10 ms·
One real danger of putting all historical video media on streaming sites is that it makes it far too easy to introduce an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that is em
by photochemsyn 4y ago
One real danger of putting all historical video media on streaming sites is that it makes it far too easy to introduce an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that is empowered to rewrite the past to make it conform to today's acceptable social norms, academic ideologies, government agendas and so on.
For example, one could make the argument that Alfred Hitchcock's entire library promotes negative stereotypes of women - and it's true, women in Hitchcock films are not the strong types, they're more often helpless victims who have to be rescued by male characters. This clearly, one could say, promotes negative female stereotypes which are damaging to young women so all those movies should be removed from streaming services.
One could continue in this manner, selectively pulling anime movies because they promote excessive violence and sexuality to a teenage audience, or war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr Strangelove that portray military generals as clueless maniacs, or if the pendulum swings back to the social conservative end, pulling all horror movies that don't portray Christianity in a positive light or have too many Satanic themes, and on and on.
Keeping hard copies in your personal possession is one way around this, but since the copyrights and hence distribution rights are held by these conglomerates that don't want to get in trouble with some political group or other by making them available, nobody else can view them without going through pirate sites - a very unfortunate situation.
- iambateman 4y agoThis is like keeping a shotgun in your house to protect against the government. If the government is ready to conduct systematic disinformation campaigns, your DVD’s probably won’t help.
- 15155 4y agoHow did Vietnam and Afghanistan fare against "the government?"
- garbagecoder 4y agoBetter than the Confederacy my cherry picking cliche replyguy.
- harvey9 4y agoCan someone clarify this chain for me? Keeping a gun to defend your home against the government is probably futile because the government always has more weapons and more fighters than you. The other three cases were all wars - an apples to oranges comparison.
- maxwell 4y agoYou think members of the U.S. military would side with the government and execute orders against American citizens on American soil?
- lrvick 4y agoThey are trained to do anything they are told. Anything. Remember the Chinese military had no problem mowing down protestors if their bosses give the order. That said, it is easier and safer to defend yourself from a government in modern society with information and free uncensored communication than with guns.
- garbagecoder 4y ago>They are trained to do anything they are told. Anything. Yeah, you've never been in the military and appear to have a knowledge based on memes of it. Read the officer's oath and see what we're trained to do.
- maxwell 4y agoWhat sources are you citing here? You seem to be completely off-base. No, in the United States, the military and all federal employees explicitly swear an oath to the Constitution, and are forbidden from executing illegal orders, regardless of the chain of command. Yeah, PLA goons in Communist China certainly do things differently. In the United States, the people are the government. Where are you?
- lrvick 4y ago
- jimbob45 4y agohttps://medium.com/everything-80s/why-are-streaming-services-editing-our-favorite-movies-6a03efc32168 https://medium.com/everything-80s/why-are-streaming-services... They already do this frequently. 4chan has been tracking it for ages now.
- snickerbockers 4y agoNetflix actually removed a segment from an early 90s bill Nye episode because it said there are two genders.
- neuronic 4y agoThis seems weird. No one disagrees that there are 2 biological (genetic) genders. Gender identity is something entirely else that is being actively researched. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6677266/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6677266/
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago[flagged]
- chownie 4y agoThis is a pretty disingenuous take isn't it? Dylan Mulvaney carries tampons as a service to others who might need them because she was once asked for one in a bathroom.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y agoNo, because while Dylan sometimes says that, the rest of the time they talk about the miraculous changes to their body, etc, and participate in female sexual health panels. They're trying to have it both ways as convenient. If you feel that this is incorrect, go to Wiki and try to edit Rachel Levine's entry to remove the word female and you can personally see how the community views this.
- eggy 4y agoSort of like the anniversary edition of ET where Spielberg replaced the guns with walkie talkies, and other digital edits. Ironically he was criticized for too much smoking in the West Side Story remake. And sometimes a film I want is nowhere to be found, even a mainstream, older hit. I keep a few boxes of DVDs to make sure I can show them to the people stuck in the Matrix in the future!
- 56friends 4y agoThis fact always reminds me of that funny video cut of Stallone where his machine gun is edited out so it looks like he is thumbs up-ing relentlessly.
- cgh 4y agoThe lack of smoking is something to ponder. It's always so glaring to me when TV shows that take place in the '80s and '90s show almost no one smoking, when in fact if you went into any public place, probably 30-50% (or more, if it's eg a pub) would be smoking, including in people's homes, offices and so forth. I wonder if the huge and realistic amounts of smoking seen in shows like Mad Men will be edited out one day.
- eggy 4y agoI grew up when there was a smoking section on the plane (BTW, why do modern aircraft still have ashtrays? Are there any airlines that allow smoking?). I miss All in the Family. Is it even available anymore?
- 542458 4y agoThe ashtray is actually mandatory even in new planes per FAA rules. Modern aircraft still have ashtrays in the washrooms because they’d much prefer that somebody choosing to sneak a smoke puts their cigarette somewhere other than the washroom trash bin where there’s a history of them starting fires.
- eggy 4y ago
- js8 4y agoYou don't have public libraries in the U.S.? In my country, it's government-mandated job of public libraries to collect historical media.
- xeromal 4y agoWe do have that. It's the library of congress that ensures the safety of culturally important media in the US. And of course we have public libraries with all kinds of good media. I don't think the comment your replying to is even talking about public libraries. I believe they're saying if society determines a person is cancelled and it's on a streaming service, it can instantly disappear from most streaming media.
- wyre 4y agoI don’t think it’s about individuals getting canceled. It’s about how the streaming service has carte blanche power to decide the material on the service, regardless of what society wants.
- js8 4y agoMy point was this. Maybe they have that carte blanche power. Isn't a good public library system (where the work is also accessible) a good enough counterweight to that power?
- lrvick 4y agoAn original streaming-only movie or tv show will never be on a DVD at a library. I would say it is almost an -service- to society to continue to torrent content that has been edited or purged by major platforms.
- franga2000 4y agoThis is something that could and should be fixed with legislation
- 4y ago
- zdw 4y agoThere are already incidences of this: The TV show Community is missing an episode on Netflix for some reason (edit: reason was Ken Jeong in what could be interpreted as blackface). The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some - that episode also has the unrelated and hilarious plot where Roy and Moss convince Jen that they're loaning her a "black box that holds the entire internet".
- legitster 4y agoA couple of episodes of 30 Rock as well.
- Klonoar 4y agoDoesn’t Always Sunny have this issue as well?
- nickthegreek 4y agoI think about 4 or 5 episodes.
- oliveshell 4y agoYes [1], mostly the episodes that involve Kaitlin Olson's character, Dee Reynolds, who aspires to a career in comedy, herself inventing and portraying racially insensitive characters within the story of the show. I'm not the type to rail against such things generally, but IMO it was unnecessary and misguided to remove these episodes: their humor came deliberately from how oblivious Dee was to the offensiveness of her act. Indeed, her portrayals are usually immediately and explicitly critiqued by her fellow characters as being racist and insane. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IASIP/comments/hflb6t/list_of_its_always_sunny_episodes_removed_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IASIP/comments/hflb6t/list_of_its_a...
- legitster 4y agoThis is somehow the most mindnumbing. It's a show about terrible people doing terrible things. Like, they can only display certain, acceptable, forms of terribleness?
- mgarfias 4y agoWhat George Lucas did to Star Wars over the years is all the lesson I need about Orwellian changes to the past being possible (and likely)
- naveen99 4y agoMaybe limit the actual truth to the top 1-5% , and leave the masses to the sanitized version of history… which is basically the status quo in the west with mainstream media / Hollywood, and CCP in the east with China.
- RajT88 4y agoA related, but different phenomena: Streaming episodes have been edited to inject product placement. I read an article a while back about how old Friends episodes have movie posters in the background of films which were released after 2010.
- czx4f4bd 4y agoI would be interested to see that article. I tried googling for it but could only find some articles about censorship on Chinese streaming sites and Netflix missing some scenes from the DVD release due to issues with the master copies.
- deadbunny 4y ago[citation needed] Can't find any evidence of this at all.
- RajT88 4y agoIt was probably 10ish years ago I read about it. Most likely on BoingBoing. Will see if I can find it. Indeed it is not easily dug up. There are many ads about the coming trend of "Virtual Product Placement" but none that I can find which acknowledge the early attempts at it which I read about way back.
- RajT88 4y agoNot the article I was looking for, but this talks about a company doing this exact thing as a service for media companies: https://www.outsourcemarketing.com/blog/help-product-placements-threw-up-on-my-reruns/ https://www.outsourcemarketing.com/blog/help-product-placeme...
- shuntress 4y agoIt's more nuanced than you are presenting here. The obvious middle ground is the use of "Poison Cabinets" where certain works are deliberately and explicitly separated from their contemporaries with obvious labels explaining that they express ideas or opinions known now to be harmful. This way they are not lost or erased but also not treated as if they are perfectly normal and acceptable. For another thing, there is also at least some element here of the right to be forgotten. It's obviously different for groups vs individuals but our systems should allow some amount of agency to people who regret things they have produced in the past and wish for them to be forgotten.
- still_grokking 4y ago> One real danger of putting all historical video media on streaming sites is that it makes it far too easy to introduce an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that is empowered to rewrite the past to make it conform to today's acceptable social norms, academic ideologies, government agendas and so on. I see such rewriting of the past, or at least attempts of that, on Wikipedia. It's not really hidden as there is a (hopefully!) integer edit history, but who reads the edit history anyway? Usually you just look at articles as they are at the current moment. As we don't have much "hard copies" of a lot of stuff any more around the possibility to "rewrite the past" for significant amounts of people becomes a real thread as we rely more and more on digital and purely online data. Given how "durable" our digital data is future historians will have a very hard time. Maybe our time will become a dark age when seen form the future. Have you tried lately to open some files from the 80'es that reside on some storage medium form that time? And that's only a few years in the past. Imagine 500 yeas in the future. What will be left of all the cat videos on YouTube (and maybe some more important data)?
- veltas 4y ago>but who reads the edit history anyway? Every time I look at a controversial article, and I'm unconvinced by the implicit narratives, I will look at the history, and more often than not there are interesting details lurking in the past versions. And sometimes it's just fascinating looking at how details on a situation unrolled over time. Like for instance, go look at Jeffrey Epstein's Wikipedia history: there was an article on him preceding the publicity of his abuse. I am under the impression right now that Wikipedia history is quite permanent unless an article is totally deleted, and that people do not prune the history of content they wish to censor. I hope it remains this way, cynically I don't think this will always be so, prove me wrong Wikipedia!
- expensive_news 4y agoCould you give some examples of a page on Wikipedia being rewritten? I’m familiar with the incident of redefining what a ‘recession’ is but I’m always curious for more examples.
- culi 4y agoOr you can torrent them... One person's collection serves that one person, but there are some really cool groups out there like DocuWiki[0] that try to archive every documentary out there and serve them on the eDonkey network. There's been numerous times I've failed to find a documentary by even the original publisher. Like I literally couldn't give them my money no matter how much I tried. And even libraries didn't have it. But good old DocuWiki always had my back Torrents are kind of like a community archive [0] https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages
- lrvick 4y agoWho knew dirty pirates would become the worlds archivists of culture.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]