Google sucks, Snow White is woke in the wrong way and streaming went backwards.
And it's all for the same reason.
And it's all for the same reason.
Google REALLY sucks. Use something else
A few days ago I wanted to share a post I wrote years ago on my main blog, titled "NO, it's not maths and tech specialists who need Hippocratic Oath".
I didn't remember the link or the publication date of that post. So, being almost certain that there are no other posts there with the word "Oath" in their title, I automatically typed "Oath site:stop.zona-m.net" in Google search bar, to retrieve that link (in case you don't know, adding "site:DOMAIN_NAME" to any search string tells the search engine to only search for that string inside that one website).
With such a specific, site-limited query, the first result of any search engine worth its name and stocks should have been title and link of that post, right? Instead, Google failed:
How could that happen? That post DOES exist, is only five years old (more on "only" in a moment), and I know for sure that that Google had indexed my whole website at least once since then. Fact is, Google failed to do the right thing, unlike DuckDuckGo which, answering the exact same query showed my post where it belongs, at the top of its list. As you can see comparing the screenshot above with the corresponding page of my blog archive:
all Google managed to do was to list, in this order:
the index page of my website for the posts in the "DigiWorld" category
This proves that Google HAD all it needed to see, index and show that post. Still, it showed , everything "around" my post, except the post itself, behaving like a Table of Contents that said "Chapter Three is before Chapter Four and after Chapter Two" instead of "Chapter Three starts at page 42". How dumb and confusing is that? Luckily, DuckDuckGo did the Right Thing.
Of course, nothing of this is new. This is just another proof that, as I and others were already reporting in 2018, Google deliberately but without any recognizable criterion, forgets lots of "old" pages. When it doesn't fills screens with AI-driven crap, that is, which is bad in more ways than we can count.
How old are your web pages? For REAL, I mean
Google's obsession for "newness" is bad also because it pushes websites to falsify themselves.
Back in 2011, I wrote a roundup of six Linux file managers for the LinuxFormat magazine, which is still readable online with my byline at TechRadar, a sister publication of the same group. Thirteen years are an eternity in software, and yet that piece is still relevant now, for one specific reason: its date, which as of August 26th, 2024 reads "last updated August 3, 2021". Now, I would not mind at all if somebody had updated that piece without my knowledge. Problem is, it was not updated, as you can quickly verify by yourself, by just checking the versions numbers of the programs reviewed. As of August 26th, 2024, that article "last updated August 3, 2021" is still about version 0.8.0 of 4Pane (now it's 8.0) and version 2.32 of Nautilus (which was renamed years ago and is now at version 46).
On the same note, I remember seeing online articles dated e.g. "November 2023", without any "last updated" notice, but with lots of reader comments at least five years older. With both them and my roundup, by far the most likely explanation of those misleading date is that they were falsified years after publication, just to make Google keep them in its index. Not good.
Whatever. Just stop using Google. Nothing to find there anymore. Let's talk of Snow White, instead.
The REAL problem behind Woke Snow White
In the unlikely case that you got distracted by petty issues like the climate crisis, Gaza or Ukraine, there is a serious crisis unraveling about... the wokeness of Disney's next Snow White movie, due next year. After a summary of that crucial topic, the article moves to the more important issue of whether "this revamp is really needed", or not.
Micro rant, skip to next paragraph if you want: as far as I am concerned, that revamp is not needed at all period, regardless of wokeness or lack thereof. I won't see that movie for the same reason I never bothered with the sequels of Highlander, Back to the Future, or anything Star Wars after the first two trilogies. To me, certain stories are OK as they were told the first time with a defined end, and obsessively repackaging just them specifically to make money isn't interesting. If Hollywood believes that real creativity, diversity and inclusivity are important, which of course they are, I'd rather have them produce really new or previously unknown stories about, or by, people and places that were always ignored or misrepresented before.
But never mind the previous paragraph. The really important reason to be bothered about the new Snow White movie by Disney is the same thing that should bother everybody about Harry Potter novels and J.K. Rowling, regardless, again, of whatever one thinks of "wokeness".
The problem with the allegedly woke Snow White that I care about even if I'm not going to watch that movie is the fact that "Snow White or Frozen, it's all the same", because it's all from Disney and only Disney all the time (including allegedly woke mermaid castings). The problem is the fact that everybody else trying to create anything that directly takes from that movie will be sued to bankruptcy, even if their version, woke or not who cares, will be better than anything Disney could do.
Appreciation that this happens in a "free market" is left as exercise for the reader. My first concern is the monopoly on "imposing a canon as a way to grab and hold (cultural) power", more and for longer than any impact a single movie may have. Because what copyright lobbies really fight, consciously or not, is not piracy of already published works: it's the very possibility to make future movies or books, that is to make money, but also new ideas and cultural models, that they couldn't control.
Ditto for lots of stories about Harry Potter and everything else Disney, as well as stories about Middle Earth, Tin Tin, Poirot, Asterix, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond etc... that, for the same reasons, must remain well below the radar, confined in fan fiction communities. This sucks just as Google canceling websites, for the same reason. Which brings us to streaming.
The Dark Streaming ages
Another things that really sucks and is really gone too far is this concept that one should subscribe (1) for months, if not one year to some streaming platform, even if all they want to watch on that platform is one movie. Me, I'd love to watch with my kids The In-Laws, in all its impeccable “serpentine” madness. But I'll wait till some TV channel reruns it, because The In-Laws is only available on streaming platforms I am not already subscribed to. I am not making more subscriptions, even if they have free trial periods, just to watch ONE, forty-five years old movie, that should already be in the public domain.
This is terribly stupid, and would remain so even if the main problem I explain in the last paragraph didn't exist. It's very wasteful, and way too complicated to be sustainable for long anyway. It must end now, in two ways. First, there must be one, really quick, simple and privacy-friendly way to pay to see just one movie, on any device, regardless of who streams it. Like, you know, those obsolete places where people could go without ever knowing who owned them, and watch just the movie they wanted, all without being tracked by digital payments (all right, movie teathers would be better if they didn't run 20+ minutes of spots before the movie and confiscated all smartphones at the gate, but you know what I mean).
Second, any form of "out of print" must disappear. You make a movie, you get exclusive rights (for 10, 15 years top, surely no 70!) to make money off it in any way. That's fair. But if you stop distributing that movie, even to people willing to pay for it, at no higher prices than your newer movies, you lose those rights, and that movie automatically goes in the public domain. Even if it happens one month after release. Ditto for e-books, music or any other "content", of course. This is what people should see right before any movie, song, book… is taken offline:
Connecting the dots
What do Google's selective amnesias, monopoly on hypothetical future movies and past movies locked by streaming have in common? The fact that they are all ways in which great works are or become hidden way too soon for the common good, that's what. There are surely thousands of great cultural works of any kind that never benefit all the people they could, for this reason only.
Instead, by tolerating laws that make copyright last forever or extend it beyond decency like the DMCA, and an ignorance that brings "Digital Dark Ages", we keep alive a world where only the big guys can reinvent old stories, all in the name of a "creativity" that is more and more mere self-looting their own basements:
There are plenty of NGOs and cultural institutions that fight this madness worldwide, and it's high time that they become a real mass movement. So, as material for a follow-up post, please write your favorite one(s) in the comments, or tell me about them by email.
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