On predicting the future...

An old colleague of mine, Richard Gingras, from my days at Apple Computer wrote an article last year about the dangers of predicting the future. It's very much worth the four minutes it'll take to read

Why predicting the future can be so dangerous

I wouldn't have agreed with this 10 years ago, however, looking back, I have to say he's right.

I would go even farther in my analysis than he does: We honestly thought we were doing great stuff for humanity and the planet back in the early days of online systems and the internet. We believed we would be 'democratizing information' and giving everyone a platform to have a voice.

And, to a degree, we succeeded. Clearly, we didn't think through the ramifications of that and we're experiencing the results now.

For that, I, personally, am deeply sorry.

Sometimes old technology is the best solution to the problem

This is an interesting use of old technology to circumvent new technology restrictions by an oppressive government: the military in Myanmar. In this case, when the government shut down all internet, the people turned to Pirate Radio.

These are the messages of a psy-ops campaign called Operation Hanoi Hannah, one of many digital fronts opening against the military in Myanmar, whose creators said would be broadcast over pirate radio in hope of persuading soldiers and police to side with the people – and to not rely on the internet, which the authorities ordered shut down yesterday.

For the full story Click Here.

For an actual pirate radio guy in the US's blog click here.

For a pirate radio community on reddit, click here.

A great argument for having a public service broadcast company like the BBC in the US

On Public Service Broadcasting:

Public service broadcasting.

The BBCs remit is to serve the public. There have been several commissions over the years to define what "public service broadcasting" actually means. The most recent one reiterated some of the old definitions but added that part of it was to serve the needs of people who are not normally served content. This is why they show niche content. It's their purpose.

(If you want to know more about the benefits of public service broadcasting keep reading. It's all half remembered knowledge so sorry if I fuck anything up.)

This was part of the reason Channel 4 was created. The goal was that small cultures and subcultures within the UK would be served. Afro-Caribbean, Irish, Asian, Grime, Garage etc. That's why Father Ted (Irish) The Big Narstie Show (grime) The Kumars at no. 42 (Asian) and other shows were commissioned.

And guess what happened? They were successful! The prevailing wisdom was that you aim everything at the largest possible market. And more specifically with commercial television the richest, youngest market. But these shows could be huge.

What happened was they would capture a huge portion of these target markets and that was enough people to drive the other markets that the show wasn't aimed at to embrace it. 2 Irish lads in the office talking about how funny Fr. Ted is and soon enough it's one of the biggest shows in the country.

So what happened next? Commercial channels noticed. Moone Boy (irish) The Kumars(asian) on sky and other commercial channels and other shows tried to capture that success for monetary gain. Not to mention stuff that wasn't designed for minorities necessarily like natural history programmes and good quality current affairs content. Sky and Netflix now do great natural history series. It never would have made financial sense until Planet Earth was one of the most successful BBC series ever.

A good public service broadcasting system raised the quality of ALL broadcasting. It's a quantifiable and repeatable phenomenon. You could argue that the success of stuff like Black Panther and other content that would never have been made a few years previously has shown this phenomenon can absolutely work in America too.

I'm Irish, we have a relatively shitty public service broadcasting system compared to the UK but it has still had an unbelievable impact on our general broadcasting landscape.

I see so many people asking how you solve the huge issues in US media and I think the answer is a robust, independent and well funded public broadcasting service.

A rising tide raises all ships. One of the purposes of the government funding stuff is to try to show private enterprise that these things can be worthwhile. And even without the private sector you get amazing results from a service that is meant to serve the people. Even if only a few thousand people watch something the service has been successful and every so often the service can show commercial entities how to do it properly.

Anyways rant over. Sorry but believe it or not I'm quite passionate about public service broadcasting. PBS should be heavily funded by the US government and possibly exclusively. Of course the issue is independence. Even the mighty BBC is feeling the pinch of government interference (please fight this people of the UK). But with some safeguards you can prevent this from happening.

-Hyippy An Irish Reddit user

As an aside for those of you who say PBS is the same. No, it's not. It's a private corporation. It's funded almost entirely by donations that work a lot like advertising in the for profit world, which means big donors get to help decide what the programming is. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of PBS.

But it's biased by the same issues for profit broadcasting and media is.

US and allies to build 'China-free' tech supply chain- We're heading into a very different phase of world history

US and allies to build 'China-free' tech supply chain

 https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/US-and-allies-to-build-China-free-tech-supply-chain

And so it begins.

You're watching the beginning of the splitting of the world into two major power centers that aren't that different than what we had before the 1990's with 'communist' Russia, China and their vassal states.

The difference is that it's fascism that's in charge now. China may call itself communist, but it operates just like Stalin's fascist-like extreme version of communism.

And Russia, well, Putin IS Stalin all over again. He's running a mafia state (i.e. fascist state) and has been for over a decade.

The only difference between Hitler's fascist/Nazi Germany and todays fascist states is they're better at handling information in general and the media in particular both inside and outside of their respective spheres of influence. Especially China.

This is going to completely disrupt commerce, politics, education and pretty much everything that's been developed the last 30 years or so that's global in nature. Late stage capitalism is showing it's cracks more and more.

It's also going to fuel a re-charging of the military industrial complex like we haven't seen in decades.

All that's old is new again.