I love Yasiin Bey as an actor, and his character in this movie is great.

I'm avoiding spoilers as I discuss the movie because it's new enough and obscure enough that chances are good that not everyone who might want to see it will have seen it already.

It isn't actually new or obscure, but still.

This movie introduced an idea, though:
"To Swede" - The process of remaking a commercial film without a commercial budget or professional actors. The resulting film is a "sweded" film.

The etymology for this turn of phrase within the film aren't important to the rest of this discussion, but "Sweded" is useful shorthand for a specific visual style and concept that I want to discuss at length.

Some examples from youtube:

- The Force Awakens: https://invidious.tube/watch?v=4fDlPI1vI2A

- Robocop (from Be Kind Rewind): https://invidious.tube/watch?v=9ZM5ZD0t1sg

The idea, basically, is short films that revel in their own mediocre production values.

The music is people's voices. The special effects are cardboard, and are done in camera. The production is Bad, but it gets the point across.

Within the context of Be Kind Rewind, this meant a single VHS camcorder, minimal editing, and in camera effects.

There's something Freeing about this approach.

Get out and tell a story with your friends.

I'm not suggesting that we all sit around ripping off hollywood blockbusters as short films made with our neighbors.

I'm suggesting we cut hollywood out of it entirely, and we sit around making our own blockbusters.

I watch Be Kind Rewind every few years to remind myself of what Good Enough can look like.

One thing that stood out to me as I watched this movie was how the march of technological progress always seems to be away from Read/Write in consumer tech.

The "Good" and "Successful" pieces of consumer tech are frequently read only by default, and if there is a read/write option, it's frequently late or measurably worse or extra expensive when compared to the read only version.

I think this is most evident in video, but it's not only true for video.

A commercially released software floppy disk and a floppy disk I write on my laptop are equivalent in terms of quality and longevity.

A cassette I record in my own home is likely *better* than a commercially recorded cassette.

A VHS tape I make myself, again, almost certainly as good or higher quality than a professionally released VHS tape.

But of DVDs I made myself 10 years ago, many don't work anymore. Of the commercial DVDs I purchased in 1999, the vast majority are fine (and the ones that aren't were mishandled.)

CDs I burned in 2002 are probably toast. CDs pressed in 1985 are fine.

VHS was a garbage format. It looked BAD. But it was a format that allowed creation *and* consumption at a quality equivalent to commercial releases using consumer equipment.

Part of this is because it's easier to make things that are readable than it is to make them writable, so higher quality formats tend to be read only first.

But professional formats are always read-write. DAT is as good or better than CD in terms of audio quality, and no more cumbersome than cassettes in terms of management, but DAT was never considered for a consumer format.

Similarly, Betacam and HDCam for video.

Consumer tech is biased towards read only, even when high quality Read/Write is possible, because read only is cheaper, and less likely to rile up the ire of those in power.

We got lucky with Flash Media and the increasing digitization of our lives, because everything is a camera, everything has a microphone, everything has some flash storage.

Flash isn't perfect, and distribution is still a problem, but maybe we've broken past Read Only consumer tech for a while.

@ajroach42 In bigger name films, I keep thinking back to The Wizard of Oz.

Not to suggest it was cheap or cutting edge, but it looks very much like a stage production. Like a play. Yet many still consider it a classic!

That aesthetic has an appeal.

@ajroach42 I think that might just be due to reading being inherently easier then writing?

@Canageek @ajroach42 It's also because copyright and the recordable media tax and capitalism.

@irl @ajroach42 I actually don't think so: Every format I can think of, other then flash media, had to overcome HUGE technological hurdles to allow writing, when reading was basically free, even the early one like gramophones when this wasn't nearly as big a concern.

@Canageek @ajroach42 not sure if this was the article i read before, but it's covering most of the same stuff https://shallowrewards.substack.com/p/requiem-for-the-minidisc

there was big opposition to the idea of recordable media from lobby groups, enough to kill formats

@irl @ajroach42 Watch Technology Connections, he goes into how engineers had to fight to fit recordable technology into just about every format you've mentioned, and how freaking hard it is to do so

@Canageek @ajroach42 oh the brown guy! i'd forgotten about that channel. do you have a link to the specific video?

@irl @ajroach42 Series on CDs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFWBEyCKt4tKHIk8ez_pZS_P

Beta vs VHS: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUrcyMYAkUPODENwP4gYCmf

DVDs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1mJv9pxm7M

and probably a few more.

Basically reading is usually almost free. Writing? Is a goddamn miracle we can do it at all.

@Canageek @ajroach42 Thanks! I'm going to watch these after work.

@ajroach42 this maps with 8-track tapes; for a while, everyone had an 8-track player, but almost no one had an 8-track recorder.

@ajroach42 I enjoyed this thread and I think I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

@ajroach42 there's an additional factor, and it's one that took me a long time to accept -- the reality is that the market for consumers who genuinely want to create as well as consume is just not that large.

While the corporate world underestimates how many people genuinely want to create, a lot of the tech community vastly overestimates it. We have a consume-heavy culture.

And that means that investments in making creative capability for "the masses" (easy, cheap, ubiquitous) usually don't pan out. When it's successful (YouTube), it's because it caters to connecting the huge consumer audience with the much smaller creators group.

Making better tools to enable more creators helps, but it's diminishing returns until/unless we can address the consumer culture.

@ajroach42 I find the same thing! (Mostly from having been gifted pirated Dr Who DVDs as a teenager)

Technology Connections does a good job explaining why this is. Chemical transformations degrade over time, the physical shape of pressed grooves don't.

Though in my case there's also the factor that those DVDs were compressed, unlike any that'll play in a DVD player...

@ajroach42 But a CD will be far WORSE quality and not last nearly as long, since they can't actually use an industrial grad processes

@ajroach42 I think that's only a conclusion that can be easily drawn from the movie because the movie was made right around the time flash storage was coming down in price for consumers.

Today, flash drives are incredibly cheap by the GB and are read/write thousands of times before degradation occurs. These are overwhelmingly today's method of data storage, whether it's files, music, videos, pictures, etc.

@blucrunch Flash media does not have the longevity of basically any other commercially media, but it is better than what we had to deal with in the early DVD era.

Distribution is still a pain, but flash makes it better.

@ajroach42 You're right about longevity, for sure. One counterpoint though is that because of how cheap flash media is today, and how relatively predictable degradation is, backup copies are easily made and the data is preserved perfectly. Physical media like records or DVD/CD aren't quite that easy, setting aside data-DVDs, and much more expensive and time consuming to backup.

@ajroach42

Jess Erskine - The Prisoner Intro (2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4eUSmUWsUY