CULTURE
Means of Production made a name for themselves with a smart campaign spot for U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now they’re launching a leftist streaming service with Means TV. COURTESY OF MEANS TV
Reality bites
Billed as the first ‘post-capitalist streaming service,’ Means TV launches this week in Detroit — with an aim to portray the world as it really is By Lee DeVito
In 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez burst onto the scene as an underdog candidate for U.S. Representative of New York’s 14th Congressional District, she did so with the help of a scrappy but smart campaign video shot by a pair of Democratic Socialists from Detroit: Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, of Means of Production. The video cost the duo less than $10,000 to shoot, largely because they simply followed Ocasio-Cortez around, showing the real her. “This race is about people versus money,” Ocasio-Cortez
says in the ad. “We’ve got people. They’ve got money.” Within a day, the video had amassed more than 300,000 views — and helped secure OcasioCortez’s stunning victory. Burton says that, at the time, Hollywood producers started reaching out to the duo to congratulate them on their success. That’s when she and Hayes started talking about their next idea: a leftist, worker-owned streaming platform. “We got laughed at for the most part,” Burton says. “They couldn’t understand
38 February 26-March 3, 2020 | metrotimes.com
what we were talking about … they couldn’t understand what a post-capitalist streaming service was. Which is understandable.” But now, once again, Means of Production have proven the power of people over money. Less than a year ago, the duo launched a crowdfunding campaign for Means TV. The new platform celebrates its international launch with a premiere in Detroit on Wednesday. “No advertisements or product placements,” the platform promises in a press release. “No corporate backers or
VC cash ever. Means TV entirely funded by people.” “It’s a post-capitalist, anti-capitalist perspective,” Hayes says. “We have over a do en feature length films, all of them are talking about the different issues we all experience every day under capitalism.” Initial offerings include The Last Days in Chinatown, Detroit artist Nicole Macdonald’s documentary about Midtown’s gentrification. The etroit launch party will screen Gaza Fights for Freedom, a documentary by journalist Abby Martin. There will also be animated shorts, comedy, and even live morning news and sports shows. “The idea is it’s not just a bunch of boring documentaries,” Burton says. “It’s entertaining, but it’s all based in the reality we actually live in — versus the one et i tells us we live in.” The problem with mass entertainment for the past few decades, Hayes says, is a gulf between “what is portrayed on-screen and what normal, working-class people experience” — think Friends, for example, a show about four people who live in what would be a giant, multimillion dollar apartment and somehow they never talk about being able to afford it. “It’s a totally different world,” Hayes says. “And it’s not relatable. What’s so cool about film and television is that it’s an incredible tool for empathy and for relating to other human experiences. But a lot of it is just used for stories that aren’t anything anybody can connect with.” There’s also the fact that, despite all its boasting of “disrupting” the massentertainment industry, a streaming service like et i isn’t really offering any real diversity of perspectives — you still have an idealized version of reality. nd there’s also the fact that et i is, like Hollywood, also backed by venture capital and corporate interests. The company’s CEO, Reed Hastings, for example, is a booster of privatizing schools in Los Angeles. For that reason, Hayes has little faith that et i would ever host a documentary film critical of charter schools. “Our biggest criticism of entertainment, broadly, is the pervasiveness of advertising and venture capital, and shareholders who have significant investments and things like defense or natural gas and oil,” Hayes says. “We think that those same people creating our entertainment is wrong.” To that end, Means TV is funded only by its subscribers, who pay $10 a month for access to Means TV’s library of
