Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Platform of the Real

Episode Date: April 28, 2016

A look at the most revolutionary media format that has ever existed and a trip back to 1968 when video became real. Plus Virtual reality!

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Platform of the Real. I've been avoiding the whole virtual reality thing for a few years now, on purpose. The idea of having those goggles on my face was just too much. But my friend Francesca Panetta just brought her virtual reality piece to New York for the Tribeca Film Festival. And so I decided it was time to take the plunge and see what this whole thing is about. 6x9 is a virtual reality piece about solitary confinement in US prison cells. My friend Fran is very intense. And this piece that she just co-produced for The Guardian UK is very, very intense.

So you put the goggles on and you are in solitary confinement. You look around you, you're in the cell. As the experience goes through, different things happen to you while you're in that cell. But you have people talking to you throughout the process and you hear prison sounds around you. And it is all your experience. Six by Nine is about you in solitary confinement. There's this moment in Six by Nine where you watch dreams fade out on the prison wall that's just six feet away from you. At first, I dreamed about being home and even being Superman and flying and all that.

They were very similar to the dreams I had when I was free. But then my dreams took a turn and I found myself incarcerated in my dreams. Even in my dreams, I'm locked up. We definitely want people to empathise with the real cases of people who are in solitary confinement. There's no doubt about that. This is about trying to imagine what it's like for those people, and that is empathy.

Empathy is a word you hear a lot in reference to VR. There's even one CEO who calls his VR rigs empathy machines. And even though 6x9 is a super empathetic piece, Fran is not down with the hype. I don't think that the format necessarily means it is more empathetic. Audio, books, things which really use your imagination, you can really be incredibly powerful empathetic tools. Welcome to your cell. You're going to be here for 23 hours a day. Virtuality has a location based element to it. You are placed in a location. And so for stories where that's really important, like for instance, being in solitary confinement, it makes a lot of sense to be using that as the format. What my friend is really saying here is that she's unwilling to say VR is better than audio.

Fran's produced a number of groundbreaking interactive audio tours and radio pieces and podcasts. She was actually my boss back when I did a philosophy podcast for The Guardian. The reason Fran's so excited about VR is because of what you can do with sound. With 6x9, I was given a whole load of audio actuality from Frontline. They recorded a documentary in Maine's Supermax prison. They gave me 25 hours of just raw footage, which I went through and built soundscapes out of. So imagine two mono tracks that I then stick in the corridor outside you. Then there's a light behind you that's buzzing all the time.

There's a toilet dripping in the corner all the time. You've got room tone. And then on top of that, scoring it as another layer. And then on top of that, you've got the seven voices around you. And as you move your head, all of those things move to give you a kind of sense of space. We can create really interesting sonic environments. And as you move your head, all of those things move to give you a kind of sense of space. We can create really interesting sonic environments.

Fran just might not be the right person to do the hard sell for VR. Lucky for her, Robert De Niro, the guy who founded the Tribeca Film Festival, went on Jimmy Fallon and raved about 6x9 after she put a pair of goggles on him. The thing that I was thinking of is that, you know, like I was looking down and I was looking at the door where there's a window where the guard passes and stuff. You trying to escape? No, no. But I wanted to get up

and go over there. And if I got up and I was in a situation like there's a step or something I could trip because you forget that you're not. It's not real. As for me, I'm still on the fence. While I really like Fran's piece and many of the others in the festival, the wonder wears off pretty quickly. The VR experience itself just feels contrived and clunky.

But I do agree with Fran. The best time to be working in a new format is when it's brand new and experimental. And the rules haven't yet been established. You've got to get over what it looks like and the technology that's just going to move really, really quickly. It's like us writing off podcasts 10 years ago because it was difficult to download them. Do you remember we had to download them onto our computers? You had to plug in your iPod.

You had to transfer them across. You couldn't stream them. It was a real pain in the arse. You just have to wait for the technology to, like, catch up so you can stream them and you don't... It's just not all of that fappery. Now, the same is going to happen I don't know if it will happen exactly as virtual reality but it certainly is not going to be

these kind of clunking great plastic things that you know you have to stick your phones into and I mean apps I mean it's ridiculously um kind of impractical at the moment but I think when you see good pieces you you realise the kind of storytelling potential. It's really exciting. In 1968, Sony released the CV2400 Portapak, the world's first portable video camera. And people started talking about video the way they talk about virtual reality today. I think what people need to understand about video is how revolutionary it was. It looked and felt so real in a way that film footage didn't at the time. That's Ginny Raskin. She and her husband John Nealon are the co-directors of a new documentary about this moment in

video history. It's called Here Come the Video Freaks. The Video Freaks were a group of artists and activists who came together in the late 60s to do stuff with video. Is there still badass around? Of course, it all began at Woodstock. This is where David Court and Perry Teasdale crossed paths and joined forces.

Neither one of them shot any video of the music. Today, this makes them laugh, but I can't help but imagine that on the way back to New York City, someone felt a little stupid. But the interviews they did do with some of the attendees at Woodstock are incredible. I got a guy with a lamb. So you were telling me why you, you can't, what, did you come here for a reason? Yeah, very definitely. There's a revolution going on that's different than most people realize.

When they went to Woodstock, I think they had a sense, although I don't think they knew it really yet, that they had something kind of revolutionary on their hands with this equipment. And the big thing was that they could, it was cheap, it was portable, and that they could play it back and they could show people what they were seeing at the time. And that inspired them and the people they were filming to have it be more of an interactive conversational experience. They were

having fun with the actual process of you know shooting tapes. Does he love me? Well, he could love you. And that's why you shouldn't turn your stomach into a grave. It sets the stage for what their approach was throughout all their work, which was really going directly to the people that they were interested in and having conversations with them, not trying to capture something in, you know, an objective news kind of way. But the objective newsy people wanted a piece of the video freaks. There was this young executive at CBS.

His name was Don West. And he had heard through, the story is that it was, you know, a hippie that worked in the mailroom told him that there were these few guys with video cameras at Woodstock shooting the crowds. And he managed to get in touch with them through this hippie mailroom guy

and went down to their loft in Soho, where a few of them were living together at the time, and just asked to see the footage. And they showed it to him, and he was blown away and saw the potential for something different. And that was the beginning of a partnership. With CBS's support, the video freaks got a van and set out to put the real America on tape. They recorded countercultural activists like Abby Hoffman.

Dynamite, lollipops, acid, dope, everything. They'll probably have the CIA protecting people like us. And Black Panther, Fred Hampton. Just weeks before he was murdered by the police. I thought there was a revolution going on in America, and I wanted to show what that was. I want the real world. I want to capture the real world in a television format. That's Don West, the CBS executive who thought America was ready to watch the video freaks

after, say, a half hour of Walter Cronkite. He thought that he would bring together a group of young people that you couldn't really call them journalists because none of them necessarily had that background. But, you know, there were some of them were artists, some were teachers, some were more kind of techie folks. And he thought that they would come together and with his guidance and experience, put together a pilot that would then be picked up by CBS and become a series that would cover the counterculture and that the country was ready to see this and see He was wrong. You know, he was fired. All it took was one screening.

This was the end of his career at CBS. The CBS brass hated the stuff Don West showed them so much that they told the video freaks they could keep the equipment because obviously CBS would never need video. And while the video that most of us can shoot today on our phones meets network standards, director Jenny Raskin hopes her film shows us that when it comes to the way we use video, not much has actually changed.

In recent iterations of digital video, I think there's potential to create aesthetic images with video using with color and depth of field and all kinds of things that weren't, I mean, were, you know, video freaks never would have dreamed of and it wasn't on their radar at all. So in that sense, things have changed really dramatically. But how are people actually using it, the stories they're capturing? different, that you still have that flexibility and accessibility and, you know, just direct connection, I guess, with your subjects that they discovered. You know, we are directly linked to these kind of pioneers of media. The other night, I was doing some research for this episode. I was trying to find out what Facebook's plans are for the Oculus Rift,

the virtual reality company that it spent billions on in 2014, when an ad popped up for the Mevo, the world's first video camera with integrated Facebook Live streaming. It was like Mark Zuckerberg was sending me a personal reminder to get real. In a post-format world, there's no escaping the platform. It's hard not to feel anxious if you're a member of this previous media and you just see something so much bigger come along that has so much less need for you. For the past few years, John Herman's been tracking the steady rise of the platform, watching in horror as it devours all other media. When you talk about a platform

in pre-software terms, you're just talking about a place from which you can be heard. When you talk about a platform in the sense of a big internet platform, you're talking about a place that contains a thousand other places that you can climb on top of and be heard. And it's just a total scale shift. There is no real way to come to terms with that that isn't disorienting. John is now writing about media and technology at the New York Times. But in many ways, his pieces are just a continuation of something he started at The All, an amazing series he called The Content Wars. I'd been writing about tech and media stuff at BuzzFeed,

one of the bigger venture-funded websites. And then I went to The All, which is completely independent, small, and really financially, at least, outside of that part of the industry. So I went from being in the middle of this whole story about social media and the media before it and how it was all blending together to watching it from like sort of the margins. And that made everything just more stark. And so for whatever reason, it just became like urgent then to talk and talk and talk about Facebook and Twitter and Google and Snapchat and whatever else was just sort of like sweeping into what we thought of as media. I mean, I'd be lying if I said that a lot of this wasn't autobiographical. It's you put a bunch of reporters in a bar or people who work in video production or probably podcasting. I don't know.

They will talk about how they feel like they work for someone else. They don't work for the companies they work for on paper. They work for the platforms that those companies sort of relate to. And this was a joke a few years ago. It's like, oh, do we all work for Twitter now? We're spending all day putting news on Twitter. And then you joke a year after that, like, oh, you know, all our views and all our traffic is coming from Facebook. I guess we work for Facebook now. But it's not really a joke as much anymore. It's no secret how most media orgs really feel about Facebook.

The Economist recently put Mark Zuckerberg and Roman Emperor Garb on a cover. But for John, Facebook is more Borg than Caligula. I don't think there's anything nefarious in the way platforms behave, I think they behave in incredibly predictable ways. Overall, they are trying to get more people to use their things more. And that's largely the business they're in. So when a platform says, we want to work with you, we want to make deals with you we want to make it easier for you to work in our world they mean it because that helps them and because it helps them and because they are such a powerful force in the world now it to some extent helps you to do that

i don't think i i think you'll find very few full holdouts now, at least in the professional media industry. There are lots of people who are like, I can't believe we're giving so much power to these companies that have interests that might not align with ours. There are very few people in positions of power who are saying, we're not going to participate. We're abstaining. In a platform world, though, there's no such thing as a partnership. I think the big mistake that people make in thinking about the relationship between a publication and a platform or a channel and a platform or whatever, is that this is a partnership in any sort of familiar way. The scale is so different. The power is just so vastly out of whack that to call it a partnership is sort of like a

comforting lie, I guess. What made a media organization a business was its control over its audience. Whether it was a list of subscribers it charged or an audience of people it could sell ads against, it had its people. If it was a newspaper, it might have served a place. If it was a radio show, it might have served people who like certain kinds of music. Now, these platforms contain thousands of different audiences. They don't even think of them that way. Facebook has somewhere north of one and a half billion users right now, which contains basically every plausible audience of people.

But they experience all the different things they like and read and listen to and watch on that platform through the same basic lens. The only company that truly owns the Facebook audience is Facebook. Now, as much as all this sounds like media bubble inside baseball, there's just so much more at stake than mere revenue-sharing models. What John Herman wants us to understand is that the platform has already become our public square. And this is just the beginning.

I feel like the word platform is one that people are going to use a lot more, and it's going to become part of political speech. Platforms are now hosting incredibly important conversations about the election, about what we bomb next, about why people are dying. And that's where the platform sits now. It is the venue for culture. It is the venue for information. And it's not clear what motivates them to make that work correctly. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Platform of the Real.

This episode was produced by myself, and it featured John Herman, Francesca Panetta, and Jenny Raskin. For more information on how to visit The Guardian's virtual reality experience, go to theguardian.com slash solitary dash VR. Just visit their website. They'll explain everything. And for more information on the new documentary, Here Come the Video Freaks, go to videofreaksfilm.com. That's video, F-R-E-E-X-F-I-L-M dot com. There you can find out about future screenings and future digital releases. And I highly recommend you go back to the all and read John Herman's Content Wars series.