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| Size | Seeds | Peers | Completed |
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| 3.21 GiB | 3 | 0 | 322 |
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Marion Stokes was secretly recording television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today.
Before “fake news” Marion was fighting to protect the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history. Remarkably Marion saved it, and now the Internet Archive will digitize her tapes and we’ll be able to search them online for free.
This is a mystery in the form of a time capsule. It’s about a radical Communist activist, who became a fabulously wealthy recluse archivist. Her work was crazy but it was also genius, and she would pay a profound price for dedicating her life to this visionary and maddening project.
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I wonder
If she caught something from 9/11 that has since been blackholed.
Or there were recently claims about an airliner being shot down by the US military, and apparently video of a missile approaching it was shown on CNN and then vanished!
2012
If it was before 2012, she probably would have recorded it. Apparently Internet Archive has been digitizing her tapes, but I am not sure if they are all up there yet or not. I haven't searched for them yet...
I wonder..911
The most interesting part I saw was when the top spire from one of the building just seemed to vaporize.
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Just curious: does this documentary show her recorded footage, or is it more about her? And if the former, do they include the older commercials, too, or just the program footage?
Marion Stokes
From what I remember, they show a lot of different news footage, including montages of old commercials and TV shows like Oprah etc, and I would have to assume that it was all from her tapes. And a special montage for the 9/11 tapes and things like that. But it is also about her and interviews with her friends and family members who reveal she was a rich hoarder and had 9 houses full of collected items like books and other things, but that she also a renowned activist going back to the 1960s and that is what fueled her later obsession with recording the news etc.
TheCorsair00 wrote:
Okay, thanks for sharing your thoughts, Boss. I will check it out...in some ways it cuts a bit close to someone I know, but I have a pet interest in the history of advertising ( = the history of control). I used to love viewing microfiche from my local library, and often it was the paid slots that held the most interest for me. This is what people value....push...buy & sell...it is also a blindspot, and if viewed from just the right angle, you can glimpse something of the dominant mentalization we are all subject to)
The Century of the Self
What you describe in your interest in advertising, and how it relates to control over the population, reminds me a lot of an Adam Curtis docu-series called 'The Century of the Self', which was basically about the same types of things. You may have seen it already, but it is in his archive here on ConCen under 2002: https://concen.org/content/adam-curtis-bbc-iplayer-collection-2021
"How Freud's theories on the unconscious led to the development of public relations by his nephew Edward Bernays; the use of desire over need; and self-actualisation as a means of achieving economic growth and the political control of populations."
TheCorsair00 wrote:
I was blown away by his Hypernormalization, but I never quite rekindled that level of awe in his other works. I can't now recall if I watched this series -- I may have, but will give it a do-over in your honor :)
Commercials
The first episode in particular gets into psychological trickery in commercial advertising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04