FRANCE
OTC50#40
PARIS CREATES PERFECT EXAMPLE FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD TO FOLLOW
W
hen the world faulters, Paris leads the way forward.
The Paris protests by the Yellow Vest movement is a continual reminder that the French will lead the world when the time comes to change the way the ruling classes social engineer society.
The Yellow Vest movement initially formed to protest against the high cost of gasoline, taking to the streets as if a forrunner to the Apocalyptic nightmare in which the battle between rogue gangs wandering the wasteland is ultimately not over bread and water but over petroleum to run the machines that are used to fetch the bread and water.
Paris has had other protests recently concerning the main issues facing nation states around the globe as the disparity in wealth and income more and more creates a class of luxury and a class of working poor.
Paris also has problems with police brutality and the violation of civil rights which came to the fore when truant public school children locked themselves out of the schools for the day to take on the metro police with a protest.
The disparity in household incomes is linked to this police issue because the higher income neighbours often receive a better service from the police department. Time and time again, a low crime rate is more often than not a result of more police presence.
These same social issues could very well have been the center point of discussion in Chicago, Illinois where protesters followed in the foot steps of Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement of an earlier generation by marching to and fro to end urban gun violence for all the world to witness.
The same social economic issues exist in Seattle, but the citizenry has been locked down in a traffic grid lock to such an extent that no one has time left at the end of the day to even bother to march, other than that brisk walk to the end of Pioneer Square to get to the tailgate party in time before the start of a professional football game.
The difference in approach is cultural and historic.
The world was once ruled by monarchs, interconnected through marriage and ancestry with other monarchy in different nations. Wars were often settled by a king marrying another king’s daughter, and the land was divided amongst them for plowing by less fortunate people.
The plowman became so destitute that the legitimacy of the monarchy as an institution for governing the nation was challenged, eventually resulting in the French Revolution (1789) which unseated the royalty living in luxurious palaces while the citizenry could barely find a potato to feed their starving children.
In more than a few swell swoops, the monarchy and the aristocrats were executed in a manner only the French could conjure. Why spend money on a rope when the cutting edge of a metal blade could work though the queue more delicately?
The guillotine was an elegant solution for such an awkward problem.
Love as in death, revolutions have occurred before and after the French Revolution such as the Glorious Revolution in England and the American Revolution, and then the Russian Bolshevik Revolution.
Political science scholars point to the middle class for the seeds of revolution, since in essence, the leader for change must emerge from the middle class to turn the impoverished rabble all but living on the streets into a powerful force of change.
Maximilien de Robespierre was the most noteworthy revolutionary leader until Vladimir Lennon.
Robespierre fell into the darkness by presiding over the Reign of Terror. The Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced thousands of members of the aristocracy to death by guillotine as a means of eliminating any challenges to the new French republic.
Robespierre had fallen from wanting democratic institutions to replace the monarchy to instituting more of a dictatorship by committee.
The revolutionary end to Robespierre remains evidenced of violence tending to fold back in on itself with little long term effectual change.
A good street protest can be good therapy for the national psyche, though.
Protest marches are vents to avert riots and riots are vents to avert revolution and revolutions are much larger widespread events that effect change so as to prevent civil war.
Initially though one must have an injustice so compelling, and a population so destitute as not to have anything else left to do, but to protest.
The Yellow Vest protests transformed from a simple gas tax protest to a much more widespread expression of the growing disenchantment with the disparity in classes. The issues already exist just waiting for the people to pick them up and ignite around them.
IF THAT’S LOVE, THEN MAKE LOVE. IF THAT’S INJUSTICE, THEN RIOT
French President Emmanuel Macron lit a tinder box with too many reforms too quickly. The critical mistake was not checking the household income figures to determine whether there was any tax room left to increase the taxes already paid by households.
Consumption taxes hit the working poor the hardest because people struggling to feed their children have little left to feed their children let alone impulse shop.
Any additional taxes literally eliminates the daily fresh baguette and the bottle of red wine from the breakfast tables.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has politics easy since many of the working poor are numb on inexpensive vodka and the heroin from the poppy fields in Afghanistan.
Putin, whose background in espionage helps him make decisions in the covert domestic operations of the state police, rounds up the would-be leaders from time to time.
US President Barack Obama used drone strikes to hunt down the next rebel leader to emerge from the rolling hills of a distant Afghanistan.
In the Unites States, the hunt for terrorists and the apprehension of the next mass school shooter keeps the critical focus off the growing disparity between the lifestyles of the aristocracy building spaceships to Mars and that of the Disneyland amusement park service workers living in their cars between shifts.
Protests only become riots when the mob becomes funnelled through a political vortex born out of circumstance.
Fanaticism though can be prevented as much as the social political anomaly can be created.
Robespierre advocated for the poor and for democratic institutions, because people were poor and the monarchy governed autocratically, although the monarchy did not govern so much with fear as indifference.
When 300,000 people protest, probably just as many still at home wanted to join the Yellow Vests in the streets of Paris.
The price of gas and the national debt are not the only problems.
The demographics of metropolitan areas around the world show an increasingly great divide between the metro elite who live inside the city and the working poor commuting to the city from more affordable neighbours.
Chicago stumbled across that issue oh so long ago now.
When the national government makes that commute more expensive, and as a consequence, takes the red wine off the table, the social economic political tinder box ignites like the California wildfires.
Americans have been convinced that anyone can become a member of the elite even if, time and again, to only enjoy a fleeting touch of luxury through various forms of impulse shopping.
Consumerism kind of lulls the population into habitual routines, whereas Macron slapped the working poor in the face with a tax on an essential ingredient.
The protests on the city streets suggest that the Republic has no more room to tax when disposable income is less than zero and every franc goes to something essential for living, such as food and shelter, and the maintenance of the automobile to get to the job that earns those francs for food and shelter.
Essentially the workers have too little dignity left at the end of the day to waste away at home when they could be protesting for a more equitable share.
The Louvre in Paris houses one of the greatest art collections in the world rivaled only by the storage vaults of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
And Paris dominated culture before Hollywood.
Painters such as Pablo Picasso moved from Spain to the city to join the likes of Matisse.
Hemmingway famously spent time at the Café du Dome, after the Spanish Civil War and before the Africa stuff.
So many people look to New York, but really Paris and then London, and more so again Berlin, as if these cities are on a tether tied to the Statue of Liberty.
Ordinary people are tired of working so hard for nothing, just in an eight hour queue only to be left with at the end of the day no change and no moving forward except for the possibility of luxury always so obviously unattainable.
A brief touch of luxury might be attained in the drive threw picking up dinner.
Democracy is so great in America but many people have grown tired of the corruption in a capital city where justice becomes a colouring contest between ideologies, while dignity recedes like the tide to the one percent owning 80 per cent of the national wealth.
The world looks to Paris for direction again and for insight from that peculiar French practicality.
If that’s love, then make love. If that’s injustice, then riot.
Macron withdrew the tax when other world leaders would merely have ignored the protests and carry on with the pre-existing political agenda.
In America, ‘the greatest democracy’, protesters have to take out a city permit to march in the streets. The American protesters look all so threatening, but really the assemblies at the Washington Mall are rather controlled affairs to attract national media coverage.
Robespierre fell to the violence he created – becoming guillotined by a counterrevolution moving just as quickly as he condemned the critics of the revolution.
These days one always has to wonder whether the violence erupting in street protest is actually from a democratic movement for political change.
Instigators have an easy time of lighting up so many protesters all gathered in the same place as easily as someone yelling fire in a dark fancy overcrowded nightclub with too few fire exists.
You know though that violence of any sort is inescapably wrong. One reason violence is wrong is that violence always creates a lot of innocent victims.
Macron has learned two important lessons. One lesson was that there ain’t no more tax room left within the middle class and the working poor for yet another tax. The second lesson is that even a governing party elected by a clear majority must govern equitably for the minority as well as the majority, because sometimes a third class emerges to take power from the street.
The third majority can consolidate support from the rulers and the ruled, and then jump up to bite the government during a democratic election.
Many more people want no part of the violence in the streets even if they believe in the cause.
Why be moral? That question world leaders must continually ask themselves.
Once in power leaders can take absolute control of even a democratic state through manipulation, coercion and abuse.
An entire population can be abused by the state just as one individual can abuse another individual.
The marginalization of the working class is part manipulation and part abuse. People must work to join the middle class, but the pay never accumulates in any substantive way that allows for advancement.
And politicians use those social political dynamics to gain power – and then often maintain power by holding on to those very same coattails, rather than instituting progressive change that alters the course of history.
TITANS FOLLOW RECKLESSLY REGULATED CHAOS TOWARD UNIMAGINABLE FORTUNE
OTC50 #82 April 1, 2022
UNITED STATES COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT of 1996 (CDA)
S 230 Protection for Private Blocking and Screening of Offensive Material
230 (b) It is the policy of the United States
(1) to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media;
(2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation;
(3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;
(4) to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children’s access to objectionable or inappropriate online material; and
(5) to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of a computer
( c ) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker, No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil Liability. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of
(A) Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) Any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical mean to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1) [subparagraph (A)]
(d) Obligations of interactive computer service.
(e ) no effect on other laws
(1) S 223 or s 231 Chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (sexual exploitation of children
C
ensorship occurs on many levels, but the most dangerous censorship may be that which occurs in secret by the operators of the big digital era information machines.
The search engine Google, like many global corporations, has a public face with a private motive beyond the realm of accountability, which too often than not operate on belated apologies based on inconvenient errors and omissions.
The public face sells the company’s on-line dominance of the Internet with a mantra promoting an open ended free speech that benefits democracy. But privately everything the information gatekeeper does has a financial aspect that is compelled forward by that old capitalist motif of get rich quick, regardless of the consequences.
Spill toxic chemicals in the Red River to make the automobile of today. Generate electricity from nuclear power to run the bread maker. ‘Eat up, and worry about the radioactive waste on another day.
Capitalism and democracy go well together when held in balance by competition and government regulations. But oligarchs and monopolies simultaneously skew the end results of the economy and governance, regardless of the publicly stated intentions, because market domination creates absolute power, and absolute power tends to want to control and manipulate, long after getting rich beyond anyone’s dreams.
That element that makes Google so appealing to search engine users also makes Google so dangerous to democracy, because with over half of the world’s Internet traffic, the Internet chat room is not big enough for any criticism. Punishment can be swift with just the slightest tick required by the eTech titan to change the outcome for a business venture, a freedom writer and a user interfacing with family and friends.
The eTech entrepreneurs pitching a new start up from their 16 gig laptops have a bit of inside adventure in store for them, along with all the risks and unexpected twists and turns that normally occur when trying to survive financially the road trip of a lifetime through the digital universe.
The business model adapted across on-line platforms begs for reckless abandonment, beginning with the early stages of developmental theory requiring the start up to be stationed inside the garage for the first start up test kitchen. The risky start up business venture accumulates more momentum toward every successive station all along the growth cycle with eTech continually propelled forward by an exponential need for speed to out distance a budding competitor.
At the same time, the eTech engine has an insatiable appetite for cash that must be met along the growth curve. Cash flow pays the daily operating expenses, but cash also pays for the expansion of digital architecture into new markets, a system of business operation that must be continually upgraded. Then there must also be cash to payback the investors, which is generated from increased share prices that rise or fall directly in relation to quarterly revenue announcements.
An eTechnology company may still increase the share value with increasingly higher revenue forecasts even if the balance sheets show a continuous loss of money. That ethical and moral conundrum promoting the shares of a net zero gain company permeates much of Wall Street, with shares ultimately being sold on a supply and demand basis.
The eTechnology business model mirrors the government budget of deficit financing. Governments run large annual budgetary deficits to meet the needs of the democratic political machine. This fiscal nonsense survives only because the actual value of the debt becomes muted by growth and inflation.
Turning off the stamping machines at the national mint will cause too much short term trauma for any re-election bid. Washington politicians cannot run for reelection with a slogan of: “This is going to hurt.”
Growth is key to democratic capitalism and the politicians that persuade the public to buy into the system with their hard earned tax dollars.
The eTech Titans run the same formula a bit more recklessly because of the inability to print money and leverage company debt against gold reserves and national resources and the unlimited ability to raise revenue from individual citizens through taxes.
For start-ups like Tesla, and the early investors into electric vehicle production like Elon Musk, cold hard cash is everything essential.
Tesla rummaged known interested venture capital parties for another $100,000 in development money for the first EV roadster prototype. Everything at Tesla ran on a long shoestring budget with many elite players invested in the company by poviding downpayments towards the yet sight unseen electric vehicles.
E-tech business becomes a bit of a crap shoot, Los Vegas style, with a good idea requiring a working product model to attract more investors whose cash is used to compel further development in the same, if not a different and better product, kind of like nursing and coddling the idea with small investments until the product is developed sufficiently for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of company shares.
The IPO pays off early investors for their loyalty, but the stock offering also capitalizes the company with cash reserves to pay daily operating expenses and fund future growth. The IPO is everything with everyone scrambling to survive until that watershed moment in the financing of new eTech development.
The success or failure of the IPO becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Interest in shares creates more cash flow, allowing the company to reload the cash drawers and expand the possibilities of the test models already in development.
Initially, Tesla had such little cash that the company was not able to machine the electric vehicle parts themselves for the initial prototype. Instead, Tesla commodified a chassis from a competing manufacturer of high end sports cars, after carefully testing commodification out on various chassis already in use by gas engine competitors.
Tesla needed a chassis that could accommodate the giant battery fuel cell that was itself a commodification of existing laptop battery products.
Tesla repeated the same commodification process in the initial stages of the development of the Tesla Model S. The Tesla Roadster was always meant to be a limited special edition for the elite, while the Tesla Model S was intended to become the first mass produced Tesla electric vehicle.
There is nothing sinister about this approach to motor vehicle development, since many automotive parts are outsourced by the biggest automakers. But the manner in which the public was sold the idea of a mass market electric vehicle is a form of censorship.
Commodification is a bit of a lie that gets continually repeated and retested throughout the eTech world.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange believes that the new world of truth is composed of several layers of censorship with tidy errors and omissions on the public record, while much of the miss telling in private being rather purposeful.
The gravamen begins with self-censorship, eTechnology companies refusing to publish, and writers refusing to write, because doing so would result in immediate and direct economic pushback.
The new age eTechnology roadster was initially an amalgam of bits and pieces of existing gas engine vehicles with the Tesla contribution being an electric power train fueled by hundreds of laptop batteries.
Similarly, the most successful user generated on-line content is that which has been commodified from other sources. In a way, an on-line post may be most appealing as a pastiche of facts that creates unique meta data for search engines and newsfeeds.
Facebook users who commodify content do better in the newsfeeds than the authors of the original content because of the meta data the search engines latch on to like closing the hatch on a computer generated submarine before submerging into the digital universe.
The publishing world has become writer focused in the digital age with publishers losing their monopoly on the printed word.
The United States Congress changed the nature of censorship by redefining publishing for the on-line world. Those big eTech companies are absolved of any liability in third party publishing through the double speak contained in the United States Communication Decency Act of 1996 (CDA).
Like every other law, every wrinkle in the new publishing definition has been exploited, so that decency means protecting publishers of indecency from liability. Information platforms like Facebook, which are clearly publishers like the old-school book makers in digital form, is actually not a publisher, but a provider for third party publishers.
The courts believe that even if the billion dollar eTech firm is aware of a hate crime, the CEO’s and employees, waiting to cash out large company share portfolios, cannot be held accountable even if the hate speech has been brought to their attention.
This omnibus government protection allows large global corporations to cross over into publishing with immunity even when remanufacturing a lie into the truth to change political elections.
The virtues of free speech in promoting tolerance, equality and justice are lost in a lie, in published hate speech, and when aiding and abetting crime that diminishes human dignity.
Meta Platforms Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, Instagram, What’s App) has total immunity across social media sites because of all the chaos in publishing the legislation has created.
Netflix is also a publishing platform, just as Facebook is, except that the rate of publishing on Netflix is at a slower more controlled pace. Netflix picks and chooses titles to stream, and then pays a licensing fee to the production companies.
Facebook has less initial control, but Zuckerberg can swiftly remove posts and delete pages on discovering content he finds unworthy of the free speech and free press protections so embedded in the United States Constitution.
Google and Amazon are competing publishing companies. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos stopped paying Google the billion dollar annual advertising fee for Amazon products to show up in search engine results, because he was paying to be censored. Google put Amazon in a paying competition with other online retailers with paid Amazon ads appearing beside other paid ads in Google search for the same products. And if you don’t pay, you don’t show up in search results, or at the least you get slotted in a spot not worth any meaning.
As Amazon developed a product line and the global reach to sell those products, the company competed with Google for search engine results. People could go directly to Amazon to use their product search engine, or they could use Google search to find the same products sold at Amazon and a number of different online retailers.
Google is so manipulative and controlling when it comes to forcing payment for advertising, but when the anti-sex trade lobby asks the big giant eTech company to remove sites promoting the pornification of young women and children, someone just has to mention section 230 of the the CDA.
Amazon took the billion dollars away from Google and used the cash to develop their own site’s search engine.
The eCommerce revolution has created a lot of chaos out of which the big eTech firms have created international monopolies with annual revenue of $70+ billion.
This state of lawlessness censors out ethics and the fate of people over the profit motive, leaving undefined revolution and fanaticism to spur growth in capitalist democracies.
The European Union has recently passed the Digital Markets Act which will allow the marketplace to whittle away at the monopolies. Google and Apple are now required to allow other eTechnology developers to access their platforms.
These American monopolies are information gatekeepers. The public version is free and democratic in the name of free speech, but the inside private operations of digital information are controlling, manipulative and driven by the profit motive – not much different than print publishing.
The judiciary are being lied to by Big Tech in that judges have been told that old school publishing controls are impractical with the millions of bits of information published onto platforms each day by millions of users.
But Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin maintain control within the user initiated chaos as long as the price point is beneficial to them.
Companies like Amazon and Apple have stayed away from social media publishing, but the companies remain publishers as distributers of third party content, such as streaming music and movies. Commerce is the driving force of eTechnology companies, not freedom, free speech or democracy.
Assange founded Wikileaks in the name of freedom, free speech and good government. But Assange quickly discovered that web pages referencing Wikileaks were being censored by Google. And unbeknownst to the public, Google CEOs had close ties to United States President Barack Obama’s Administration whose Titanic foe Wikileaks held them accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Post 9/11 Middle East Wars.
Online life is a bit like living in a casino with a lot of chaos all around, and only fleeting random luck at the tables. The net result is individual censorship and an ever diminishing freedom and democracy – particularly because of the double speak at the slots, I mean search engines.
Google has the ability to prioritize web search results to promote their own business interests. These monopolies are not victims of overwhelming user interfaces that should be protected from liability by s 230 of the CDA, so much as they are publishers picking and choosing how their business operates to maximize billion dollar annual profits.
The big lie by big tech and the US Congress is that search engines are public commons when in reality nothing is free, although everything is public.
The Google lie about platform neutrality causes a gaslighting of users trapped inside the chaos created by algorithmic unfairness. Google publishes without rules or without respect for the rules by hiding behind the idea of them being information gatekeepers, while culling human sentimentality.
Former US National Security Agency operative Edward Snowden states that technological innovation outpaces all moral and ethical boundaries. The intent is to foster the development of the eCommerce marketplace and the digital universe, but the effect has been an “uncontrolled monster” more commonly known in the secret intelligence field as the ‘Frankenstein Effect.’
UCLA Professor Safiya Umoja Noble found that there had been a direct mapping of old social barriers and stigma into the new media architecture.
Computer code, controlling, manipulating and categorizing information, is a language full of meaning. These algorithms are written by Silicon Valley techs more often than not educated in the American university system where students learn to share the same biased world view as the dominant elite controlling the classrooms and writing the textbooks.
Noble found that marginalized people are exponentially harmed by Google. And that far from spreading the words of freedom and equality, Google promulgates racial and gender barriers already firmly entrenched in the social system.
In this same way, the big digital electronic machines, controlling the on-line universe with artificial intelligence, still have a consciousness as a creation of human discretion originally formed within the collective.
A publicly benevolent eTech company may in realty be so imbued in self-interest, driven by the profit motive in particular, and perhaps also by delusions of social engineering a better democratic society without actually having been elected to political office, that it is privately malevolent, and at the very least, not as advertised.
Regulated into deregulation by the US Congress, the semantic meaning of publishing was redefined, with the old definition that included distribution of content being erased and reinvented, perhaps commodified in the greater spirit of the digital information age.
Big Tech companies like Amazon, Disney, Apple and Netflix limit their publishing interests to distribution, whereas social media platforms massage third party content in a manner that undefines publishing.
Assange describes censorship as the intention to mask the truth in layers of misdirection and unintelligible meaning. This lawlessness in the presentation of the digital word creates a lot of chaos.
And this particular brand of chaos benefits the status quo and the Washington establishment by creating a buffer from substantive systemic change that sacrifices the truth of the present in a kind of careless disregard for right and wrong.
Justice has been nonchalantly set aside.
If people think they can print anything, certain people actually will print anything. This barrage of lies and insults censors by burying the truth and the earnest pursuit of tolerance, equality and justice.
The unintended chaos is not so unintended, because racial and gender subjugation is profitable to the white, male dominant corporate class structure, according to Noble.
This neoliberal capitalistic, social ideology persists among the elites running corporate economies and influencing the judiciary who in turn implement the regulation of unregulation in the digital age.
Big eTech corporations are billion dollar information monopolies that reach far and wide beyond any political borders.
Noble states that egregious and racist content becomes highly profitable because that content attracts the interest of the dominant classes within the majority rule.
Instead of search engines becoming the great equalizers of our times, the information gatekeepers are hegemonic devices.
Even if the artificial intelligence running the big online machines have not purposefully been programmed to be racist or sexist or to sell images of young black girls for pornification, those are the search engine results, according to Noble.
That method of overlooking outcome permeates the new economy, fueled by cash flow and venture capital, with a lot of speculation permeating everything inside and outside the economy.
Tesla and SpaceX just began producing products before they had been properly developed. Musk even Tweeted that he didn’t mind so much if he had to watch his spacecrafts blow up on the launch pad a few times, after the spacecraft in development blew up three times in a row, before getting it right. Musk then sold a home based flame thrower as an accessory to his celebrity status.
‘It’s okay though because everything has worked out.’
In the early years, after commodifying a chassis and automotive parts, Tesla had to sell their unique electronic power trains and solar energy systems in a horizontal market to other competing manufacturers so as to generate sufficient cash flow for the next phase of unregulated economic growth.
To avert becoming relegated to a continued existence as a parts supplier, Tesla sold a 10% stake in the company to Daimler Chrysler for $50 million. The Obama Administration also provided financial grants to Tesla.
The importance of keeping pace with change and being the first to market was so breathtaking that Musk spent considerable time deficit financing the production of electric vehicle as the company continued to move forward by innovating.
The economic pressures are similar in other industries as well, because of a general business model tethered to Wall Street financial interests.
Netflix started out as a mail order movie DVD rental company in direct competition with Blockbuster retail stores in 1997. In essence, Netflix cofounders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph moved to do for the movie business, in an $8 billion movie rental industry, what Amazon and Jeff Bezos had done for book selling and general retail.
Netflix relied on the First Sale/Second Use Doctrine developed out of the 1908 United States Copyright Law and a 1981 US Supreme Court ruling that granted the right to resell or rent the movie DVDS that they owned.
But even with $100,000 in rentals the first month, Netflix had to stall the eventually bankruptcy of the company until technology changed VHS to DVD and more people bought more DVD players as the price of the machines dropped.
The dilemma seems trite now with digital movies and streaming platforms finding common ground in the public marketplace, but Hastings could not really compete with Blockbuster because of the cost of shipping bulky VHS tapes and the high price of VHS home machines that limited the pool of potential customers.
Technology changed everything with a cheaper DVD machine below $200 finding a way into almost every household and the thinner profile of DVD’s that could be shipped in the regular mail all within the framework of a price point that beat Blockbuster retail stores without too much profit loss with each customer transaction.
Netflix survived the corporate battle for movie rentals by generated sufficient cash flow to adapt the business model with the changing technology, while Blockbuster was too slow to transition from retail stores, and then chose the low end of eTechnology that could not process the eventual on-line demand.
Netflix in the meantime positioned itself as the ‘it’ movie rental company while the platforms changed from renting physical copies to selling subscriptions for streaming digital movies on-line.
Like a quickening, by the time Netflix moved from renting DVDs through the United States Postal Service to streaming movies online, Blockbuster had fallen too far behind with the wrong choice of technology and too much debt to be refinanced.
The players have to be fast to survive.
When the film distribution industry changed irrevocably to on-line streaming, Disney lost hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees the production company would normally earn from broadcast stations for Disney programming. CEO Bob Iger realized soon enough that he had to transition the entertainment company to a new era of distribution.
Amazon too had to quickly grow into other global markets before upstarts got their market share first with their stolen idea. Bezos business sense was to create the eCommerce platform by selling books, but then to add more products as quickly as the market and the online technology would allow.
The economic ethics are so precarious that when Amazon failed to establish an on-line presence in India in 2004, Amazon’s former employees, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, started their own brand of online retailing specific to the market in India, called Flipkart, just three years later. To keep going, Flipkart sold a stake in the company to Wallmart, a direct competitor of Amazon, for $16 billion in 2018.
Similarly, Alibaba beat out Amazon in China by undercutting the commission on sales to 2-3 per cent, substantially down from the 10-15 per cent Amazon charged. Alibaba also had an inside track with the Chinese authorities, while Bezos struggled with that outsider label.
The anti-direct foreign investment rules brought into play in India in 2013 underlined the need for Big eTech to know the inside passage controlled by government and the inner circles.
The monopoly held by Flipkart and Amazon amounted to 80 per cent of the on-line retail market, eventually leading to new anti-trust rules and foreign ownership laws in India.
Amazon had still lost $1 billion a year in India. So Bezos purchasing the Washington Post Newspaper for $250 million was like giving to charity. Bezos turned the newspaper company around from a $10 million loser in 2015, to a $100 million profit winner over the next three years by going on-line. But the Amazon expansion into India and China was awash with billion dollar losses.
When Amazon turned south for growth, Walmart and MercadoLibre had already established a presence in Mexico for the $7.1 billion eCommerce marketplace.
Mistakes are made along the way, the pace of change is so quick, while loyalty is bought with company shares. A multi-billion dollar fortune attracts a lot of friends.
Netflix initially offered free movie rentals as part of a marketing campaign, but the coupons were printed without a unique numbering system so Netflix could not keep track of who had how many, and customers could simply use another coupon instead of paying for the next rental, as the company had hoped the promotion to unfold.
Tesla initially bought the batteries from Asia and flew in the roadster chassis from the UK, then assembled and installed the battery pack in California. The robotic assembly line initially produced flawed prototypes that were sold to waiting customers with waning patience.
And instead of placing the deposits in escrow, Tesla used the funds for cash flow while Musk personally guaranteed the deposits from his personal fortune acquired from the sale of PayPal.
Musk depended on the elite customers for the roadster being loyal and not demanding their deposits back as Tesla struggled with missed production deadlines. Tesla also increased the cost of the roadsters already on order to make up for cash short falls in development. The price was increased for a car that still did not exist.
Musk was literally scrambling for cash and know how to beat the Big 6 automakers to being the first company to mass manufacture electric vehicles. Even when production began, the lack of loyalty on the production line caused a number of manufacturing defects that would slow Tesla growth.
Amazon marched on through the storm with the trouble light motto of innovating themselves out of the chaos.
All the more concerning, eTech companies not only run roughshod through production missteps but the companies change the engineering of communities like Redmond, Washington, and the Mission District in San Francisco, California by bringing into the community employees with higher than average income levels who then spend more and live higher, thereby driving up the cost of living for people living in the community for other reasons.
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asserts that a corporation is just a set of rules and just a code in the digital universe, while the corporation has no mind for people priorities and the future.
Technology had gradually replaced the human element in the means of production and eTech is finishing the job by disassociating people from production. Consumer loyalty has instead shifted to the brand and the billionaire entrepreneurs behind the celebrity culture.
What do electric vehicles, streaming movies, on-line retailers, social media platforms, and information gatekeepers have in common?
Digital passages through the virtual universe are controlled with planned chaos.
So where do you want to go and how do you expect to get there?
Forward, in that direction everyone seems to want to be heading through the maddening crowd of the unconnected trying to get connected.
But moving forward with such speed and acceleration has become reckless and unmanageable. What income disparity that existed before the digital commerce giant wave still exists, but 10 and 20 fold more luxurious and more depraved with a tiny percentage finding celebrity existence in mansions and on yachts, while more homeless find failure and loneliness on the streets.
Algorithms of Oppression, How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by Safiya Umoja Noble, New York, New York University Press, 2018. Cypherpunks, Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum , Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremy Zimmerman, New York, O/R Books, 2012. Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Expose of Big Tech Censorship, by Zach Vorhies and Kent Heckenlively, JD, New York, Skyhorse Publishing, 2021. NETFLIX: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs, by Gina Keating, New York, Penguin, 2012. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, New York, Little Brown and Company, 2013. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity, by Douglas Rushkoff, New York, Portfolio/Penguin, 2016. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, by Marshall McLuhan, London, The MIT Press, 1996.
POETIC REALISM MAINTAINS THE INTEGRITY OF PERSONA
T
hat smile and the ability to engage costars at a level that draws in the audience that other supporting character actors never seem to be able to attain makes Lea Seydoux one of the best female costars.
The realism of her acting craft is given extra dimensions in different films with the layers of aesthetics provided by the director’s camera, set lights and the precise editing of shots together into something short of the classic montage.
The truth be told though, what looks easy takes a highly skilled, experienced actor to accomplish.
Not everyone can light up their face in just the right way when the character is not brooding.
Seydoux synthesis her character acting with the narrative of each new film by giving expression to the character’s inner thoughts. The actor’s emotional facial gestures are just one part of the performance made all the more relevant with a voice. And the frequent use of body language includes an affinity for action scenes such as she performed in her important story roles for the Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) franchise film and then the James Bond franchise films, Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021).
Seydoux plays a contextual figure within the spy genre, bringing poetic realism to the set as the essential, and the perfect hostage, within the high octane circumstances, to whom the audience can relate, from one realistic character to another, and from one hostage in a film narrative to one in the circumstances of daily life.
This story telling ability becomes near poetic as a standalone supporting thread throughout several films.
The characters may brood. The characters may also address the silent inner conflict with tears. Seydoux may even project rage at the exact moment the film plot begins to turn.
But each performance is made different, not just by the oh so subtle changes in acting, but also by the context of each scene.
Directors frame Seydoux with the camera to creat a unique figure for each new film role. The costumes play an important part, but so does the lighting, set design and the script.
Seydoux often also has substantial speaking roles in well written, meaningful stories. The audience becomes enamored at what the character has to say because of the compelling realism developed by Seydoux.
In La Belle Personne (2008) (The Beautiful People) director Christophe Honore explores the growing pains, accented by the love and the despair, that young adults experience learning the way the real world works.
Young love and young disappointments are just the beginning of the emotional repertoire that Seydoux has developed over just a few films.
In Robin Hood (2010) the future Queen of England has a French heritage. Seydoux shows the arrogance of the European nobility at the time of kings and castles. Intermarriage among dynastic families creates stability among the monarchical states, but the people’s suffering is often ignored.
Director Ridley Scott shows how Robin Hood lifted the peoples’ spirits after years of neglect by a King more concerned about successful crusades to the Holy Land that bankrupted the royal coffers, than the people starving back home.
Seydoux has a small supporting role with a unique purpose of showing the contradictory division within the monarchical families of Europe in this feature film blockbuster with an ensemble cast that includes Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchette, Matthew Macfayden, Max von Sydow, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Eileen Atkins, Danny Huston, as King Richard the Lionheart, and Oscar Isaac as his brother, Prince John.
Acting is a discourse interpreted in a historical context compared to other discourses occurring at the same moment in time. Seydoux does not shy away from controversial popular discourses, though.
Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) won the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Seydoux joined costar Adele Exarchopoulos and director Abdellatif Kechiche to accept the great honor at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.
Exarchopoulos plays Adele, an introverted teenager, while Seydoux plays Beatrice, an eccentric painter.
Adele fantasizes about Beatrice while in a heterosexual teenage relationship. The narrative slowly unwinds through the teenager’s last bits of childhood until eventually the two worlds meet.
Seydoux shows more masculinity as she crosses over her character as a lesbian for director Kechiche.
Seydoux realistically portrays the LGBTQ community without clinging to stereotypes or unravelling taboo subjects.
In this way, Seydoux is able to character act within a variety of different roles. The realism becomes modified by the camera and the other technical aspects of filmmaking that create her character’s point of view in the narrative.
But the talented actor can also make her character more feminine, twisting and turning the poetic realism into a vulnerable daughter from a traumatized childhood.
She tends to stay away from the more fantastical elements of the narrative while anchoring the entire story with her emotional presence.
In Sister (2012), the young boy Simon, played by Kacey Klein, has a bit of a Disneyland life on the ski runs of the Swiss Alps. The film tells the classic Disney-type story of a young boy surviving poverty and loneliness without parents by mingling among the super rich ski elite.
But the boy’s sister remains grounded in reality in that she searches for a partner to end a Cinderella story, while battling binge drinking and other reckless behavior. The two characters survive poverty and loneliness on a brother and sister relationship level while keeping a deep secret an unspoken truth even between them.
That same year, the Queen of France has several special requests of her courtiers as the French Revolution closes in on life at the Palace of Versailles. Farewell, My Queen (2012) stars Diane Kruger as Marie Antoinette who requires Agathe-Sidone Laborde to dote about her even as the end of the monarchy approaches in France.
Seydoux shows how the Queen’s courtier has only one dress fancy enough for the Queen’s court, and then also only her duties which are singularly for the Queen. Sidone is otherwise penniless when the end becomes inevitable with the storming of the Paris prison, the Bastille.
Everything gets dialed down a bit further when the Queen dispatches Sidone as a decoy to ensure her more favored courtier can escape to safety.
Kruger has also played Helen of Troy, the stolen Princess that sparks the war between the Trojans and the unified armies if Greece in Troy (2004), costarring Brad Pitt as Achilles, and Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom and Peter O’Tool.
In the Infiltrator (2016), Kruger plays Kathy Ertz, an FBI agent who infiltrates the world of drug lord Pablo Escobar with her make believe husband, FBI agent Robert Mazur, played by Bryan Cranston.
Seydoux carries on with the character actor adopting the more elusive charisma of a journalist who herself has become a national celebrity in France (2021).
The film self referentially investigates the true thoughts and feelings behind the broadcast star only to discover that the show and the celebrity may be more important than the genuineness of the story and the safety of herself and her camera crew.
But in the end, the French celebrity must persevere through the same tragedies that accompany life for everyone.
Seydoux’s character acting survives though by remaining truthful to the character and believable to the audience from film to film.
The illusive acting cache is the integrity of the character.
Not so fantastical when the narrative calls for fantasy, by maintaining realism in fantastical circumstances, Seydoux creates a cache for her characters, like in the box car fight with James Bond or the failed exchange of diamonds for nuclear launch codes with Ethan Hunt.
Life as a spy may be all so fantastical, but realism as an actor is all the better.
