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CineSource, YouTube and the Beheading Videos by Doniphan Blair
This is a video-rich article, featuring a three-and-a-half minute webdoc, produced by CineSource, about our publisher's attempt to meet a YouTube representative and discuss media ethics and strategy after the "Beheading Videos" of August, 2014.
WHEN YOUTUBE BROKE THE 'JAMES FOLEY BEHEADING VIDEO' ON AUG 14th
—inadvertently, of course, given they're the planet's premiere DIY station, located just south of the San Francisco International Airport in San Bruno, where all the shows, channels and web snippits, or webits, are uploaded by viewers at a rate of 100 hours a minute (see YouTube Stats)—it raced viewers to the cutting edge, as it were, of information delivery.
Still from the brutal 'James Foley Beheading Video'. photo: 'courtesy' ISIL
Within 24 hours, however, YouTube had backed off a bit, scrubbed the offensive footage, in accord with the Foley family's wishes and a "Don't Feed the Dragon" strategy, not to mention that gratuitous violence violates YouTubes terms of service, which the terrorists did in fact sign.
YouTube used to be helmed by Salar Kamangar, Google's seventh employee, who took over when they bought the company for 1.65 billion, comparatively cheap in retrospect. As an Iranian-America who attended Stanford, he should have been able to locate at least one filmmaker or philosopher from Iran, where Shi'a clerics have never outlawed images, to provide some insight into fording this raging religious and media-ethics river.
Alas, by February of 2014, Kamangar had been replaced by Susan Wojcicki, sister-in-law of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
The thing is: Radical Sunnis adore intimidating other Islamists as well as the West with their brutal displays of death iconography, so why assist their efforts, even though the barbaric scenes of Foley's decapitation are available elsewhere?
Most internet corporations planned to scrub the web of the Foley video, noted the Associated Press, making the event also a test for Twitter, which "hastily adopted a new policy giving family members the ability to get images of a relative’s death removed."
"Denying the terrorists a cheap propaganda victory requires the companies to steer a careful course between being used passively and being baited into knee-jerk action," opined Forbes.com. "In its handling of the latest video, the one documenting the murder of [Steven] Sotloff [the second journalist beheaded, on Sept 2nd], YouTube has managed to do just that."
Certainly, First Amendment absolutists can accept some common sense limitations on free speech.
Ex-YouTube CEO, Salar Kamangar, an Iranian-America, on a good day at the office. photo: courtesy Google
Point well-taken. But is that the best idea available? Should we censor the "art" of ISIS?
By the way, the radical group should surely be called ISIL, so that we don't abet their linguistic decapitation of the Middle East's ancient goddess of love or the many companies named Isis, which are also experiencing identity-collapse.
As it happens, ISIL prides itself on censoring ALL art and music other than in its own propaganda, which is comparatively well-produced since they see no hypocrisy in simultaneously borrowing every technique possible from the very art they outlaw, including using music and human figuration.
Hello? The Leni Riefenstahl argument, which used to rage at my film school, especially among Jewish students and teachers?!? Should we censor "Triumph of the Will" (1935), Riefenstahl's absurdly aesthetic film about marching morons, or should we LOOK at it—very closely—and RESPOND to it?
By now, we have a century of studying anti-art art. The Futurists and Dadaists as well as the Punks and Anarchists shed some light, though they are nothing like ISIL's art-obliterators.
Wartime kill images were censored and self-censored by the press until Vietnam, with Holocaust imagery restricted even further. Still, the grotesque skeletons, lines of naked people and body-filled pits eventually "came out" in films, museums and books, where all could examine and take note.
War is first and foremost philosophy, and genocide most of all. Hence, shouldn't we try to crack the genocideer's code, to push their buttons, as ISIL is now pushing ours? Indeed, an excellent way to palpate for peoples' buttons is through their art.
Sure, simple pornography of big-breast
Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako Timbuktu dives into the radical Islamist versus Sufi musician story in 'Timbuktu' his excellent 2014 French-Mauritanian co-production. photo: courtesy A. Sissako
ed blondes, or the burgeoning Arab porn sector, may be already be pushing their buttons as hard as possible, especially since Islamist neighborhoods and towns across the Middle East now enjoy almost full Internet penetration, as it were.
But porn is designed to degrade, the opposite of the highly romantic sex of "1001 Arabian Nights" or pre-Islamic poets whose poems, painted in gold on silk banners, hung around the polytheist Ka'aba Stone, now the sacred center of Islam?
Wouldn't it be better, perhaps, to leave the beheading videos up, cover them with YouTube's seven variations of advertising banners and point the viewer to equally compelling art—more speech instead of censored speech, as the saying goes?
How about a contemporary Arab rapper, of which there are thousands from Morocco to Iraq, rapping as he—or she!—races across the desert, in a Humvee rather than on a horse, rapping about the inalienable rights of ALL humans to enjoy their preferred art?
Or perhaps a dinner party, where an IT worker, an Islamist and a Sufi get into a raging argument about Muhammad only to be interrupted by their hostess who sets them, all men this time, straight.
Historians, of both the East and West, tell us that Muhammad and his first wife, Khadija, were incredibly romantic and not in the macho manner ISILers would have their minions believe.
Over ten years Muhammad's senior, his boss, in fact, and the matriarch of a wealthy Meccan business family, Khadija chose Muhammad for marriage. She also produced most of his children, all girls—which is oddly symbolic for the patriarch of a major monotheism.
The fourth most popular video on YouTube is the personal and dramatic 'Charlie Bit My Finger, Again!' photo: courtesy YouTube
Moreover, Khadija so respected her beloved, she granted him paid leave, one month a year to meditate in the mountains, and when he returned one year with his vision for the fresh monotheism, she "submitted" and became the first Muslim.
The ballad of Muhammad and Khadija is incredibly cinematic, if anyone had the wherewithal to defy assassination threats to make it.
What ISIL clerics and scholars, as well as Western academics and feminists, don't quite get is that the Mecca of Muhammad's day was collapsing into matriarchal and polytheist chaos. Khadija was a reform-minded matriarch who helped her husband effect the massive cultural evolution to patriarchal monotheism, which was innovative for its day.
The basic symbol of monotheism is oneness: the universe is one, humans are one species, we are equal under one (local) law. This suggests we go by one standard of freedom of speech.
If Google doesn't have a longterm "art war" strategy, it better start digging fast because we need one, desperately. We need cutting-edge art and culture to fight ISIL philosophically before the cancer of militarism metastasizes further.
We need cutting-edge culture to compete for the eyeballs of Muslim twenty-somethings who feel so degraded and disenfranchised that their most romantic dream is to fly to Turkey, cross into Syria or Iraq and help kill Shi'a, Christians, Kurds and polytheists.
You'd think, with the most popular video in history, Psy's 'Gangnam Style', two billion views and counting, Google might be able to find a hi-rez photo... photo: courtesy Psy
Google must intervene simply because they're the big boy on the block. It's unseemly—much more than showing beheading videos—to be so massively influential and wealthy while dodging the dilemma of the day going down right in your neighborhood or data banks.
Just how big is Google's YouTube, anyway?
Well, BBC News, which claims the most single-entity viewers in the world gets a quarter billion viewers a week—that's under 40 million a day—while YouTube has up to A BILLION A DAY!
Indeed, YouTube and Netflix, the other massive Silicon Valley station, which is 45 miles to the south in Los Gatos, compose fully half of North American Internet traffic, 50.31%, to be exact, during peak hours. Their closest rivals, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video, get a mere 1.29% and 1.61% of downloads, respectively.
Admittedly, millions of those YouTube views were folks watching cat videos or "Charlie Bit My Finger Again" (2007), which has over 741 million hits and is number four on the "Viral Hit Parade". Next is Jennifer Lopez's "Bad On the Floor" (768 million), Justin Bieber's "Baby" (one billion) and finally, the all-time most popular video in history, Psy's "Gangham Style", with over two bill—props to K-Pop's world conquest!
Perhaps K-Pop's studio chiefs might have some insight into addressing the genocideer-video problem.
Of course, YouTube also features a near-infinite number of 'how-to" videos, like those by Lyndsay, a slight and sardonic young woman out of Berkeley, California, who has her own fingernail art channel and earns a nice income from YouTube ads.
YouTube also provides access to such esoteria as Skip James's "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues" (950,000 views) and Joel Singer's "Sebali Cremation" (2014), see CineSource article, a luscious investigation of a Balinese ritual art (with 181 views thus far).
Which brings us to the value of low-hit videos and unbreaking news. Given CineSource only garners two to three thousand readers daily, aren't we just a local blog? Despite publishing for six years and being the only media journal in Northern California, is it our place to investigate, report on and engage YouTube, let alone Google?
CineSource Publisher trying to convince YouTube Receptionist, who gave her name as No. 42603, to let him to leave his business card for a press rep, see video. photo: T. Hafter
After no response from emails to their press office four times over the past year, I went down to YouTube's corporate headquarters in San Bruno to see if, in person, I might obtain an appointment.
We weren't allowed in the lobby. Evidently, while YouTube started DIY and was built entirely on DIY production, it doesn't favor DIY journalism. As with the egalitarianism of Burning Man: we are all one on the desert floor but as soon as you step up into an "art car," you have crossed into private property.
YouTube is enacting art war in our name, since we are from its analog community. Given art war comes before regular war—and that art war is so central to ISIL—perhaps the time might have come to open up the discussion to alternative research and opinion.
I started researching Islam when I traveled across it in the '70s; I began looking at Art War when Ancient Currents Gallery, where I worked, did a show in 1978; and I began writing about both in my "Art Fatwa" in 2001 and "What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East" in 2005.
Although the James Foley and Steven Sotloff beheading videos are far more brutal and prosaic art war than what the Futurists or Dadaists dreamed up, they started the cultural investigation that would allow us to respond coherently. To paraphrase Timothy Leary when he explained why he accepted CIA funding to study the mind-control capacities of LSD: "If there is going to be an Art War, I want to be on the winning side."
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), and can be reached .Posted on Oct 08, 2014 - 02:09 AM