Netflix pushes back against content intolerance
Morning peeps. This is Subculture Zero, where we cherry pick media and culture trends to review so that you don’t have to dumpster dive on Twitter.
Going on this week:
🎥 Netflix pushes back against woke intolerance in their ranks
📡 The ACLU is lucky Amber Heard never paid up
🔷 Culture Bytes: Biden coins the term “Ultra-MAGA;” Twitter engineer acknowledges censorship of politically right content; free speech wins a legal battle against compelling the use of pronouns
The Big Idea
Media is standing up to content intolerance
Last week, Netflix did the unthinkable: They resisted content intolerance brewing among woke activists within. Netflix, besieged by activists flying “Hateflix” signs in front of the office and employees demanding the removal of various content, finally took action.
They updated their culture memo to reflect an attitude change within. You might be surprised at the changes:
Changed: Headline from “Netflix Culture” to “Netflix Culture—Seeking Excellence”
Added: “Not everyone will like — or agree with — everything on our service…. While every title is different, we approach them based on the same set of principles: we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”
Added: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”
Mic drop.
So where did they get the balls?
3 possibilities come to mind…
Netflix is hemorrhaging money. Perhaps woke
propagandaprogramming isn’t hitting the spot for viewers, especially in the face of competition from independent creators on YouTube who don’t have any f’s to give about political correctness. So maybe, pivot or die.Perhaps Elon Musk’s unapologetic defense of free speech emboldened the shift back toward users deciding for themselves what to watch.
Dave Chapelle. When your media company is up to its eyeballs in Twitter mobs trying to oust your highest-earning comedian, cancel culture gets old real fast.
So which of these inspired the resistance?
We’d say dealer’s choice.
But how did we get here?
Pre-Elon/Twitter, only a smattering of companies pushed back against woke activism seeking to integrate ideology and work. Activist employees increasingly expect paid time off to protest, “check your privilege” sessions at work, company Slack channels dedicated to social justice, etc.
The Coinbase culture memo of 2020 was the shots fired of anti-woke resistance. When CEO Brian Armstrong told employees to leave their politics at home or take an exit package, mainstream media went bananas. Vice, for one, claimed “Coinbase is showing employees with a conscience the door.”
📈Outcome? Just 5% of employees took the exit option, and Coinbase went public seven months later in one of the 10 largest IPOs in US history.
Software darling Basecamp announced that social and political discussion would have no place on company Slack channels because this distracts from work.
📉Outcome? A third of their employees felt “silenced” by the company’s focus on—well, work—and quit.
Shopify also opted out of “moralistic overreach.” CEO Tobi Lutki reminded employees that this is a business—not a family. And while Shopify “believes in liberal values,” he said “employees who engage ‘in endless Slack trolling, victimhood thinking, us-vs-them divisiveness, and zero sum thinking must be seen for the threat they are.’"
🤨Outcome? Unclear.
Bottom line: this looks like a case of know-your-audience.
The crypto industry can pull off resistance to a hijacking. Blockchains, after all, are literally built for decentralization. Resisting the influence of forces who want to tell others how to think and feel is what decentralized protocols were born to do.
Traditional software startups like Basecamp? These are the internet incumbents. The establishment. And they’re chock-full of the “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” crowd who live in fear of damaging their mental health with exposure to other opinions.
What’s next?
If Netflix can stop their financial freefall by putting this cultural stake in the ground, it will definitely set a precedent. Now if only news media could tell employees that tolerating opposing views is part of their job…
The ACLU is lucky Amber Heard never paid up
An interesting element of Johnny Depp’s defamation case against Amber Heard is the provenance of Amber’s Washington Post op-ed. We now know that she didn’t write it—the ACLU did. And Amber pledged to donate $3.5 million.
But Amber never actually fulfilled the pledge. We can’t say there was an explicit quid-pro-quo where the ACLU made her the face of domestic abuse in exchange for a donation. But we can say both parties stood to gain.
The ACLU’s principles have been on the slide for a while now. Ira Glasser, Former ACLU Executive Director recently told Bill Maher how the org—once a staunch defender of free speech and civil liberties—is now more interested in political games.
The current ACLU Head Anthony Romero even said: “I reject we need an entrance exam on civil liberties to establish the bona fides needed to work here.”
Umm…Aren’t you guys called the “American Civil Liberties Union?”
But back to the point. The good news for the ACLU is Amber Heard never paid up.
They got played.
Why’s that good?
Getting played by Amber isn’t a good look, but it’s better than being complicit in a hoax.
Either way, I’d be curious what Ira Glasser thinks of this unholy alliance. He might just see it as another step in the ACLU’s descent from defending speech into developing the narrative.
CULTURE BYTES
Biden coined a woke-tastic PR term after 6 months of research: “Ultra Maga”— describing extreme factions in the Republican party whose influence is allegedly growing. Any humanities majors out there afraid you won’t be employable without an engineering degree? Not to worry—plenty of career options out there coining buzz words for the government.
A court determined that a Kansas teacher will not be legally forced to use students’ preferred pronouns.
Of course, the teacher can still choose to use the pronouns. Just won’t be legally compelled to. And those of us with liberal values have well-documented feelings about choice (especially in light of the recent Roe V. Wade debates). In other words, we have feelings about not being forced to spawn things we don’t want to spawn – whether those things are babies, words, or what have you.
A Twitter engineer went on what he thought was on a date. That was his first mistake.
It was a sting.
Then, he admitted on camera that at Twitter, “we’re actually censoring the right and not the left.” Yeah, everyone knows that already.
But the admission provided some moral relief to the hoards of people that Twitter’s been gaslighting for years. Nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth: No, content moderation is not about “hate speech;” it’s about dissenting speech.
There probably won’t be a second date.