I will always remember what a Leica manager in Germany said to me, which went like this: “I have read your publication today, and I have to admit that the tone is from my point of view unreasonable. However, we respect that journalists can make up their mind independently. But I think even for your reputation within the worldwide video community this article might not be helpful.”
What surprised me most was not that he disagreed with my Leica SL2 review. It was that he felt I had a “reputation” within the worldwide video community.
How had this product manager at Leica come to such a revelation about me, a humble blogger and advocate of affordable filmmaking tools?
At first I thought some of the spies in Berlin had tipped him off. Perhaps they had put a neatly written memo out about the British and what we were like. Could it have been my nemesis, the Cinema5D crew in Austria?
In the end, I suspected none of that. Because to be disliked these days, it is apparently enough simply to tell the truth and be straight to the point about it.
That’s because, like the former Soviet Union we are living in a post-truth society with most Western nations following Putin’s media playbook where fake news is big money, and facts merely an inconvenience that get in the way money changing hands.
At the time of the Leica controversy, I was a Leica customer with the SL2, Leica Q and very firmly in the Leica M Typ 240 club when I feel like slowing down my photography and missing a lot of shots.
(Note for the Germans: The last line is a sarcastic joke – I do really like my Leica M Typ 240).
But the money the public gives to corporations and banks doesn’t seem to buy us much influence. When we bail out the banks, we don’t seem to get much of a say in how they are run or much of a share of the future profits. In turn, modern businesses never seem to invest any of their profits into their acquisitions, instead there always seems to be a hedge fund in there or a venture capitalist round, or a massive bank loan.
And if you follow the money, they don’t just want control of our corporations, they want control of the media and government too, which is textbook fascism.
Take the AI industry for example, which will crash the world’s economy next January, around the 15th if my calculations are correct and we’ll have to bail them out. If the truth mattered at all to people in the AI industry (especially investors) how would Microsoft justify giving so many billions of dollars to ChatGPT so that ChatGPT could give it back to NVidia and NVidia pass it back to Microsoft and they all live happily ever after ignoring the fact they have even less profit than Leica.
I only have to look at the supposedly “Liberal” government in the United Kingdom to realise that when it comes to money and powerful networks of crooks, they are willing to throw facts and factual journalism under the bus at every opportunity.
Take the BBC.
This is a British institution which was the pioneer of all broadcasting, the mother of all TV networks, at the peak of Western civilisation, and the BBC is still to this day a world leader in journalism, news and TV and it was even further ahead of the pack at a time when the internet and shouty dickheads on social media didn’t even exist, let alone Canadian YouTubers.
The BBC is a great dane in a room full of nasty little chihuahuas. I along with most of the country and 100% of the educated voted for a centre-left government last year in order to protect our institutions like the BBC and to stand up to the rising tide of fascism.
I voted so that my country would be better placed to stand up to Neo Nazism.
Instead, I may as well have voted for a customer service chat agent given what’s been achieved since.
Much to the detriment of the BBC, right-wing media companies are stronger than ever and Murdoch is more influential than ever before despite looking like something that crawled out of a pyramid. Even for him Trump is “a bit too right wing” (his own words) and at one point even Fox News were reluctant to go there. But go there, they did.
In fact go there, the whole fucking world did. Just like the shills in the camera industry do whenever then inconvenient truth gets in the way of affiliate link sales.
In our own tiny microcosm of life, I’ll give you an example.
Nearly all of them ignored Magic Lantern’s truthful journalism about the Canon EOS R5 overheating debacle, and my reporting of it and journalism involving fridge freezers…
Granted, this wasn’t as important as Emily Maitlis on the BBC exposing Prince Andrew lying about being a pedophile, but it was interesting in a camera sense.
Yet it has taken just one legal document from President Trump to the BBC over one edit in one episode of Panorama for the whole country to capitulate and sack the BBC’s bosses.
To be fair, they were useless and deserved to go.
But the injustice of it is clear.
The BBC has a social contract with the British public to stand up for the truth, and in return we pay for the BBC. When a proven liar and convicted criminal sues the BBC, he is in effect suing the people of the United Kingdom, and this isn’t a very nice thing to do after we were gracious enough to give him a full state visit where he met the King.
Whilst our own alleged island vacationer Mr Andrew Mountbatten persona-non-grata takes the brunt of the anger, the person Mr Epstein hired his prostitute from gets a full state visit. One assumes the Royals were thrilled to meet him. And he got a multi-billion dollar trade deal as well.
I as a non-fascist believer in free press, and British values, I think that all of this is deplorable and crosses the biggest red line on so many levels.
But that’s the inherent hypocrisy in our governments of today and one of the big reasons they keep losing to fascists and popularist idiots.
As a politician of the left-of-centre and decently informed (thanks in no small way to the BBC), do you stand up for your voters and their values, and stand up for the truth, or do you rub shoulders with pedophiles and rapists? It’s a tough choice, isn’t it?
What I learnt in the camera community was that when it comes to certain career focused individuals – personal growth, cash and social standing means you’re guaranteed to capitulate on your principals all the time, and that is as much a part of everyday life as filling the dishwasher. When it comes to the Big $D, these important values are a distinct afterthought… The sort of afterthought you have when closing a drawer, not the ones that keep you awake at night.
This is how the camera community, along with it the indie filmmaking community on Vimeo was sold out to the career-politicians of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Content creator workaholics who live and breathe money rather than artistic philosophies and principals… All in a big circle jerk with the camera PR marketing departments, and in return they get to grow their own online ego in order to showcase an ever expanding body of nothingness.
They have 100% of things in common with today’s politicians.
There’s no impartial, objective BBC of camera reviews, let alone another EOSHD. DPReview is now like advertorial. I could be savage and bitter, I could be rude, but that’s how critical thinking works, you fucking dumbasses.
Once you abandon your ability to be critical and start to sugar coat everything you do, you may as well surrender to the markets, and by extension – to neo fascism.
And this is exactly what the left have done in politics.
Rather than standing up for what’s right or for those who voted them into office, they have chosen to usher in a new era of career-liberalism and inequality, and they are the enablers of so many bad things, and bad people.
As a result the Germans are voting right wing for the first time since the 1930s and the Americans have turned into a full-on dystopian monarchy with a big fat ex-landlord TV celebrity as King.
Yet still the career-minded-liberals refuses to admit they got it wrong. It’s a sort of mass collective delusion, the kind that makes Kamala Harris believe she can run again and win. I have news for her – thanks to you, there won’t be another US election.
The career psychos with shiny faces and their nice intentions don’t seem to realise it. They’re too short sighted and too far gone up their own bottoms. They like to say it’s pragmatism. It’s actually cowardice, and the self defeating nature of it has been proof-tested.
Nobody wants to vote for this sick form of career growth and perverted pragmatism.
And as for the camera world…
It’s a fascinating microcosm of the wider problem, isn’t it? A case-study of what happens when shills rise to positions of power and into the positions of community gatekeepers.
When the camera community was being curated by outspoken artists or individuals speaking sense and giving their own professional and enthusiast insights, the filmmaking community by extension was so much more enjoyable and productive too.
