Hacker Cinema
Big Brother
2000 · TV series · 28 seasons
Created by John de Mol
American version of the reality game show which follows a group of HouseGuests living together 24 hours a day in the "Big Brother" house, isolated from the outside world but under constant surveillance with no privacy for three months.
5 negative1 mixed11 neutralfrom 17 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
Are you conflating telemetry with literally live-streaming your life to Meta? Because that's what makes the statement weird.
edit 2: OK, I see what you mean. But I'm wondering if it should be possible to consent to this via T&C. Basically the same issue as with many online services, turned up to 11, sure. And it involves OTHER people, who have not consented.
Stuff like this used to be outrage fuel even when it was more of a social experiment, e.g. the documentary "We live in public" or the "Big brother" TV show. By now, I'm sure there have been millions of influencers doing similar things, but it's very much not considered normal?
Streaming to an unknown number of employees might be considered different from streaming to the public, sure.
But the core question here is whether there's informed consent, and, IMO also, if it should be possible to consent to this when the other party is a company like Meta and the pretext is not deliberately seeking attention (like influencers and streamers do).
edit, clarified social media comparison
a descendent of Bazalgette invented the Big Brother reality TV show. I always think they reversed the process established by their ancestor and started pumping shit back into our homes.
I wanted to try Crave but I bought an nVidia box instead. Install kodi found some popular addons. Now I can see anything on Crave or any other network from any point in history. I'm watching season 2 of Big Brother, I'm watching shows not available on streaming services. I didn't realize this user experience and availability was possible. I still have netflix, prime, plex and cable but that might give me .1% availability
> This blogger is acting like traditional network television has never mentally tortured people for our viewing pleasure. Have they never seen an episode of Hell's Kitchen, Dr Phil, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or Big Brother? Basically the entire reality TV genre is based on that premise.
There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasubi#Denpa_Sh%C5%8Dnen_teki_Kensh%C5%8D_Seikatsu
Although I guess Japan has always sort of been in a league on its own when it comes to questionable TV show premises.
This blogger is acting like traditional network television has never mentally tortured people for our viewing pleasure. Have they never seen an episode of Hell's Kitchen, Dr Phil, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or Big Brother? Basically the entire reality TV genre is based on that premise.
Edit: Seeing as they mention Joe Rogan, Fear Factor is another great example of a reality TV version of basically the same thing.
There are a few seasons of US Big Brother which are genuinely great, intelligent and deep TV. You have to look past the production a bit and get in their heads. At the end of the day, it’s people trapped inside a TV show. It’s a psychological experiment. It’s a real competition for real money involving deception and alliances. Same with Survivor. These shows are often bad but there are some gem seasons out there.
This seems absolutely bonkers. World's largest LARP. Extremely Soviet to have what is effectively a Potemkin village for an audience. Bizarre that more of it wasn't filmed, producing "only" 700 hours of film, and the whole thing seems to have been done fairly quietly rather than a massive blaze of publicity.
Like Endemol's "Big Brother", on a city scale.
The abuse may also have become .. intrinsic to the project? The voyeuristic dominant seems to be a common type among film directors. He had a unique opportunity to control and film sexual interactions, and he may simply have decided to carry on with it because nobody stopped him.
Sorry, I meant Big Brother (and yes, I back translated it from Italian). And I meant the (trash) TV show, rather than 1984.
No, Big Brother the TV show isn't.
British shows mostly go the other way. All the classics seem to be one or two series where you wish they'd made one or two more, and series are often 6 or 8 episodes rather than the 10, 12 or "bleeding ridiculous" US series love. As our tv has got more American in style and business we've gained series that just won't die, even though so far past expiry date the corpse is rotting. (Big Brother? Apprentice? Celebrity anything...
The only downside to the shorter seasons is book adaptations often go at breakneck pace and take too many liberties.
As example, The Last Kingdom: First two series were BBC America and 8 episodes that covered 2 books a series. Pretty damn good adaption, pretty faithful to the books even with the brutal fast pace compression, and kept the real historical basis Cornwell is famous for. Maybe a bit tame and a little too "worthy" in places. It's King Alfred christianising early England and killing many heathen Danes, some "worthy" was unavoidable. :)
Third season is Netflix and no BBC, so instant 10 episodes a series, and it's unbelievably fucking shit. The gore, the dialogue, budget and plot all got turned up to 11, all the characters got entirely new personalities and the basis on the books got thrown out the window. Yet it drags and drags, because the highlights are constant now, so no contrast any more. Cornwell's famous historical basis laughed at and pissed on. Shark jumped multiple times. In wanting to make it more showy and mass market they killed any interest of the people who did watch it.
Another reason to think my Netflix sub is nearing its end.
This sounds so like me in my twenties. I am forever destined to have the build of a long distance runner. Shame I hate running. Acceptance, sometime in my late twenties, was the only real fix, somewhat helped by lifting at the gym. Some highlights for your amusement anyway... :)
Regular gym with trainer was the only thing that ever reliably increased my weight. I tried for years to find a food based approach - nope. With fitness+lifting, cycling, swimming and 4x gym weekly, strength increased fine, actual weight gain was still very slow. So I was super well defined, strong but still looked too scrawny. By the time I'd gained 28lbs, my waist had actually lost 2". What the actual fuck? I had nothing there to lose. I could match lifts with guys who looked far bigger, which I know irritated one or two. :D
Calories alone simply didn't work. I could push to eat 5k+ calories a day and gain nothing that month. Almost no one believed this of course, until they spent enough time with me to see what I regularly, and easily ate daily. I once caught a BBC weight loss documentary series that had everyone in a house like Big Brother, which also included a couple of calorie-proof people like this, along with regular guys and some who always struggled with obesity. They carefully monitored in, out, blood and metabolism, and tried to force feed the guys who couldn't to gain. They too concluded some were somehow immune beyond a certain, maintenance intake. I forget what explanation was offered, or whether that explanation was merely guesswork.
Still, for routes to sugar and calories, my own one real sugar weakness is cake. Mainly the more complex, older recipes - the rich Victorian cake or a brandy laden fruit cake in preference to newer, lighter sugar-only crap. Or a nice sharp apple or fruit pie (home made then, shop bought is pure sugar pretending to be apple) still has plenty of sugar. Lots and lots of snacking in between meals. I used to search out the full fat of everything. Premium brands of dark chocolate lose the ugly sweetness of regular, good 70 and 80% have a nice bitter edge, and some of the posher brands of milk chocolate are higher cocoa, lower sweetness. There's plenty of chocolate and sugar laden bars that have some bitter mint or something strong enough to take the sweetness away - always the expensive premium or continental though! Nuts, pies and pasties, especially pork pies are very energy dense, so plenty of those too.
Yet despite all this and pushing intake to the most I could cope with, I eventually realised that this was all completely pointless. The only way to win was not to play. I could still gain just as quickly (i.e. almost imperceptibly, and painfully slowly) via the gym, especially when I got a spotter/trainer (this was the only real secret actually - a trainer and/or training buddy to push me to breaking every single time), eating only what my body said it needed/wanted. If you go with gym buddy rather than trainer, make sure they want to push hard enough - I found almost none did. The second I drop to an 'approved' regular guy 2k a day calories, weight falls off like an amputation until it's back at the genetically mandated, underweight normal. So I've had to keep working to maintain above that. I'm sick to death of gyms these days, but I haven't yet quite lost the habit.
Ageing never brought the much threatened easy weight gain, neither did quitting smoking. My 50s finally gave me the ability to gain a little fat (not much - even that still seems severely limited to only 2") around the waist, but it still falls off easily, just a little slower, and I am still built like a marathon runner. My general fitness is way better than it would have been though.
Despite the long ramblings, I'm not sure there's too much useful actionable advice in there.
Maybe Trump can have a TV show about living in the white house? "Big Brother" would be a great name--too bad it's taken
in europe most of the the time if you turn on the tv you _will_ find the same stuff.
Holliwood movies, Game of thrones, Kommissar Rex, the borgias, eurovision song contest, european football championships, local versions of "the billionaire" or "big brother" etc.
Did you grow up in southern europe in the '80s? Then you probaly watched the same dubbed animes like "Captain Tsubasa". In eastern europe? Same, but this time it was Krtek. Are you a kid now? Then you are likely watching Masha & The Bear across the whole continent.
A lot of people who deny watching this stuff watch it.
Big Brother US just finished its 14th season. Jersey Shore is in season 6. Real Housewives Of Orange County going into season 7. Somebody's out there watching it.
Having said that, this does look particularly light weight. The appeal of Silicon Valley in the tv sense is the money, but these will be people without money. The promo makes it look like a show about wannabes on the party circuit. I guess that might work, but if I were doing that kinda show I'd aim at Hollywood or maybe NY.
If given a complete lack of want, I'm convinced the majority of the world's population will choose to do nothing creative with it, and spend it socializing, fucking, and eating.
The reality TV show Big Brother is strong evidence in favor of your argument.
It's an artificial environment where people are aggressively prevented from creating anything. You can't even smuggle a pencil and a piece of paper into the Big Brother house -- if you wanted to write or draw something, you'd have to do it with your own blood on the walls, I guess... Once you're in there, your life for the next N months will consist solely of socializing, fucking and eating.
Amazingly, there are millions of people who find this prospect so exciting that they apply for the show year after year.
You have to consider there are story driven movies/shows which can get made for lower budgets (Primer for example) as well as setpiece driven shows or spectacles which simply can't be made for smaller amounts of money (setpiece cnostruction can get pricey and can't be replaced with VFX).
As for TV costs, I was involved in a Big Brother show as a director for example - reality shows are among the cheapest content you can produce (hence why there are so many of them)... 3 months of that show production was I believe in 3-5 million euros range. And that was the cheapest content you can produce, with producers that watched every penny spent with relatively cheap workforce.
1) Get on a reality TV show like Big Brother.
2) Do something ridiculous that will get you in the news. Leave your dignity at the door.
3) Get a publicist and milk your infamy for a couple of months.
Interestingly, another thing TV has done to adapt is create content that expires very quickly. Reality shows like American Idol and Big Brother are unlikely to end up downloaded, because they're not worth watching if you don't watch them right away.
This is probably a huge component in why there are so many more reality shows these days.
Breaking the broadcast model also won't work for those, because their value is precisely in the fact that a lot of people watch them, so that they become gossip points. I know some people who watch reality shows only because they know that's what will be discussed around the water fountain the next day, and so they want to be sure to be "in".
I agree that that's a pretty small niche to fit all of today's TV industry, though.