Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
The language of Wall Street has become the language of ad tech, an industry on the cusp of major change because of a new bill in Congress, the AMERICA Act.
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Now that YouTube is barreling into the CTV space, legacy programmers are putting their collective foot down about what counts as premium content.
The post Will YouTube Win Its Fight For Premium Video Status? appeared first on AdExchanger.
As the digital advertising industry upgrades its privacy protections for consumers, some ad tech providers have wondered what the business impact for improving privacy will be. But how often do
The post Study: Cookies’ Low Match Rates Cost Ad Tech Millions. Moving Off Cookies May Be The Answer. appeared first on AdExchanger.
In
a new drama series coming to Amazon this week, a diverse group of female characters feel like victims reduced to second-class citizenship in a world dominated by men.
And so, they nurse grievances and fantasize about murder. The phenomenon of loners with grievances — whether male or female or otherwise — happens to be one that we are dealing with far
too often in the real world today, up to and including the latest unspeakable attack this week by a troubled loner at a school in Nashville.
In light of this
week’s events, the arrival of this new Amazon series at the present moment seems poorly timed.
In the
series, titled “The Power,” women around the world are poised to punish men by electrocuting them with their fingertips, a newfound superpower.
Let the record show that some of the female characters in the show are true victims of men. One of them, a parentless teenage girl, is raped by a predatory foster father.
Another one, the bastard daughter of a London gangster, is attacked by two men in the home she shares with her mother.
She fights
back and is rendered unconscious. When she comes to, she finds her mother dead lying on the floor nearby.
Another one of them is a teenage high schooler
named Jos (Ail’l Cravalho, pictured above).
Unlike the previous two, her grievances, if any, go unidentified in the premiere episode of “The
Power” that the TV Blog previewed this week.
Jos is a teen in that part of her life where she can’t stand her parents. She is also
frustrated by social media and the apparent willingness of girls and young women to make asses of themselves on video-sharing sites dancing, applying makeup and trying on clothes.
Before the episode is over, she learns that she is one of a growing number of women and girls of all ages and backgrounds around the world who are discovering that they
possess the power to generate electricity.
Perhaps we will learn in a later episode what her beef with men might be, but suffice it to say, she does not
weaponize her new electrocution skill in the premiere.
But at least two men in Episode One are attacked this way, one of whom dies. The other one may or may
not be dead.
We are supposed to excuse the attacks because in both cases, self-defense is the rationale for the women suddenly administering these fatal
fingertip electroshocks.
But the underlying principle of the show amounts to much more than just these two instances.
The show’s point of view is that women everywhere are suffering at the hands of men, and that this new
power to electrocute them represents justice for the world’s oppressed women and girls.
“For women around the world, it is the dawn of a new
day,” says a narrator — a male one — at the conclusion of Episode One.
But when seen in the context of this
week’s school massacre and so many before it, aspects of “The Power” are even more disturbing.
One of the characters, the teen foster child, hears
voices in her head, a familiar trait in the profile of some of our real-world mass shooters.
This voice urges her to feel at ease with her newfound power and
to be comfortable using it whenever she sees fit.
Meanwhile, it is not unreasonable to believe, based on her behavior thus far, that the alienated teenage high schooler whose
grievances are still obscure just might harbor violent feelings against the inhabitants of her high school, both students and teachers.
In the corridors of her
school, she seems isolated, anti social and angry. She lives inside her head and has difficulty relating to others.
It is certainly true that the vast majority of people who feel the same way — teenagers and grown-ups — never resort to violence.
But let’s be real. Here in the real world, some of them do, as we have seen time and time and time
again.
And yet, here is a TV show, “The Power,” in which such violence is actually
encouraged.
While no one can really prove that this kind of video content has a clear, direct causal relationship with the real-world killings that plague
us, it is also true that if we did not have TV shows like “The Power,” who would miss them?
“The
Power” starts streaming on Friday (March 31) on Amazon Prime Video.
