindicated.

on the one hand, I hope this ruins them. i want to watch the company die. there’s a satisfaction in that. but the shitty thing is how much suffering has to happen for things to change. i just wish good people didn’t have to die to make change happen. I wish people cared first, before tragedy strikes. I wish our world wasn’t so fucked up and shit like this didn’t happen. But it did. And it does. And money won’t save any of those people any more than it saved John Jacob Astor or Benjamin Guggenheim, or any of the other rich greedy assholes who died on Titanic. I’m not celebrating their deaths. But I won’t ever forget who suffers the most. The coal trimmers and the stewards and the minimum wage guest service associates at the museum I worked at.

I’m glad I don’t work there anymore. But some of my best friends still do. And I don’t want them to suffer more because of this. All I can hope is that it enacts meaningful change that actually lasts. But I know that’s just wishful thinking.

#win rambles #this is very convoluted and not really... idk how much sense it makes i just had to get thoughts out #i don' thave a witty conclusion or a message or anything like that #i just want people to know how shitty our company was and i want you to know how much i loved that job and how much i cared #and how much people in the titanic community do care #i'm just tired of seeing posts and memes about it from poeple who don't know what they're talking about #the titanic community is full of shitty bigoted white men and people who fucked me over bc i'm trans #and fucked over my queer nonwhite neurodivergent disabled friends #but me and my friends are in the community too whether they like it or not and we care and WE matter #titanic #rms titanic

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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A business model for bankrupting the oil companies

Today (June 6), I’m on a Rightscon panel about interoperability.

Tomorrow (June 7), I’m keynoting the Re:publica conference in Berlin.

Thursday (June 8) at 8PM, I’m at Otherland Books in Berlin with my novel Red Team Blues.

When a giant company wrecks your life, what are you gonna do? They can afford more and better lawyers than you can, and they have people whose full time job is fighting off lawsuits — are you really gonna beat those people by pursuing your grievance as a side-hustle? Do you really wanna be a full-time, professional litigant?

For some people, the answer is yes: some people are angry enough, or sufficiently morally offended, to make suing a giant company their life’s mission. Sometimes, they succeed, and force companies to cough up gigantic sums of money. Obviously, this makes the plaintiff better off, but it can also make things better for the rest of us. Money talks and bullshit walks, and once it becomes clear that 300% of the profits from harming people will be sucked out of the company by a lawsuit, shareholders will revolt and force the company to clean up its act.

Shareholders don’t invest in companies that ruin our lives because they are committed to an ideology of cruelty. Ideology only gets you so far: the pursuit of profit incentivizes far worse conduct than mere sadism ever can:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers

Incentives matter. Companies above a certain size become too big to fail and too big to jail. They capture their regulators and ensure that any damages the government extracts are less than their profits — a fine is a price.

Juries, on the other hand, can and do really whack a company for its bad conduct. They understand that incentives matter. They understand that a company that saves $1,000,001 by cutting back on workplace safety can’t be driven to improve its behavior by a fine of $1,000,000 after it kills a bunch of workers. If profit outstrips penalties, penalties aren’t effective.

A dirty $1m profit needs to be met with a $100m judgment. As the Untouchables MBA teaches us, this is just sound business: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPZ6eaL3S2E

But suing these giant companies is hard. They can tie you up in court for years — decades, even. They can outspend and outwait you. The more profits a company has racked up through its evil deeds, the more claims it can fend off. Incentives matter, so if you’re gonna commit corporate murder, you’d better do a lot of it to build up the cash needed to scare off your victims and their survivors.

However: the bigger a company is, the more cash it has, the more money there is to extract from it if you can prevail in court. If the company has genuinely injured you, and if you can mobilize the capital and resources to pursue it to final judgment, there’s a huge payoff at the end of the process — and a lesson for all the other companies contemplating their own course of action.

That’s the Voltaire MBA: “you have to execute an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others.”

For hundreds of years, rich, powerful people have observed their colleagues’ abuses and thought, “They only pull that shit on peasants — but if they did it to me, I could sue them for everything!”

This led to an obvious course of action: strike a bargain with the mutilated, ruined peasants to finance their suit against the toff that so abused them, in exchange for a (large) share of the proceeds. Medieval courts called this champerty; today, we call it litigation finance: investing in other peoples’ grievances against deep-pocketed monsters, in the expectation of reaping huge cash payouts.

On paper, litigation finance seems like a neat solution to a messy problem. The bigger a company is, the worse the abuses it commits — and the more it can be made to pay for its sins. The normal economics of litigation are turned upside-down: rather than avoiding the largest companies, you pursue them. This is the Willie Sutton MBA: “That’s where the money is.”

Litigation finance is a large and growing chunk of the finance sector. For about a decade, hedge funds and private equity have been bankrolling law-firms that represent people who’ve been mangled by corporations, keeping the money flowing through whatever delays and entanglements the target throws up:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/should-you-be-allowed-to-invest-in-a-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share

Litigation finance can be thought of as the no-win/no-fee “ambulance chaser” business on steroids. While a local lawyer can make a tidy living going after slip-and-falls and fender-benders, splitting the proceeds with their clients, a firm backed by a huge investment fund can do the same to companies with billions in the bank and hundreds of millions on the line.

Litigation finance is also closely related to impact litigation, which is when a nonprofit uses charitably raised funds to chase corporations and governments through the courts to establish precedents that overturn bad laws or pave the way for future judgments. Impact litigation can be thought of as the trailblazer for litigation finance: for-profit lawsuits are risk averse and stick to pursuing cases that have a high likelihood of eventually succeeding, while impact litigators are a kind of legal entrepreneur, advancing new, uncertain legal theories in the hopes of making new law. Once that law is created, litigation finance can drum up thousands of similarly situated plaintiffs and sue tons of companies on the same theory, citing the new precedent.

Litigation finance’s first big scores was going after med-tech and pharma companies. A lax regulatory environment allowed medical companies to market deadly products that maimed or killed people wholesale — think Vioxx, vaginal meshes or metal-on-metal hip replacements (a doc about this, The Bleeding Edge, will give you persistent nightmares):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bleeding_Edge

Suing the companies that killed your family or permanently disabled you is a slow and ugly process, but it’s a lot more certain than asking Congress to patch the loopholes the company that hurt you exploited, or hoping that a future President will appoint an agency head who gives a shit, and that the Senate will confirm them. And since money talks and bullshit walks, corporations that can’t pay dividends or do stock buybacks because they owe all their cash to their victims will suffer in the stock market, and their rivals will clean house and tread carefully.

Which brings me to the latest turn in litigation finance: climate litigation. As more and more money has sloshed into ESG funds that are supposed to make money by investing in ethical, climate-friendly businesses, the idea of suing giant oil companies and other wreckers has grown more attractive. 18 months ago, Businessweek covered the nascent-but-growing phenomenon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/09/grievance-factory/#champerty

That growth has only continued. With more and larger ESG funds chasing returns, there’s a lot more money available to represent, say, poisoned indigenous people in the global south whose ancestral lands have been rendered an uninhabitable hellscape by a mining or petrochemical company. The returns from these cases aren’t correlated with wider economic trends: whether the market is up down, it makes no difference to the size of the judgment or settlement that is extracted in the end.

A new piece in the Financial Times by Camilla Hodgson does an excellent job rounding up the state of play in litigation finance, starting with the oil giant PTTEP paying $102m to 15,000 Indonesian farmers to settle claims stemming from a massive, ocean-killing oil spill in 2019:

https://www.ft.com/content/055ef9f4-5fb7-4746-bebd-7bfa00b20c82

The firm that financed the suit is Harbour Litigation Funding, and they paid for a lot of shoe-leather lawyering, sending reps on off-road motorbikes to each of the farmers’ plots to sign them up. The case cost more than $21m, and Harbour creamed $53.5m off the top of the settlement from PTTEP — about 40% of the total.

Those numbers are pretty compelling investment story: there aren’t a lot of opportunities to make a >100% return on a $21m investment in 15 years — let alone investments that let you claim to be bringing justice to poor farmers who’ve been abused by rapacious corporate murderers.

Other cases are still ongoing: mining giant BHP is facing a £36b class action case over the 2015 collapse of Brazil’s Fundão dam, which released poisoned mine-tailings into waterways serving millions of people. 700,000 plaintiffs are in the class, and the investors, Prisma Capital (Brazil) and North Wall Capital (UK) have already fronted £70m pursuing the case.

There is a vast inventory of cases like these, just lying around, waiting for someone to stake a claim. One barrier is that most of the world’s large law firms are conflicted out of pursuing these cases — they represent these same companies in other actions. But a new sector of specialized, un-conflicted firms is growing up, and tackling more and more of these cases.

These firms are chasing relatively easy claims, but there’s an even bigger fish out there, waiting to be caught: class actions against carbon-intensive companies, especially coal and oil companies, for their knowing contributions to the global climate emergency. These corporations are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars, and they have inflicted trillions in harms. There’s gold in them thar wildfires.

The FT cites experts who predict a massive wave of litigation finance climate suits in the next 2–3 years, and notes an increasing tempo of shareholder motions demanding that big oil and mining companies disclose their litigation risks in their investor reports. This is a very compelling idea, a kaiju boss-fight in which we recruit monsters to fight other monsters. It’s such a fun idea that I actually wrote a novel about it, 2009’s Makers, in which corporate misconduct that has not yet reached the statute of limitations becomes the new oil, prompting a huge investment bubble:

https://craphound.com/category/makers/

But is the answer to a bad guy with a law firm a good guy with a law firm? There are certainly some ways this can go very wrong (many of which end up in Makers). Back in 2015, Cathy O’Neil published an excellent critique of litigation finance in the context of vaginal mesh cases:

https://mathbabe.org/2015/09/01/litigation-finance-a-terrible-idea/

O’Neill’s point is that incentives matter. The incentive for a litigation finance fund is to extract settlements, not win justice. Time and again, we’ve seen how a financial tactic can be severed from a societal strategy — like how GDP can be goosed to spectacular heights without improving national prosperity.

There’s even a name for this phenomenon: Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The finance sector is spookily good at decoupling positive societal outcomes from positive investor outcomes. The real answer to medical companies that mutilate women with vaginal meshes, or destroy the planet with CO2, is criminal sanctions and regulation, not private lawsuits.

That said, I think there’s a case for the one leading to the other. Right now, climate wreckers devote very large sums to preventing effective action on climate. Suborning regulators and politicians all over the world isn’t cheap. If we take away the money they’ve saved up for this project through stonking, eye-watering judgments, and if we convince the capital markets not to give them any more money lest it be immediately extracted to pay for more redress of a litany of grievances, then perhaps we can deprive them of the capacity of corrupt our political process.

One way to understand whether something is a genuine threat to a company’s power is to look at how viciously the company attacks it. If you doubt that unions could do good for workers, just take a peep at the all-out violent blitzes that Amazon and Starbucks mount in the face of union drives. I mean, imagine if the Democratic Party took unions half as seriously as the GOP!

The corporate lobby exhibits the same terror over plaintiff-side lawsuits as it does over unions. A massive, decades-long campaign to villify plaintiff-side lawyers has convinced many of us that corporations are the victims of the legal system, rather than its masters. The PR campaign is surprisingly effective, despite its reliance on lies about the “McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit” and other urban legends:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

Corporate plunderers are terrified of being dragged into court by their victims, and devote titanic amounts of blood and treasure into making it harder and harder to do so. On the “the more scared the are, the better” metric, litigation finance is a slam dunk.

But winning a case isn’t the same as getting a judgment or disciplining a firm. When Steven Donziger won a landmark judgment against Chevron on behalf of indigenous people whose lands and bodies had been permanently poisoned, the company struck back:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#free-donziger

Chevron bribed a judge in Ecuador to claim that Donziger had rigged the case, then brought a case in the US against Donziger for racketeering, judge-shopping to get judge Lewis A Kaplan on their case. Kaplan is a former tobacco industry lawyer who never met a corporate criminal he didn’t love, and when the SDNY prosecutor declined to press charges against Donziger because the case was absurd, Kaplan appointed a private lawyer — whose firm also acted for Chevron! — to act as prosecutor. The case against Donziger was obviously trumped up — the Ecuadoran judge who accused him of corruption later recanted and multiple countries’ Supreme Courts upheld the judgment Donziger won against Chevron. Nevertheless, Kaplan got Donziger locked up under house arrest for years, and even got him banged up in Riker’s for a time. Donziger’s lost his law license and his clients are still awaiting judgment.

This is the best law that money can buy, and Chevron has a lot of money. The massive expenditures needed to railroad Donizer were a pittance compared to the $9.5b judgment Chevron owed its victims in Ecuador.

The lesson of Donziger is that these companies won’t go genrly to their graves. They are enormously, unimaginably wealthy and act with the ruthlessness born of greed, which makes mere sadism pale by comparison. Litigation finance is exciting and promising, but it’s only a tactic — and it’s a tactic that’s always in danger of being turned against the goal it nominally serves. The people funding litigation finance don’t want to save the world — they just want to get rich. They can and will change sides if someone can make the business case for doing so.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/06/thats-where-the-money-is/#champerty

[Image ID: A mirrored office tower bearing the Exxon logo. One face of the office tower is a graffiti-covered ATM. Before the tower is a giant pile of bricks of oversized US $100 bills in paper wrappers. The ATM screen depicts a smouldering Deep Water Horizon oil platform.]

Image:

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

—

Joe Shlabotnik (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/2299501806/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #incentives matter #Business #champerty #that’s where the money is #climate #litigation finance #kaiju fight #impact litigation #set a thief to catch a thief #goodhart's law

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sundae-meringue · 1 year ago

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The Old Web part 1: Neocities and Geocities

Today I discovered the Old Web movement.

As a 2003 kiddo I was not an internet user in the late 90s and early 2000s when the "old internet" was at its height. But I recently discovered that there lies a place beyond our Twitters and Instagrams of the present. Deeper into the internet there is a thriving community of personal, amateur-coded, not-for-profit websites, many of which are hosted on Neocities.

But before we can really get into neocities, we must talk about it's ancestor geocities. Geocities was created in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Reznor to be a website-hosting service and a way to discover people's personal websites. In 1999 it was bought out by yahoo! (the destroyer) at a time when it was the third most popular website on the whole internet. Yahoo! changed a bunch of shit, forgoing the "cities" aspect of grouping together websites of a certain theme so that people can discover websites related to their interests. Yahoo! instead wanted to focus on using the person's yahoo! usernames in the URLs. This is one of the first of MANY times that corporations will ruin things on the internet for the sake of profit.

Yahoo! eventually decided geocities wasn't profitable enough, even after the website had added advertisements, paid premium benefits (which screwed over people who didn't pay), and a geocities watermark on every website it hosted that you couldn't remove. Geocities was killed by yahoo! in 2009.

Shortly after the website was announced to be shutting down Internet Archive (bless them) and a few other groups made it their mission to archive the geocities websites that would otherwise be wiped from the internet forever. These campaigns were widely successful.

After geocities was gone, there was now a niche to fill. Neocities sprung up four years later, taking its place. In 2023 it boasts over 600,000 websites being hosted on its platforms. It has links to people's personal websites, a webcomic where a cat teaches you HTML, and many guides to making your own website.

The community of custom website owners is alive and well, equipped with HTML knowledge, friendship, a healthy dose of nostalgia, and their own manifesto. They believe in the idea that the internet was better before everything was dictated by profit, algorithms, and efficiency. I'll get more into the community aspect in part 2.

#neocities #geocities #old web #webcore #internet #internet history #internet culture #textpost #90s internet #00s internet #old internet

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paleoleigh · 11 months ago

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thank you for saying you feel a bit guilty because I’ve also been feeling it and didn’t know if anyone felt the same.

realistically, I should know that some zoomer on the internet calling me a zionist racist genocide apologist does not make me one, especially since those people don’t know jackshit about me as a person. like sorry I’m not constantly posting definitive proof of my irl activism for palestine on my fandom account??

but I’m embarrassed to admit that it gets to me. it really does. getting accused of being all these monstrous things while having extremely poor self-image does not mix well. I’m very stede-coded in that way I guess. I just wish I had more faith in myself to ignore these people and remind myself that yes, I can care about multiple things at once and no, random people on the internet making absolute, final judgments about a person’s moral integrity are not the arbiters of truth

I understand 💕 it's hard not to feel guilty and upset when people are essentially saying you're a bad person. And they're real people, even if they're trolls, so it feels bad! But the fact that you sometimes feel that way means you DO care about the tougher issues.

I think something that's hard for people to understand is how much OFMD means to us in terms of representation. Not just queer rep, but rep of hope, kindness, acceptance, community, and finding yourself at any age. I'll be real for a second - I've considered myself pretty unlovable for most of my adult life. And I see myself in Stede, a weird, goofy, sometimes misguided but earnest person who feels unlovable. And seeing him be loved by basically the coolest guy on the planet so earnestly in return? I can't tell you what that means to me.

So I'm going to fight for the pirate show. Because it's more than a show to so many of us - it's a community. It's representation. It's hope. And it's not just this show we're fighting for! It's almost this wider area of pushing back against ALL terrible CEO decisions made for pure evil profit purposes. I'm pissed at capitalism and corporate greed ruining everything and it's cathartic to scream at the executives about it.

Keep doing what you're doing, and if you need to talk about it more my inbox is always open 💕💕💕

#anon #ofmd #renew as a crew #sorry for the rambling

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sourcreammachine · 5 months ago

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REFORM PARTY "MANIFESTO" 2024 SUMMARY

they say it ain't a manifesto even though it is. they're tryna pretend they're not politicians even though they are. their reasoning is that they know they won't be the next government, so this is what they'd push for as opposition members - just like in the manifestos of the greens, SNP etc. but anyway, this "contract" of theirs is scant and they're running a vibes-based campaign. you don't need to see any actual policies, no no no. you already know if they're for you or not. oh, and if you think they're for you - just like all far right parties, they ain't: they're for capital, they're for vested interests, they're for cruelty. they're for the classic quasi-accelerationist burnout cycle that'll weaken the base of society and the economy and ruin fucking everything. but hey, at least there won't be no immigrants. i'm so sorry if you see them as the future: they're taking you for a ride just as you've been used time and time again, because there is no clearly accessible political solution to improving your material conditions as current politics stand, i'm sorry - that is, within the paradigm you know - there're answers just outside the tunnel-vision you've been forced into. why not take a look sometime. who knows, you might find some hope.

i'm not shitting you, though. the manifesto is not long. go read it. see for yourself the draconian horror they advocate, and will push for these five years, and will endorse with the hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of Short Money coming their way after they get into parliament. this isn't a 2015 UKIP moment, a single-issue agenda that'll flame out. even if they fail in their 2029 campaign with no votes against the tories to count on, these ideas and their influence are here to stay for the medium-term now. even if we remove the rosethorn it'll keep bleeding and bleeding and bleeding

yeah, on account of the scantness, these policies are vague. they're much more like ideas rather than proposals. the general nonsense of them has been fact-checked time and time again so i won't bother. here's just a summary of their rambling ephemeral suggestions

💷ECONOMY

revoke benefits after four months, MANDATORY acceptance of the second job offer on pain of benefit revocation, make all eligibility capability assessments in-person, mandating medical assessments, to catastrophically reduce disability benefit entitlements

raise the personal allowance to §20k/a, cutting individual taxation by §1600/a. raise it to §25k for the married

raise the second band of income tax from about §50k to §70k cutting an ABHORRENT amount of tax from the upper-middle class, far far far far far more than the tax cuts on §20k-earners

leave the World Economic Forum, plummet corporation tax from its already international tax-haven low levels, abolish any business tax for "high-street based" small businesses to create a new class of fat cat burghers, VAT refund for businesses making under §150k/a profit no matter what it is they're flogging

revoke european trade agreements and collapse trade with the mainland

massive tax breaks for defence contractors

'frontload' the child benefit system, plunging it after the child turns four

pour money into giving tourists a full refund on VAT

surge the inheritance tax threshold to §2m BUT "allow the money to be donated to charity instead" (ie allowing massive loophole scams)

massive deregulation, including on the regulation of business and employment laws as "we must make it easier to hire and fire". the manifesto also whines about "6700 eu laws" that still stand, but whines and moves on, implying a mass unbounded deregulation of industry

🏥PUBLIC SERVICES

abolish the NHS and replace it with a private voucher system

catastrophic austerity: every government department to be removed of a 5% of its funding that it must account for itself, reducing spending across the board without central planning or oversight

catastrophic statecapture: abolish civil service leadership and replace them with politicised government appointees "from the private sector"

catastrophic hike on university entry requirements and mandate many be cut to two years

catastrophic privatisation of the remaining public healthcare with surge in outsourcing and contracting, 20% total tax relief for private healthcare

statecapture the BBC with full nationalisation

comprehensive curriculum audit to impose "patriotic education": mandate "any teaching about a period or example of british or european imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-european occurrence of the same to ensure balance", teach children about "their heritage"

public inquiry on "the harm of vaccines"

leave the WHO

end the exemption private schools from the 20% VAT. wait, wait no hang on i've got that wrong. oh right yeah, that's labour's policy, sorry. reform says to impose a 20% TAX RELIEF ON PRIVATE SCHOOLS. sorry peasants, your tax money is funding Eton now

🏠HOUSING

catastrophic tax breaks for small landlords

revoke the renters reform bill

abolish stamp duty (the tax on the buying of homes) under §750k and plummet it above that mark, allowing obscene wealth transfers, massive property buyup, catastrophic housing supply saturation, and the annihilation of first-time buying

🚄TRANSPORT ?

ban and abolish low emission zones

ban and abolish low traffic neighbourhoods

ban and abolish all 20mph zones except outside schools

lower petrol tax

👮FORCE

abolish the human rights act

abolish the equality act

leave the european convention on human rights

freeze "non-essential immigration", and they do not elaborate what they mean or what the policy definition is to be. so they're just gonna be rambling about ephemera to kingdom come. that's the game they're playing

10% HEAD TAX ON IMMIGRANTS via additional national insurance charge

REVOCATION OF CITIZENSHIP FROM IMMIGRANT UK CITIZENS COMMITTED OF CRIMES, without specifying whether or not this applies only to dual-citizens, meaning reform supports the mass imposition of STATELESS status, A GRAVE AND ABHORRENT CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

invade france. i'm being serious. they'd intercept and arrest small-boat crossers and 'take them back to france', violating french territorial sovereignty on both land and sea via the use of force, gravely violating international law against our neighbour

FORTY THOUSAND new police in five years, around 25% more, massively prioritise pipelining ex-military officers and enlistees into the police, abolish PCSOs and make them regular broken-windows police

labour camps for young offenders

create a US-style coast guard and begin routine patrols for migrants or foreign fishers

surge armed forces funding by the highest amount proposed by any party

"stop Sharia law being used in the UK", ie draconian monitoring of mosques, muslim community organisations, the palestine movement, and any muslim

absolute prohibition on asylum applications from "safe countries", sentencing desperate seekers to political persecution and death by mere categorical definition

increase stop-and-search powers, mandates and centrality in policing tactics, pursue broken windows policing,

MANDATORY MINIMUM OF LIFE for second violent/serious offences or ANY drug dealing, new offence for 'substantial possession of drugs'

catastrophically demolish the legalised definition of hatecrime to de facto prevent its use for any prosecution

mass prison building, convert disused military bases into prison camps

bad internet bill: massive inquiry into 'child social media use' (under their watch requiring catastrophic restrictions), renew the online safety bill as "social media giants that push baseless transgender ideology and divisive critical race theory should have no role in regulating free speech"

abolish the northern ireland framework, seemingly unilaterally, paving the way for a hard border and blowing the starting whistle on The Troubles 2

speaking of which: exempt the armed forces from human rights law

catastrophically plummet the number of student visas and prohibit international students with dependents

end funding for european defence programmes. sorry estonia looks like you're lost. oh also "the west provoked putin" so there's that

require the licensing of foreign trawlers in the eez, beginning a cold war with iceland

halve international development / foreign aid funding from its already tiny budget, with specific mention of "global quangos" (literally how many centuries has it been and antisemitism is STILL invoked by these pillocks)

🌱ECOCIDE

repeal every penny of green investment

abolish all emissions targets including for all public services

abolish all renewable energy subsidies

mandate the use of fertile land for farming, ban natural england from protecting 'farmland' land, end and ban all rewinding programmes

abolish environmental levies

catastrophic surge on oil/gas licensing and open new lithium and coal mines, and support biomass/biofuel

🗳️DEMOCRACY ?

begin trumpist restriction on the ability to vote

abolish all postal voting apart from the elderly and disabled

keep voter ID

"legislate to stop left-wing bias and politically correct ideology"

proportional commons and elected senate

🏳️‍⚧️REACTIONARY AGENDA not otherwise covered

for all transgender schoolchildren who have not been permitted a gender recognition certificate: prohibit the use of correct pronouns by any teacher, prohibit the recognition of social transitioning by any teacher, and require mandatory outing to their parents

ban all unisex toilets

"cut funding to universities that undermine free speech", with no clarification, meaning they get to bully anyone they chose

abolish the public health observatory on racial health disparities

look, yeah. the manifesto is short, their purview is open. the door is not shut. everything is on the table. their one, two, three or more MPs are going to be using your tax money to advocate anything and anything that harms migrants, queer and trans people. nonwhite citizens and any annoying political movement can and will be fair game for total attack and political annihilation. wherever the transphobic tornado goes next they will join in. it is going to be a dangerous time for us. they are going to push for absolutely anything they can to harm trans people. your country. your money. your responsibility to fight them. that is what democracy is

#196 #amy724 #uk politics #ukpol

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alarrytale · 6 months ago

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Sony Music and Sony Entertainment are owned by the same corporation and it would reflect badly on all of it. I’m not saying that there’s no shitty business practices, or even that they’ve done unethical things, but the things that are being claimed Sony Music has done to Larry I don’t see how Louis and Harry could not easily sue over that. I’m no lawyer so I can’t fully but it is doubtful to me they can’t sue for say, being forcibly closeted or trying to pressure Louis into signing a birth certificate, etc. Coercing someone into doing these things is one thing and a whole other conversation, but doubtful to me they’re legally bound to do them.

Hi, anon!

I don't think i agree. I don't think people will stop going to a Sony produced movie, not buy PS5 or buy a Sony TV because Sony Music Entertainment forcibly closeted Harry Styles. They're all separate companies with the same owner, Sony. It's not like Sony is putting extra pressure on Harry if they don't sell enough TVs.

I've said many times before why H and L can't sue. They willingly signed a contract that states that Sony can do whatever it takes to make them big and earn them money. Sony own the names, likenesses, voices and personal histories of the 1D guys and everything they do while under a Sony contract, forever. Sony can use that material however they want, even if it's false, embarrassing or damaging. This is not illegal, as long as the guys signed it knowingly and willingly, and as long as Sony does it with the intention of furthering their careers and make them money. Sony's first right of refusal clause in all their recording contracts makes it so that Sony won't let anyone leave if they can match the offer from another label. They will never let Harry leave as long as they can control him like they already do and as long as he's profitable.

So if Sony says, Harry we're going to give you a womaniser image to make it look like you have sex appeal and make you attractive to women, and at the same time make people think you're straight, because out gay men don't appeal to het women who wants to marry you, Harry can't do shit about it. If they say, Harry you have to pretend to date CF to make you look like a womaniser and to create buzz for txf (she's under the same contract ans probably had little choice herself). People will watch the show if there is a scandalous relationship between you and CF, there is nothing he can do to say no. If he refuses he's in breach of contract, that he willingly signed, and will probably be banned from the music industry forever. Sony is powerful enough to do that. If he refuses they can ruin his image more. More damaging stories in the press. All press is good press. As long as it gives them attention and make people aware there's an album out, they can drag his name through the mud along with all of his family and friends.

If Sony says Louis, we will create a baby scandal around you to get attention on our new 1D album, make you look straight and make it look like you're not in a relationship with Harry, there is nothing L can do. Both L and H can try to bargain and trade off and say, no i'd rather fake date that person or do that instead, and Sony can say yes or no. Sony can also say, if you refuse to do this or that Louis we'll make Harry get engaged. Louis might then say, alright i'll do the baby scandal. Sony might later say, oh btw. Now that it's out that you're going to be a father, we've actually signed with that family and a baby is being born that you'll have to pretend is yours. And Louis will be shocked and in disbelief. It's already out that he's going to be a father, but he probably thought it would all end with a DNA test when the kid was born. Pretty sure he didn’t think he signed up for 10 years of playing a fake dad back in 2015, and how damaging that would end up being for his own solo career.

As long as Sony can prove that H and L signed these contracts willingly and that it's the best course of action to advance their careers and make them money, H and L won't have a case. It's not about right or wrong, it's about what's legally allowed or not. It's a corporation and Sony is treating H and L like corporations. They're a brand that needs to be protected. They've invested in said brand and expect returns on their investment. Using their control over their images, they indirectly control their closets and their public lives.

H and L (and the rest of the 1D guys) are legally bound to this contact saying Sony can do whatever they want. They signed it. Sony has played their cards so well that H and L are backed into a corner. Even if L isn't with Sony anymore, he isn't free of the consequences of what Sony made him do. He isn't getting radio play, he's still saddled with a fake baby and his boyfriend is still under Sony. I honestly think all of 1D are still under Sony, since they're on hiatus and not disbanded. I think Sony still controls their images, either directly under the 1D contract or indirectly though the image clause.

It's fine if you believe this isn't possible, but i think you are too unimaginative about how Sony can go about making this all happen and resulting in what we're witnessing today. I also think you are too hung up about things being illegal or legal, instead of looking at it as Sony having certain powers within the contract and them forcing H and L's hands by backing them up into a corner. If you think Sony is powerful, multiply it with ten.

#contracts #boyband politics #babygate for ts #harry image #louis image #stunting #sony

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priestly-prince · 8 months ago

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I really, really hate how companies and corporations have ruined the internet.

Social media used to be fun. There used to be communities, friend groups. It used to be SOCIAL. It used to feel like hanging out. There used to be tight knit groups that would hang around, play games, share each others posts, support each other.

Then the corporations came along. "Oh, you can't post this here so we'll flag your posts. Oh, we don't like people like you so we'll delete your blog. Oh, your content wont make us money, so we'll push your posts off the algorithm. Oh, you're "too woke" so we'll shadowban you." If it's not profitable, it doesn't matter to them. It didn't matter that you were a community, it didn't matter that you had a friend group. It all gets trampled in the machine.

So communities broke up as some members fled to other sites. Friends lost touch because platforms such as AIM, MSN, Skype and so on simply died off. People fled and friends didn't follow, or some simply disappeared altogether. Communities were destroyed.

I've been through it so many times and I'm tired. I've gone through so many of these events, lost so many people I cared about, been abandoned by friends I miss dearly. Only a handful of people have stuck around, and while I'm glad they did, it just feels like floating in limbo these days. There's nowhere to go anymore because everything is broken, and when there ARE places you can go people wont follow. Because they're tired, tired of these places dying over and over again.

So I guess we're all just treading water until we drown.

#tumblr #hellsite #internet #social media #lonely #tired #boop

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super-hero-confessions · 1 year ago

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I think what bothers me the most of what's become of the MCU is that the media actually used to get one thing right in spirit from the source material, and that was in touching on important topics dealing with real world events as a form of protest.

The first Iron Man film dealt directly with showing us war profiteering. That bar wasn't even that high.

Compare with Age of Ultron, which has a *deleted* scene showing us Steve Rogers tossing his helmet just before saving people on Sokovia, because he sees a mural of himself with the label "fascist" on it.

That brief scene had so much significance in representing what kind of person Cap was. And they removed it.

As soon as Disney touched it, all meaning that could have been was slowly, carefully siphoned out, stripped and replaced with vapid Disney approved lack of messaging or corporate messaging. And it's only gotten so much worse.

All of the characters get Disneywashed in some way, white feminism is rampant, fandom toxicity is rewarded, hell Steve Rogers did a full 180 on everything he's supposed to stand for and abandoned everyone he loved. And things may be "connected" but they're not even remotely *consistent*.

Messed up things happen or are portrayed as good or justifiable right under the noses of a wide audience, and it gets eaten up without a second thought.

I am so tired. Of the empty cash grab.

I get a company wanting to make money. I don't get sacrificing every possible moral principle, in or out of the fictional universes, which had the meaningful groundwork laid out before them, to do it.

Gee thanks Disney, and also fuck you for supporting Ron DeSatan's campaigns so you can make empty promises of queer baiting, peddle white feminism, break the backs of every creative you can get your grubby mitts on, and get billions in tax breaks while Floridians have to pick up your slack with money we don't have, and ruin one of the few things I had to look forward to in my life and robbing it of all the things that were good about it to begin with.

You and the die hards that refuse to see reality are truly the worst thing that has ever happened to Marvel.

#confession #rant #marvel

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coveredinmetaldust · 4 months ago

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You ever notice how there seems to be a rather large overlap between the crowd that evangelizes "AI", and the crowd of corporate bootlickers who will wag their finger at you and go "a company has to protect its IP!" whenever a multi-billion dollar corporation responds to a perceived copyright infringement with a grossly disproportionate level of duress?

There is just a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, naked hypocrisy, and performative hand-wringing that seems to be part and parcel for the vocal group of core believers of this technology on places like Reddit and Twitter.

These people will shout "It's the law! Don't do the crime if you can't do the time!" but then immediately turn around and berate any artist who makes the mistake of suggesting that these laws should apply to everyone.

This particular phylum of AI cheerleader loves to tell artists to "get a real job", while at the same time shaming them for having the audacity to charge money for their labor. Because in their mind, everything artists create and post on the internet should be free and is "fair game", but anything corporations post is protected within our current legal framework.

They see no problem with the fact that corporations are using petabytes of artwork for profit with impunity, yet the moment you use even 1 microsecond of a piece of media these same corporations own in a video that you post online, their copyright bots will hunt it down and expunge it--or a legal team will send you a DMCA takedown and potentially nuke your account.

They will be more than happy to lecture you about how capitalism is the best system ever, and explain in great detail all of its benefits and how it works--but the moment an artist finds monetary success by engaging with that system, suddenly that's not ok. No, when artists engage in capitalism they aren't "contributing" anything to society based on an arbitrary framework that only applies to artists.

Yet, many of these same people will worship the ground that businessmen like Jack Welsh and billionaires like Elon Musk walk on, because they figured out how to make an ungodly amount of money by exploiting this system--even though they did this in ways that make everyone's lives objectively worse. No, for some reason it's immoral to charge money for your art, but it's both morally sound and smart to leverage our legal system to shake people down, parasitically suck the life out of small and large businesses alike, treat wall street like a casino, tank the economy, and then cry to your government sugardaddy to bail you out when your gambling debts come due. (All so you can do it again.)

Ok, so maybe artists just need to be more proactive and protect their work so this doesn't happen. Well, apparently that's not ok either! Because when artists tried fighting fire with fire by employing Nightshade, the conversation suddenly shifted to how artists are immoral for "creating malware."

I'm sure most of you probably know about Nightshade at this point--but for those unaware, you can kinda think of it as a filter that artists can apply to images before they post them online. To vastly oversimplify what this accomplishes: when an image that has the Nightshade "filter" is scraped by someone and fed into their generative AI program, this image will ruin the dataset that the program spits out.

What's important to know is that this does not affect the host computer in any way, shape, or form beyond a non-essential, third-party program, that the user willingly installed on their system and fed data they gathered from the internet into, outputting a file that the user finds sub-optimal compared to what is normally generated. If the nightshaded image is omitted from the training data, there is no ill effect on the model or host computer--regardless of whether or not the nightshade affected image exists on the internet or somewhere in their hard drive.

How effective this process actually is in the real world has been debated, with many in the AI scene boasting that it's completely ineffectual--but that doesn't matter as far as the narrative is concerned. Many have chosen to interpret this act as artists "creating malware", because the Nightshade'd image that the AI practitioner willingly scraped and fed into a program negatively affected a function on their computer--which is about the same logic as robbing a bank, then getting mad that the bank ruined your clothing because a dye-pack hidden within the bundle of cash you stole exploded and got blue dye everywhere. (Or maybe a more accurate analogy would be posting an AMV you spent a long time editing together to YouTube only to have it immediately deleted by a copyright bot because it's sadly not 2006 anymore. idk.)

Regardless, I find this hilarious coming from a crowd that usually has such a massive hard-on for "personal responsibility." I mean, these are the kinds of people who would see a topic on Reddit where someone is complaining that got injured because a burrito they bought was filled with caltrops, and their immediate reaction would be to reply with something like "this is your own fault, everyone knows you're supposed to eat around the jagged shards of metal."

But no. Instead the lengths some of these people have gone to twist themselves into knots to demonize nightshade could only be viewed as satire in a sane world. But we live in the hell world, so I cannot tell you how many of these losers I've seen unironically clutch at pearls while wailing "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?" because there is a chance their AI model could get corrupted after they scraped 1tb of porn from Deviantart without checking what they actually fed into their system.

Or worse: they will turn the onus back on the artist and say they are the one causing environmental damage--because the person stealing their art now has to remake their model and expend electricity.

Well, more electricity than they are already consuming on AI models. Which, by their own admission, is enough to make their energy bills skyrocket.

This is is like Dupont saying "All of you people protesting in front of our factory ruined productivity for today. You actually caused more environmental damage than us, because we had our machines running all day but no one was able to work. The world is more polluted now because you don't want us to further damage the environment. We may dump literal tons of chemicals into the water supply on an hourly basis, but the markers you used to make those signs you're holding were created using technology that pollutes as well--so I guess that makes you all huge hypocrites hmmmmm?."

But wait, it gets worse! If you read the two screenshot directly above carefully, you may have noticed that some of these people go so far as to believe that they are entitled to everything you create, and anything short of your full consent is tantamount to stealing THEIR property.

Because that's really what this is all about: when you strip away all their moralizing and semantics, you're left with people who view artists as nothing more than an annoying barrier between what they think should rightfully belong to them.

I'm just going to say the quiet part out loud:

These people absolutely fucking hate that there are people out there who are good at art. They are mad that there are people who put the time and effort into improving a skill-set, and got good at it as a result. That's not me putting words in their mouths, they have explicitly said as much time and time again--to the point where it has become a core part of their belief system and mythology.

(This wasn't directed at me, but I know their theory is bullshit because I do know how to weld, and I can't draw for shit. Also, knowing how to weld has never stopped me from being insufferable on the internet.)

They try to make themselves the victims by setting up this narrative that artists have a "monopoly on creativity." They make a big deal about how unfair it is that someone can be technically competent at formal compositions through years of hard work. (Which, is funny, because some of these same people were railing against Le SJWs for being so-called "Professional Victims" in the mid to late 2010s.)

It's not hard to understand why they need to dress this up like it is some kind of righteous crusade that flattens an oppressive hierarchy, because their objective reality is a lot more pathetic.

They know this, so they will gleefully tell artists they can't wait for AI-art to "replace" them in however many years. They will smugly tell artists, right to their face, that nothing they have ever created has any value--all while feeding that artist's work into an engine so they can copy their style.

They will spew all kinds of inflammatory, hateful bile like this at creatives, spit in their face by scraping their work after explicitly being asked not to, and then have the fucking nerve to act like they have the moral high-ground when there is any pushback from artists.

Because to them, creatives are just malcontents who don't know their place.

Many of these people like to present themselves as an austere nonpartisan with a rigid code of ethics; someone who will solve problems through objective logic and rational debate. But when you look past their attempts at self-mythologizing it becomes very clear that these people don't want to have a "civil debate"--they want to maintain a farcical moral high-ground while they stab you in the throat and then twist the knife. (Then complain about how you got blood all over their nice shirt.)

Now, I'm fluent in both "pretentious art-speak" as well as "toxic terminally online forum user", so let me speak to these AI art bros directly in a language they will understand:

This is copium so potent that it's considered a controlled substance in most states. How about you fucking casuals try getting gud instead of getting buttmad and running to social media so you can bawww about needing an easy-mode?

FFS this isn't complicated, but you drooling idiots will just sit there and stare at your monitors with the wide-eyed bewilderment of a dog that just saw a magic trick any time someone suggests you pick up a pencil.

Don't worry though, I hear Kotaku is hiring. You should ask ChatGPT to write you a resume and email it to them, because you suck at art just about as much as their writers suck at video games.

Now go back to your subreddit hugbox and circlejerk about how logical and civil you are compared to those mean artists who hurt your feelings. I'm sure all those heckin updooterinos and wholesome affirmations will make you feel like you didn't just waste thousands of dollars on a new computer for the express purpose of generating anime waifus who look like they tried to high-five a disc sander.

tl;dr:

#Go ahead and post this on reddit #i'll be watching #ai art #ai #ai generated #ai bros #nightshade #reddit #twitter

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shadowmaat · 3 months ago

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Whizzers of the Coast

It would be so very damn nice if WOTC and their puppet master, Mattel, actually started listening to their underlings, the feedback they've been getting, and the D&D fanbase in general. I'd love it if they stopped trying to change and streamline everything in order to maximize profit for shareholders and actually worked to keep the game fun and inclusive for everyone.

That's never going to happen, of course, because CEOs have wads of money where their hearts and brains should be, but it's a nice thought.

Another good pipe dream would be for the whole Wizards empire to crash and burn. Instead of the tedious cycle of announcing something massively unpopular, getting nuked from orbit, and then reluctantly backtracking as little as they can, let them burn. Let them hemorrhage money on such a catastrophic level that even the shareholders feel the pain. Let WOTC become an even bigger money-losing embarrassment than tumblr. LOL! Make Mattel regret the day it ever bought the property. Make it a public spectacle of humiliation. Have the pundits howling (with rage and/or laughter) and asking how anyone could possibly fuck up something like this so badly? Damage their profits and their public image. People who've never even heard of Gary Gygax or Dungeons & Dragons will be forced to hear about it because ye gods, how could a megacorp as powerful as Mattel be so far removed from reality that they could ruin an empire practically overnight?

Either make it so Mattel is forced to sell it off at a significant loss, or have them chop off the infected limb and pretend it isn't theirs anymore. Either way the worst predations will (hopefully) stop. And D&D will live on. Even if there isn't any new "official" content, the core systems will still be there and the possibilities with homebrew are endless.

D&D has been around longer than the modern internet. There are physical books that no one can take away from players. There are scans of those books uploaded for others. There's a wealth of resources available that no corporation, no matter how money-greedy, can erase. We'll get along just fine without WOTC attempting to piss all over our fun. And Mattel can suck a sewer pump.

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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In a move that surely made the Succession theme play in the heads of all who got the push notification, Rupert Murdoch announced today that the “time is right” for him to step down as chair of Fox Corporation and News Corp, ending his seven-decade reign as mastermind of the media landscape. His retirement won’t begin until November, but the great unbundling of his media empire has already begun.

Still, what an empire it is, or was. Murdoch, 92, got his start at 21 years old, when his father died and left him in charge of his relatively small Australian newspaper company. On taking the helm, he upped circulation by shifting their coverage to be more tabloidy. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s he continued to build that portfolio, gobbling up everything from The Sun in the UK to The Village Voice and New York magazine in the US.

By the 1980s, Murdoch was casting his gaze toward film and TV, taking over regional news stations and the movie studio 20th Century Fox. The Fox broadcast network launched in 1986, Fox News a decade later. By the early aughts, Murdoch set his sights on new media, writing a Scrooge McDuck–sized $580 million check to then-superhot social network Myspace.

Soon, a spark lit a fuse that set the whole dumpster on fire.

It’s an easy shorthand to say “Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp ruined discourse,” but that’s also not far from the truth. (The notion of “truth” is also something Murdoch’s empire has had a hand in destabilizing.) News Corp ownership effectively ruined Myspace, making way for platforms like Facebook and Twitter to host the public square, but the influence of Murdoch and his companies spread regardless. As WIRED reporters Vittoria Elliott and Peter Guest noted earlier this year, Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson “helped bring often dangerous misinformation into the mainstream around the world.” Murdoch may have never controlled Facebook or Twitter, but the people his companies platformed dominated the conversation on them anyway.

“For Rupert Murdoch, all of his media empire was a way of trying to push certain ideas,” says Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.

In the US, this was most evident in the way Fox News wed itself with the Trump administration, a marriage that was for a long time beneficial to both parties but also led to Fox News agreeing to pay $787 million to settle a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems that “would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election,” as the Associated Press put it. It also led to revelations that Carlson, in the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection, sent texts saying that he hated Trump “passionately.” Carlson was canned by Fox News in April.

Murdoch newspapers in the UK backed Brexit and got caught up in a phone hacking scandal. In Australia, where his family’s news empire still holds massive influence, Murdoch periodicals showed skepticism about climate change. Today, as news spread that Murdoch was stepping down, Angelo Carusone, the CEO of watchdog group Media Matters for America, issued a statement saying, “The world is worse off because of Rupert Murdoch. No one should sugarcoat the damage he caused.”

Still, the empire Murdoch built, though vast, is dwindling. Murdoch pushed out Roger Ailes, the man behind the ascent of Fox News, in 2016. (Ailes died a year later.) News Corp sold off 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019 for $71.3 billion. (Fox News and the Fox broadcast network were spun off into Fox Corporation as a result of the deal.) As of this summer, News Corp profits are down 75 percent year over year. As the media industry goes through a series of massive shake-ups ranging from the Warner Bros. and Discovery merger to the increasing dominance of Apple and Amazon, everything is getting unbundled and rebundled, including Murdoch’s empire.

Not that Murdoch hasn’t tried to have a hand in how those bundles come together. Murdoch abandoned a plan earlier this year to consolidate Fox Corporation and News Corp, a move he said could give the entertainment and publishing business better scale, after shareholders opposed it. “Fox is certainly diminished,” Carusone says. “I don’t think they’re going to be able to keep this big thing together.”

When Murdoch steps down in the fall, his son, Lachlan, will become chair of News Corp and remain Fox Corporation’s CEO and executive chair. (Cue the “eldest boy” memes.) It remains to be seen where Lachlan will take the empire from here or whether he’ll be able to maintain the same hold on political messaging as his father. Following the transition, Rupert Murdoch plans to stay on as chair emeritus of the companies, and in a message to his staff today said that in his new role he would still “be involved every day in the contest of ideas.” Perhaps, though, with his empire shrinking, that contest will no longer be an all-out war.

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dotthings · 2 years ago

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While I really, no really, do not care about the CW Network's goings on any further, the misguided takes still going on at the most popular CW Network stan account on twitter are just too much. I can't.

I find it so hard to relate to stanning a corporation and a platform this hard. I'm with the fans who are fans of the shows, and hurt because of losing the shows, that part I relate to, but I don't relate to this stanning of CW as an entity. I'm a fandom old and have been through 3 CEO's at the CW. I watched shows on UPN and The WB. I remember when The CW was formed. There is no era of The CW that hasn't made me feel like this was a dumpster fire of a platform, to greater or lesser degrees. When The CW was formed it wiped out a bunch of Black-led series on UPN. The CW was the evil network that people now think CW Nexstar is.

There was a brief period where I rethought my perceptions of it--at the height of the Arrowverse, back when Arrow was on the rise and spun off into The Flash and it was a very exciting time to me as a DC fan to have that. But it was short-lived and I quit the Arrowverse only a few seasons later.

There are good creatives who have done good work at The CW and I appreciate them, I also appreciate the more recent gen of shows that did seem to be course correcting on some systemic things that drove me nuts about many of the shows on The CW previously.

The evangelizing of Mark Pedowitz. Let's start there.

Mark Pedowitz, who showed he had no interest in SPN whatsoever beyond "maybe the franchise is only J2" and "we'll keep making more so long as the boys want to keep going" and that's all he ever had to say about it. He cared only for the draw of #1 and #2 on the call sheet, he never showed any sign he actually cared about the story, and he was immensely disrespectful about the show.

Pedowitz who said maybe SPN doesn't have any characters worthy of a spinoff.

Pedowitz playing to the very J2-only stanning toxics who are currently attacking Jensen Ackles and The Winchesters.

Pedowitz, who dissed Wayward Sisters. And no matter if that decision was actually over his head and out of his hands (it actually had to do with the CBS half of CW), there's no reason for that kind of tactless PR statement. "Not where we want it be creatively."

I find it hard to forgive all that, to this day. So excuse me if I'm not on board the Saint Pedowitz train.

Now, let's talk about this idealization that says that "they destroyed the network," they being Nexstar.

Oh I'm sorry. Excuse me, come again, WHO destroyed the network?

Who was it that operated it in the red?

Who was it that left such a mess where it was bleeding money and got to the point where The CW's owners, WB and CBS, realized that their loss leading, practically a tax shelter, actually never profitable, and making its money from streaming not linear, pseudo network, was no longer worth it and DECIDED TO SELL IT OFF.

To Nexstar. Who clearly love a challenge. Because they bought that mess and are trying to make it profitable, for reals, as a linear broadcast tv network that doesn't need to rely on a massive Netflix streaming deal just to pay the electricity bills. While overspending, over-renewing everything, and not giving a darn how deep in the hole it was making the platform.

And all of that. That era. Has fallen on the creatives and the shows and harmed the shows.

This is the consequences of that era.

This is The CW paying the piper. Oh, Nexstar ruined it? Are you SERIOUS RIGHT NOW??

And try for once, sorting ratings BY DEMO WHICH MATTERS MORE THAN TOTAL VIEWERS. Yeesh.

Paying attention to readily available, public articles of industry commentary is a good idea.

Less time uwu-ing over a corporation that screwed its own shows over for years and left an inherited mess behind for the new owners who then, from a business perspective, had no choice but to burn it all down and basically remake it from scratch. Causing a lot of hurt in the process.

CW Nexstar does not care about The CW's legacy or the shows people loved there from the past. They Need To Make a Profit.

The shows wouldn't have had to be treated like this if The CW, originally, had been managed in a way to make it sustainable.

And that is on everyone not just the previous CEO. That's on WB/CBS who really didn't care so long as they got their streaming revenue. The CW was their neglected child. Something they threw together to make a profit off streaming, and off exploiting the viral fanbases that platform generated.

THE CW WAS NEVER PROFITABLE AS A LINEAR BROADCAST TV NETWORK

THE ONLY REASON IT SUSTAINED AS LONG AS IT DID WAS THE NETFLIX DEAL

WHEN THE NETFLIX DEAL COLLAPSED IT WAS OVER.

The corporation does not love you. The corporation never loved you. The CW was not destroyed by Nexstar. I'm not interested in uwu CW Nexstar, either. CW Nexstar has made it clear that they are ditching genre entirely. Oh, they might keep ONE dc series, as a treat. They don't care about that legacied genre audience from old CW.

CW Nexstar is not evil for having sports. Read the industry news for once I beg of you instead of just spouting off about how evil it is for a platform to have sports. Max is getting into sports. Amazon Prime does sports. Apple TV+ experimented with live coverage of baseball games. Get this through your skulls please.

It pains my brain to see twitter accounts perpetuating the misinformation and stans lining up to unquestioningly absorb it. I don't care about CW, I do follow media news closely, I do know some things about media myself, and what I care about is misconceptions and misperceptions.

I really think it matters, especially now, for fans to use critical thinking and read more media commentary and learn about what's going on in the industry. It's going to be hard on the stories we love for a while. I support the creatives. I don't care about your uwu big corporation that you stuck on a pedestal and insist on repeating misinformation about.

#tv ratings #media

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