The Silent Reorganization of First Look Media or Just How Powerful is Pierre Omidyar?

[Ryan Carboni]

I have too much time on my hands in case you're wondering (alas, alas, the
government's strategy for dealing with me doesn't work against someone with
autism)
There exists a five year grace period for nonprofits to become viable,
until the Public Support Test needs to be fulfilled. 5/6 of First Look's
money comes from... Omidyar so far. (how is he so rich and yet failed to
figure out a viable strategy for First Look???)

Recently First Look has been reorganized a bit. Well, as a media
publication on the media says about it:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/07/first-look-medias-topic-com-is-leaning-on-video-and-illustrations-to-tell-stories-and-break-out-of-the-news-cycle/

Topic.com is the product of First Look Media’s titular entertainment
studio, Topic, which officially went live earlier this year. Unlike the
nonprofit operations at First Look Media, like The Intercept, Topic and its
related operations are charged with building the company’s revenue
operations in part by financing and distributing independent projects such
as the documentary Nobody Speaks, which follows the Hulk Hogan trial that
helped take down Gawker. The documentary premiered on Netflix this month.
Topic itself is platform-agnostic: its productions will live on a variety
of platforms, including movie theater screens, podcast apps, television,
and, of course, Facebook and Twitter.

---
Looking at the staff of the for-profit First Look shows that it shares no
(or nearly no) staff with the non-profit first look.
Based on what I've read, I can guess that First Look and First Look are
unrelated organizations.
>From what I can tell, news organizations cannot fund their own operations
(unless as a foundation, maybe) unless *squints* it is selling
advertisements that further its program service like... a bar association
magazine to quote: "A bar association publishes a legal journal containing
opinions of the county court, articles of professional interest to lawyers,
advertisements for products and services used by the legal profession, and
legal notices. The legal notices are published to satisfy state laws
requiring publication of notices in connection with legal proceedings, such
as the administration of estates and actions to quiet title to real
property."

So it isn't hard to see how First Look and First Look are unrelated in a
purely irrational sense. Recently First Look began asking for donations
(strangest public charity, hid their address on their website for a long
time).

Of course, public support requires essentially at least a third of all
money come from individuals providing less than 2% each. An interesting
question is if Pierre Omidyar offered to triple everyone's donations
(+200%), and had a few friends donate a few thousand dollars each that he
wouldn't triple. Would it qualify as public support? Probably. All this
seems very elaborate and rather silly.



Let's look at the ACLU. It uh. Has a related nonprofit foundation to fund
itself and it's affiliates.


Anyway, mimicry is stupid, but informed mimicry can improve one's own
survival function. I've said something about orienting the network of
privacy non-profits towards actually accomplishing things. You know
SuperPACs have a wink-wink relationship with their candidate.

And here is the reorganization of First Look, they hide the truth through
some pretty sophisticated means. You want to improve privacy, create
devices under the control of the public? Here's the blueprint.

Get a bunch of people together who are on the same page. Create for-profit
and non-profit corporations who aren't related. The designs and code must
be open-source to prevent co-option and unnecessary risk that corporation
could dominate and render the others irrelevant.

Pretty short blueprint huh? Wonder why no one hasn't come up with this
before... oh wait. Credit goes to Omidyar. The people in charge of your
freedom are not on your side. Only you can manufacture freedom.

P.S. /dev/random losing entropy when it is used only makes sense if the
output is linear with the state. (?)
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