Proper Gander: Theroux the keyhole (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Louis Theroux has built up his career as a documentary-maker since the 1990s, with his trademark approach being to patiently spend time among society’s stranger subcultures to learn about what motivates the people within. The subjects of his latest film are prominent figures in the ‘manosphere’, a loose online network which upholds hard-line versions of masculinity. Netflix’s Inside The Manosphere follows Theroux as he meets influencers who have amassed millions of young male fans through their social media platforms, livestreams and podcasts. Their content extols their values of conspicuous wealth, sexism and conspiracy theories, with the influencers all living extravagant lifestyles and exuding confidence, giving their views plausibility among their impressionable followers.

In Marbella, Theroux visits Harrison Sullivan (aka HSTikkyTokky) and Ed Matthews, whose online content includes videos of macho fitness tips and ‘predator stings’ confronting alleged paedophiles. Sullivan becomes suspicious that Theroux is trying to catch him out and cuts short the time he agreed to spend being interviewed, although he later backtracks after his videos about their first meeting attract more clicks. While Sullivan and Matthews represent the ‘laddish’ style of influencer, Justin Waller from Louisiana is more measured, wearing tailored suits as he drives Theroux around in his Lamborghini. Waller’s material combines business advice with a disdain for feminism, saying women tend to prefer traditional family roles. He and his wife are in a ‘one-sided monogamous’ relationship, and it’s not him who’s monogamous. This arrangement is also a preference of the Miami-based influencer known as Myron Gaines, who claims women ‘want a guy that can lead them and dominate them’. Theroux sits in during Gaines’ Fresh & Fit podcast in which his female guests get objectified, belittled and embarrassed. As Theroux later comments, many of the influencers ‘advocate for traditional values while at the same time wanting to be seen with scantily-clad models’.

The confidence which influencers have in their derisory beliefs about women’s roles comes from their ‘red pill’ ideology. This is a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, which we’re told in this context means seeing through the mainstream media’s discrimination against men, although ‘redpilling’ is usually shorthand for adopting a far-right viewpoint. New Yorker Sneako is among the more politicised of the influencers Theroux meets. Alongside being a Muslim Trump-supporter, he claims satanists run the world, leaving clues in pictures of celebrities using ‘one eye’ symbolism and telling people such as singer Sam Smith to become transgender. Predictably, he adds that the aim of this satanic cabal is to establish a single global government. While Sneako denies this is Jewish, other influencers share the conviction that a small group of Jews are behind a plan to promote degeneracy through manipulating culture, especially gender politics.

The outlook spun by the influencers is really a convoluted way of enticing people to buy the financial products they have a stake in. Theroux tests one of Sullivan’s investment opportunities and loses most of the £500 he paid in. Sullivan is at least honest in admitting that what drives his material is what makes money for him rather than what is considered right or wrong. An example is when he says he was ‘clip-farming’ by including antisemitic content while not believing it, as he knew this would generate attention. Getting exposure in order to gain more supporters and therefore customers is the priority. The notion that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ would apparently be confirmed after Inside The Manosphere was released, with Sullivan accruing more followers because of the coverage it has given him, according to an article in the Metro (7 April), which itself represents more promotion.

As the focus of the show is Theroux meeting people, not much time is spent analysing the manosphere’s place in society. This approach either admirably allows the viewer to reach their own conclusions or disappointingly makes the programme feel shallow. Theroux posits how the upbringing of the influencers may have contributed to their mindset in that many of them lacked a supportive father figure, perhaps affecting their attitudes to relationships, such as ‘one-sided monogamy’. More widely, he says they are ‘products of a culture – growing up online in a world that’s changing at dizzying speed’ with long-established male roles challenged. He adds that they now project their trauma by ‘spewing hate’ to an audience of young men looking for something to feel they belong to, preferably with money to buy financial products. The fans of the influencers we see in the documentary clearly feel empowered by what their heroes advocate. Theroux recognises that while the influencers offer hope to troubled men, it comes with a belief that they are living in ‘a matrix purposely designed to make men fail’. He suggests ‘the matrix they rail against more accurately describes the algorithmic prison they’ve created for their followers, an illusion of endless wealth and power that actually only enriches a few at the top’.

The personal traumas which shaped the mindsets of each influencer and follower happened in a world which is ‘designed to make men fail’ (and women too, often in different ways). This is the divisive world of capitalism, driven by aspirations of wealth amid poverty and power amid powerlessness. They have misinterpreted this, though, and don’t identify the economic system itself as structurally creating (nearly all) people’s disadvantaged position, but instead blame the ‘matrix’ of feminism and a supposed Jewish cabal. This poisonous stance has proved lucrative for the influencers because it attracts attention online among vulnerable men, reinforcing a worrying association between wealth and bigotry. The confidence with which this mentality is promoted disguises its errors and contradictions, such as its ridiculous ‘evidence’ for a Jewish / satanic conspiracy and the hypocrisy of its attitudes to women. For an ideology apparently based on dogged independence it relies heavily on fan worship of the influencers. The ‘manosphere’ is both an expression of the alienation which comes with living in capitalist society and a dangerously misguided attempt at compensating for that alienation.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Lessons from Adolescence (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A little over a year since Mr Bates vs The Post Office reminded us that TV drama can still have an impact, Netflix’s Adolescence has also shaped debate in Parliament, online, in the media and round the proverbial water cooler at work. Adolescence has been particularly resonant because the issue of violence from young males which it raises feels both more emotive and widespread. The story centres on a 13-year-old boy who is accused of stabbing a girl from his school. Each episode covers an hour at intervals after the murder, with the first showing Jamie’s arrest at his home. Episode two follows the police’s initial visit to the children’s school, the third is a conversation between Jamie and a psychologist some months afterwards and the last episode looks at how the rest of his family are managing over a year later. The performances from Owen Cooper as Jamie and Stephen Graham as his father Eddie are particularly gripping, with Graham also co-creating and co-writing the series. Impressively, each episode was filmed in one continuous take, which must have involved intricately structuring and choreographing the scenes to get the camera and the actors in the right places at the right times.

The drama gives less emphasis to the details of the murder than to the circumstances around it, gradually bringing out the combination of reasons behind Jamie’s actions. His family isn’t portrayed as dysfunctional apart from his father’s anger, described as a generational trauma passed on to Jamie. His own anger is shown sparingly and as being fuelled by online culture. The ‘manosphere’ to which Jamie is drawn, of emojis, incels, influencers and abusive messages has led him to a view of women which leads to his crime. The script tends to understate the causes: Jamie is outwardly ‘normal’ rather than obviously aggressive. Online discourse isn’t explored in detail, other than several brief scenes where aspects of the ‘manosphere’ are mentioned, hinting at its links with far-right ideology. The meanings behind kidney bean emojis and ‘taking the red pill’ explained by the teenage characters would have been new to many viewers. An effect of this is to tell parents that they may not have understood the nature of online cultures their children are being tempted into, and how this can almost casually slide them into violence. In some ways, this is a modern version of past moral panics about the influence of horror comics, video nasties and computer games on young people, although this feels more serious, given today’s climate with the rise in knife crime and misogyny.

Much of the discussion sparked by Adolescence has concentrated on ‘toxic masculinity’, rather than another factor in what influenced Jamie. His school is depicted as a grim and tense place for children to learn in, taking into account that the scenes there are set only a few days after the murder. The teachers are depicted as policing behaviour more than teaching, while the regimented routines and drab walls aren’t much different from those of the police station or detention centre seen in other episodes. Our society’s institutions and environments encourage and reinforce alienation, with Jamie representing its extremes.

Adolescence isn’t a case study, although because it’s fiction perhaps it can be spoken about more openly than real cases. Its release was certainly timed well to contribute to a broader debate. In the same month, former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate, giving the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, said that today’s young men need more wholesome role models rather than ‘callous, manipulative and toxic influencers’ online. Also in March, the Centre of Social Justice published its Lost Boys report which describes an increasing divergence between the future prospects of boys and girls, with girls now more likely to later have higher qualifications and higher-paid employment.

Various right-wing vloggers (and Elon Musk) opined that Adolescence is liberal-lefty propaganda which demonises white males and distracts from the proportion of stabbings committed by black youths. Their dislike of the drama is presumably due in part to its criticisms of the ‘manosphere’ they represent. Right-wing commentators were also more likely than those on the left to say that it is being used by the government to justify legislation about regulating online activity. The Online Safety Act 2023 passed into law under the previous Conservative government, and its implementation is still in progress under Labour’s regime. The Prime Minister met with the series’ creators and backed MP Anneliese Midgley’s call for it to be screened in schools with the aim of helping to deter teenage boys from misogyny and aggression. Secondary schools are already obliged to include ‘Relationships and Sex Education’ on their curriculum and updated guidance to cover sexual violence is being planned. Even if the state’s approach of embracing the programme and saying they are taking action over the issues it raises is sincere rather than cynical, it’s still a better PR move than ignoring or disputing the drama.

Adolescence has, at least for a few weeks, connected together various attempts to address concerns about some young males. But to what extent can tightening up legislation about online activity or showing the series in schools or promoting different role models counter misogynistic violence? The context of the problem remains. Titling the drama ‘Adolescence’ points towards the root of the issue being with younger people, especially boys. However, the real cause is found with the social conditions which shape adolescence. Therefore deeper social change is needed, although this risks being ignored among the piecemeal reforms and proposals.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Mr Bates vs The Post Office was reviewed in the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Proper Gander: All over the shop (2025)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Netflix released Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy just before the Black Friday spending bonanza, since when we’ve also had the pre-Christmas push to shop and the post-Christmas sales aligning with retailers starting to stock up for Easter. While the documentary engagingly describes how capitalism turns us into hungry customers and consumers of short-lived commodities, predictably it’s not as subversive as it wants to appear.

As is the norm, the programme starts with a quick-fire round-up of what’s to come, which is largely interviews and clips of stock footage, archive news and content from vloggers. Between these are CGI scenes of panoramas of piles of rubbish (an idea recycled from the 2008 film Wall-E) and billboards displaying words like ‘buy’ and ‘consume’ (an idea recycled from the 1988 film They Live). AI is also invoked with the presenter being Sasha, apparently a disembodied expert on ‘how to succeed in business’. Sasha outlines ‘the five most important lessons in profit maximisation’, which provide a framework for the documentary, although ‘her’ presence quickly becomes annoying, perhaps deliberately.

The first of these lessons is ‘Sell More’, in which we’re introduced to the people interviewed throughout the programme, including ex-employees of corporations who became disillusioned after realising what the brands they were promoting really represent. Some particularly interesting contributions are made by Maren Costa, previously a ‘User Experience Designer’ with Amazon. She talks about her initial excitement at creating new ways to make products tempting (right down to the most effective font colour) and easier to buy (with ‘one click’), until she realised she was working within ‘an intentional, complex, highly refined science to get you to buy stuff’. Although the focus was on selling Amazon’s stock, Maren says ‘I don’t think we were ever thinking about where does all this stuff go?’ Buying tech or clothes tends to involve getting rid of whatever has been replaced, as described in the second section ‘Waste More’. Producers have known for a long time that shortening the lifespan of a commodity means that a new one will be bought sooner, increasing sales further. The most notorious example of this planned obsolescence was when the durability of incandescent lightbulbs was set by a cartel of companies in the 1920s. Another approach is to make it impossible to mend broken appliances, such as when the fixings on the cases of Apple iPhones changed so their backs couldn’t be unscrewed. Gadget manufacturers have even filed lawsuits against organisations such as iFixit to prevent their devices from being repaired. Items are often thrown away before they’re even used, as shown in footage of Amazon employees destroying serviceable goods because it’s cheaper to do this than redistribute them.

The third lesson ‘Lie More’ covers how we’re encouraged to believe that products are or can be recycled to distract us from their real environmental impact, not only how they end up adding to piles of waste, but also the CO2 emissions caused by their manufacture. If we have the impression that a brand has green credentials, we’re more likely to buy its merchandise. The practice of ‘greenwashing’ – pretending to be eco-friendly – is, according to Maren, a ‘double evil’ as companies are not only harming the environment, but also pacifying people. In the fourth section ‘Hide More’ we’re told about how the amount of waste generated by commodity production is disguised through the irresponsible ways it’s dealt with. Discarded items are moved across the planet to where it’s cheaper for them to be disposed of, such as countries without much legislation about handling hazardous scrap. Unfortunately, around this point the documentary loses momentum. The fifth section ‘Control More’ is very brief, despite it hinting at explaining the word ‘conspiracy’ in the show’s title. Maren says that staff at the highest level have to commit to ‘backing the company no matter what’, so after she spoke out about Amazon’s carbon emissions, she lost her job. ‘They don’t want anyone disrupting that story’ which presents a company as admirable even though it reinforces the damaging normality of pushing out more and more shoddy products which often end up littering beaches in Africa.

After over an hour of vividly highlighting problems, Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy doesn’t have much to say about solutions. It winds down with each of the interviewees giving glib optimistic lines which brush over the detail of what they previously described. The views of the writer and director Nic Stacey don’t seem to be any more thorough. When asked about how the problem of waste could be resolved, he said ‘companies need to creatively think about ways that they can extend the lives of the products they make. And we need policy change; governments can help put legislation in place to manage the end of life of a product’ (tinyurl.com/3fsuuenh). This hasn’t happened because it hasn’t been in the interests of the capitalist class which owns the companies, although their role isn’t explored in the documentary. There is little explanation of the overriding need for production to accumulate profit for those capitalists, which leads to practices such as manipulative advertising, planned obsolescence, greenwashing and making more refuse than can be handled. Nor is the wider economic context of the global commodity market sketched out, even though this underpins how companies have to operate. Two of those prominently criticised in the show are Apple and Amazon, and their Siri and Alexa virtual assistants sound similar to the dislikeable virtual presenter Sasha. Both companies are rivals of Netflix, who stream the documentary: Apple TV and Amazon’s Prime Video division compete with Netflix for subscribers, even though for many years, Netflix has relied on its data being hosted by the Amazon Web Services cloud. As Netflix is part of the same media market, it also has to follow ‘the five most important lessons in profit maximisation’ outlined by Sasha. So, it isn’t going to broadcast anything which delves too deeply into why.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Dukes And Rebukes (2023)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The royal family get enough coverage in the media without a need for fictional retellings of its excesses. Netflix’s ongoing series The Crown has been the most prominent, reframing the dynasty’s recent history in whatever way will win the most awards. In what looks like a dig at The Crown’s pretentiousness, Channel 4’s Prince Andrew: The Musical makes a song and dance of the life of the now-disgraced Duke of York, the eighth person in line to the throne. Andrew is played by comic actor Kieran Hodgson, who also wrote the show’s deft, droll script. He portrays ‘randy Andy’ as smarmy and self-aggrandising, enjoying an extravagant lifestyle because he’s ‘Elizabeth’s favourite son’ and doesn’t have the expectations of being the heir.

The show takes us through Andrew’s life with jaunty musical numbers and real archive footage narrated from the character’s perspective. We begin with the 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight, which Andrew reluctantly realises didn’t put him in a good light, before rewinding to his younger years, believing that he was a hero in the Falklands War. His marriage to Sarah Ferguson is presented as a transaction from which Sarah sought to benefit, much like her later attempt at selling access to Andrew to an undercover reporter. A role as a trade envoy gave ‘air miles Andy’ opportunities to continue his jet-setting ways, no sweat. The frothy format of a musical is supposed to be an impudent way of telling his story, but jars when the subject of sexual abuse comes up. After Andrew’s association with convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein became known and he was accused of sexual assault by Virginia Giuffre (the latter glossed over in the musical), he ‘stepped back from public duties’. He reached a financial settlement with Giuffre which (in a logically puzzling way) did not include an admission of guilt. The programme risks minimising the seriousness of the allegations against Andrew by putting them in the frivolous context of a musical. In it, Andrew makes the point that he’s a useful scapegoat to take attention away from the wrongdoings of the rest of the royals.

The show was commissioned as part of ‘a collection of irreverent, thought-provoking and hugely entertaining shows that no other broadcaster would air’, according to Ian Katz, Channel 4’s Chief Content Officer. This may have felt like a last throw of the dice for the channel which at the time was planned to be privatised, a decision since reversed.

Prince Andrew: The Musical isn’t the only Channel 4 show to present the royals in a cartoonish way, being close in tone to The Windsors, a sitcom which has been running since 2016. In both programmes, members of ‘the firm’ are characterised too loosely to be particularly insulting. In the musical, Munya Chawawa portrays Charles as a stern boss who tries to keep Andrew in line, and who also unfortunately reminds us of his infamous ‘tampon’ remark. The late queen was immune from being lampooned in either show, though, not appearing as a character. While Elizabeth was treated with too much veneration in the mainstream media to attract much criticism, the caricatures of Charles demonstrate that there’s less reverence for him, even now he’s the monarch.

Prince Andrew is probably secretly relieved that media attention has largely switched away from him to his mother, brother and now towards the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The latter’s criticisms of the attitudes of other royals towards her were the focus of last December’s documentary series, Harry & Meghan. This was hyped up enough to attract Netflix’s highest number of viewers in the UK for the year, although how many really did endure its almost six hours of self-promotion from the estranged and bitter Sussexes? Harry has since courted even more attention with his tell-all memoir Spare and another round of interviews, for which he’s no doubt received a princely sum of money. But this hasn’t bolstered his popularity, as measured by YouGov’s Royal Favourability Tracker, which has reported a drop in support for him as well as for the monarchy as a whole. Harry’s salacious confessions about drug-taking, being knocked to the floor by William, having frostbitten genitals and killing members of the Taliban have chipped away some of the mystique which the royals have traditionally attracted.

Being born into a life of privilege has damaged Harry and Andrew in different ways, raising the issue of what kind of institution produces lives like theirs. Questioning this can only be a good thing if it’s a step towards a wider rejection of the social system which includes having a monarchy. If the figureheads for capitalism are so dysfunctional, what does that say about the system? Presumably, the House of Windsor is hoping that the pomp and pageantry of Charles’ coronation in May will push away recent bad press and declines in popularity. Even if it does to some extent, more pointedly, the spectacle will be in stark contrast to the privations much of the country will still be trying to cope with. The coronation will be a reminder of the gulf between how the vast majority have to live and the indulgences of the elite.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: The Shape Of Things To Comet (2022)

Film Review from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Movies about giant lumps of space-rock crashing into the planet come round every few decades, some having more impact than others. The earliest was the hit 1916 Danish film The End Of The World, made within recent memory of a fly-past by Halley’s Comet. 1979’s flop Meteor drew on contemporary Cold War tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union, and was inspired by Project Icarus, a plan to strike a potentially incoming asteroid with missiles. More recently, these films have come back into our orbit every twenty years or so, and in pairs, with blockbusters Armageddon and Deep Impact (both 1998) turning impending catastrophe into a glossy spectacle. The latest two have switched emphasis more to how people on the ground might respond to such an event. 2020’s Greenland followed a family’s attempts to escape from the impact, although the only doomsday-from-space movie anyone’s been talking about lately is Netflix’s ratings smash Don’t Look Up.

Producer/director/writer Adam McKay wanted to make a film about climate change, and with leftist journalist David Sirota, developed the idea that the lack of media coverage about it is like a comet heading to Earth which no-one cares about. The end result keeps the bluntness of this metaphor, while focusing not as much on apathy as on how capitalist society’s priorities detract from dealing with the problem. Don’t Look Up was devised before the pandemic, which has now given its message another topical spin.

Astronomers Kate Dibiasky and Randall Mindy (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a comet six months away from striking the planet in an ‘extinction-level event’. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), head of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, arranges for them to present their findings to President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), who is dismissive and says that the government will ‘sit tight and assess’. Frustrated, Dibiasky and Mindy then take their apocalyptic discovery to a newspaper, which drops the story when it fails to generate enough internet traffic, and The Daily Rip, a vacuous talk show with an ethos of ‘keeping the bad news light’. On social media, Mindy trends as a ‘hot’ scientist, while Dibiasky is turned into a bitchy meme as a hysterical doom-monger. For the media, ratings and clicks are what’s important, rather than substance.

President Orlean only takes an interest in the looming end of the world when it becomes a convenient distraction from a sex scandal. She agrees a strategy to fire missiles at the comet, and because ‘Washington’s always gotta have a hero’, a gruff Colonel takes command of mission ‘American Savior’ to fly out and blast the comet away. In one of the movie’s cleverest scenes, the President explains how announcing this plan to the public will be pitched more like an advertising campaign for her government, filmed on a warship, ending with fireworks. The announcement hits its target, with the President’s approval rating reaching 99.1 percent, but the missiles don’t hit theirs. The launch is aborted when Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), creepy tech billionaire and prominent donor to Orlean’s party, finds out that the comet contains trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals. He comes up with a hasty and scientifically dodgy alternative plan to mine the comet, which gets support because of the jobs (ie, profits) it’s expected to create. Dibiasky and eventually Mindy realise that the problem can’t be resolved by working with the administration and corporations, and join and galvanise the ‘Just Look Up’ grassroots protest movement. This is countered by the government’s ‘Don’t Look Up’ campaign, complete with MAGA-style baseball caps. Isherwell’s plan fails, as does a probably sabotaged attempt by countries cut out of the mining deal, leaving the comet on its collision course.

Don’t Look Up isn’t at all subtle in its messages that protecting state power and the profits of big business are more important than saving the planet, and that the media trivialises and distracts from the issue. It’s refreshing to find such obvious anti-capitalist points made in a mainstream, widely watched movie, and it would be nice to think that its popularity is because of its subversive slant. The way the film satirises a government’s priorities is a bit blunted, though, as criticising a Trumpesque president is old hat these days. Its mistrust of the motives of tech companies is a blatant dig at the out-of-this-world ambitions of the likes of Elon Musk and, more pointedly, Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Netflix’s rival Amazon Prime Video. But while the film exposes some of the structures which hamper us in dealing with major problems, it doesn’t offer any viable alternative, and didn’t intend to. The ‘Just Look Up’ movement isn’t in a position to make real change, as it’s only a protest group shouting at those in power. The general public are relegated to background details, depicted as media-fed sheep or angry rioters, without their motivations being considered. The film risks being misanthropic by disparaging everyone, apart from scientists who stick to their principles: NASA is the only institution which isn’t lampooned. So, alongside its criticisms of society, the positive lesson in Don’t Look Up is to ‘follow the science’ concerning climate change and Covid, as well as any comet collisions. But as the film demonstrates, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it is shaped by the priorities of capitalist institutions like big business and the state, so ‘following the science’ always leads back round to what works within capitalism. The film doesn’t discuss this problem, though, and again it didn’t intend to. Unfortunately, Don’t Look Up’s critique of capitalism doesn’t go far enough, but still further than your average flick.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Whales, Scales and Fishy Tales (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Big waves were caused recently by the release on Netflix of the documentary Seaspiracy, which sets out to harpoon the supposedly sustainable global fishing and aquaculture industry. A furious backlash by industry insiders immediately ensued, accusing Netflix of screening ‘vegan propaganda’. Netflix however, keen to drag an increasingly vegan-oriented millennial audience away from YouTube, won’t care about treading on a few people’s raw sushi.

First-time film-makers Ali and Lucy Tabrizi travel the world to research the documentary, showing at times considerable courage in evading arrest, or indeed much worse. What they discover is shocking and designed to shock. It takes nerve to watch a whole dolphin pod being hacked to death with cleavers, even more to see real footage of humans being shot in the sea. Former slaves in Thailand relate being press-ganged and made to work at gunpoint on trawlers for years, and executed and thrown over the side if they refuse. The filmmakers have to flee in a car chase to the airport with a criminal gang in hot pursuit. An industry spokesperson at a trade show laughs and denies any such nonsense. EU ministers offer bland assurances. Environmental charities dodge the issue. This is an industry which, the documentary makes plain, will stop at nothing to prevent the public from knowing what really goes on.

This is an unregulated and often illegal industry in which vast factory ships trailing miles of floor-scraping nets drag the ocean for everything it contains, including not just the target fish but also ‘by-catch’, variously estimated at between 10 and 50 percent, which is then thrown back dead. The impact is global and catastrophic. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in 2010, instead of marine wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico being destroyed as predicted, it actually recovered, despite all the oil, because commercial fishing had been suspended. The tragedy and the irony is that the oceans would recover easily enough if humans would just leave them alone. More whales would help us too. Marine life is a huge carbon sink. A tree absorbs up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year. Each dead whale that sinks to the ocean floor sequesters 33 tons for centuries (Link).

The scale of marine destruction is not common knowledge. Catches are supposed to be ‘dolphin-safe’, and sustainable, and there are industry-approved labels to certify it. But the documentary makes clear that none of these certifications mean anything, because there is no way to enforce them. It’s too expensive for observers to go out with every boat and check, so they only have the captain’s word that no by-catch was destroyed in the process. Issuing agencies get paid by the industry to certify catches as ‘dolphin-safe’, a clear conflict of interests. ‘Sustainable’ doesn’t mean what we think either, that fish stocks are 100 percent healthy. Some species have seen population crashes of up to 90 percent, and ‘sustainable’ may only mean that they are being fished at just above extinction level.

Then there’s the fact that marine trawling is the biggest food-related carbon emitter after beef and lamb farming, equivalent to global air travel, and dwarfing that from pigs, chickens and grain crops (Link). And while we are encouraged to obsess about plastic straws and cotton buds, a media displacement strategy that George Monbiot, a contributor in the film, describes as ‘micro-consumerist bollocks’ (Link), fishing produces up to 800,000 tons of discarded heavyweight plastic fishing gear a year, making up approximately half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and destroying untold wildlife.

Monbiot lambasts the BBC for making nature programmes that never spotlight the destructive fishing industry (Link). In fact the BBC’s own Reality Check journalists went over Seaspiracy and failed to find much to criticise (bbc.in/3tiLqGu). There were some out-of-date statistics though, which gave ammunition to the doc’s detractors. Yet data is a perennial problem. You can’t just count fish in the sea like cows in a field, so fish stocks are guesses. Catches can remain level while stocks plummet, because of greater trawling efficiency. The documentary says 50 percent by-catch, other sources say 10 percent, but with no monitoring there is no way to know. The film perhaps has a motive to paint a bleak scenario, but the industry has an equally strong motive to dismiss all concerns. Who do you believe?

Just before Seaspiracy aired in March, New Scientist also looked at the global fishing industry (13 February). This article was slightly more upbeat, pointing to some small improvements, yet came to the same broad conclusions. Since 1950 the human population has gone up by 175 percent, but fishing by 750 percent. Despite three global agreements to stop the decline in fish stocks, almost nothing has been done to reverse the trend. And fish farming is no solution, because it’s a net consumer, not a producer of fish protein. More human-edible fish are fed into the aquaculture system as fish meal than come out as product, at a ratio of anywhere between 3:1 and for tuna, 20:1. And this is quite apart from the 22 million tons of fish – nearly 30 percent of the human-edible catch – fed to domestic livestock for the meat industry, once again with back-to-front protein ratios (Link).

So if industrial fishing is so bad, and fish farming is no answer, what’s the solution? Don’t eat fish, says the documentary. It’s true that the health benefits of fish are overrated, despite the NHS advice to eat more of it. Omega 3s aren’t made by fish, but by the algae they consume, so we could just make edible foods directly out of the algae.

But telling viewers not to eat fish is meaningless unless you also tell them not to eat animals or keep pets fed on them, or use products made with them, and in any case overlooks the bigger picture. The fishing industry is just one aspect of a spectacularly destructive global production system which operates the way it does because it makes money. And where money leads, destruction follows. As the fish stocks fall and the prices go up, the plundering will if anything increase. Capitalism is a war of profit against humans, profit against wildlife, profit against the planet, all for the benefit of a few billionaires, and changing your diet isn’t going to change that. The only thing that will is to get rid of capitalism, and share the world as a democratic cooperative. If you want to save the oceans, being vegan is not enough, you also have to be a revolutionary.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Revenue Streams (2018)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the internet came along, we’ve got used to having instant access to whatever information or services or media we want (or are supposed to want) whenever we want it. This easy availability has left many older ways of doing things lagging behind: online shopping is pushing out the high street, newspaper sales have declined as we increasingly turn to our smartphones for fake news, and traditional broadcast television has similarly been under threat. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 started to lose their market dominance when satellite and cable channels popped up, and now all of them have to compete with streaming media platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. These let us watch any of their programmes at any time (for a price), so waiting for a show to come up on a channel’s schedules now seems as old-fashioned as a squarial. 

 Younger people are particularly likely to embrace newer ways of watching telly. According to a recent report by Ofcom, teenagers and young adults now watch around 40 per cent less through old-school channels than they did seven years ago. This has meant fewer people watch the adverts between shows on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, with the consequence that their advertising revenue fell by 7 percent in the last year due to ad agencies turning to the internet. There’s less money in all of the terrestrial channels, who now spend 28 percent less on programming than they did twenty years ago. And for the first time, streaming media has overtaken older paid subscription channels in the race for customers. 

 There are now 15.4 million subscribers to Amazon Prime, Netflix and Now TV (nearly 40 percent of households in the UK) compared with the 15.1 million who pay for satellite or cable channels like Sky, Virgin and BT. However, the pay channels are still raking in much more dough than their online rivals: yearly revenues for pay channels are £6.4 billion compared with a mere £895 million for streaming services (Link.).  Both are also contributing to the decline of the shiny disc; sales from streaming and downloads of films and TV shows are now greater than those of DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

Streaming media and traditional broadcast channels tend to lend themselves to different kinds of programmes. Netflix specialises in lengthy drama serials we can binge-watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon, with crime drama Breaking Bad being the first to benefit from the platform boosting its audience. Since 2013, Netflix has started producing its own shows and films as well as buying content from other studios. Recently, it has brought us popular series including House Of Cards, Orange Is The New Black and The Crown. And there have been a couple of transfers, with Netflix bagging the terrific anthology drama Black Mirror from Channel 4, and that irritating trio of presenters from the BBC’s Top Gear selling themselves to Amazon Prime with The Grand Tour. Broadcast channels suit ‘event television’ better, such as live coverage of sporting events and royal weddings, and shows which play out over a few weeks, like reality TV and The Great British Bake Off. They have also adapted to the internet age with catch-up and on-demand services like the ITV hub, Channel 4’s All 4 and the BBC’s iPlayer and BBC3. And the three channels have already started looking into collaborating on a joint streaming service to challenge Amazon and Netflix. 

So, the TV industry marketplace is split between the licence-funded BBC, channels paid for by advertising revenue, subscription-based satellite and cable channels and now streaming services, each competing for our attention and money. As streaming media fits in better with our have-it-now expectations, its popularity and profitability are growing. This doesn’t mean that corporations like Netflix have just been in the right place at the right time to cater for media-hungry millennials. 

 Their rise is largely down to knowing their customers well enough to churn out and effectively promote what’s going to attract viewers. As well as handing over their money, subscribers hand over large amounts of data about who they are, what they watch, when they watch it, how much they watch of it and how much they like it. Number-crunching this data enables Netflix not just to predict the kind of shows its customers want to see but to shape them. Algorithms can target particular shows at those people most likely to be receptive, and can even determine preferences for the styles, tones and designs of their content. In his 2014 book The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions, Phil Simon describes how data can be used to make decisions as specific as the colour schemes of promotional posters. The principles behind all this aren’t new, of course: the BBC is bound to use market research and focus groups to inform the kinds of programmes it makes, and adverts slotted in around Coronation Street, for example, have been placed there to appeal to its particular audience. The difference is that Netflix’s way of gathering and using data is personal and meticulous enough to smack of being insidious. 

 The technology’s already here to let us have any media we want delivered straight to our screens, and there’s something socialistic about this kind of ready access. Sadly, the reality is that this always comes at a price: what we can afford and what makes a profit for the media moguls. Bringing data and algorithms into all this gives streaming services more power over our choices, making them less of a choice than we think.

Mike Foster