The Streisand Effect In Action. Well Played Coinbase
I know it's trendy to criticise the big exchanges as being too willing to accept government regulation and looking too much like legacy finance companies.
But we need them, they perfrom some essential functions within the crypto space. They make it possible to turn fiat into crypto, they are an accessible way for non-crypto people to get into the market and provide a bit of education and hand-holding. They are also generally a bit simpler to use (and with better documentation) than some of the more exotic DeFi platforms.
But Coinbase have inadvertently done soemthing completely different. They released a television advert in the UK, which you can see in this video....
It's actually a genius ad, and there are some really subtle but sharp jabs at the way things are going in the UK.
The advert was promptly banned by the British government.
The nominal excuse is that there is a blanket ban on television adverts for crypto services. Funny, I hadn't heard about it before now. And apart from showing the brand name at the end, there isn't a single mention of crypto in the advert.
But Starmer's regime is slipping into censorship and outright dictatorship at a frightening pace. They have an incredibly thin skin when it comes to any criticism of the way they are managing the country. Or anything posted online which doesn't agree with their agenda, in fact.
I'm glad Hive is too small in the UK to be on their radar (and Hive posts rarely turn up in Google searches unless they are incredibly well crafted). The mainstream social media channels are being closely monitored, with more and more cases reported of the police turning up in dawn raids at the houses of those who post "the wrong thing" on X or Facebook.
Coinbase's advert taps into the zeitgeist perfectly. It's actually incredibly clever on several levels.
There's a seemingly cheerful-but-resigned acceptance of how shit life has become. It references the binmen's strike in Birmingham, where rubbish has been left uncollected in the street for months and rats are becoming a real problem - something the government seems to be so embarrassed about it's worked hard to keep it out of the legacy media.
The cheerful song is a brilliant cultural reference. The tune is very, very similar to one of the songs from the 1960's musical "Oliver", which was itself a glossy production which was in fact a damning crtiticism of the disparity between rich and poor in Victorian England.
Everything in this advert touches a nerve with the regime, and it's no wonder they shut it down hard.
But in the process, they proved the correctness of the ad. It demonstrated clearly the existence of the censorship Starmer was so keen to deny existed when he met Trump last week. It highlighted the rapid decline of the country under all of the recent governments, it can't all be laid at Labour's feet because the main parties are so indistinguishable that they are commonly called The Uniparty.
The problem is that the government are so incompetent that if they'd just let the advert play out, a few people would have seen it , had a wry chuckle and moved on. But now.... people are talking about it. YouTube has political commentators discussing it and making videos. People are seeking it out to see if it's as good as they've heard.
And that's what the Streisand effect is; by trying to shut down discussion of something, it just makes more people want to see it and talk about it.
Posted using The BBH Project
Indeed, well played, Coinbase ... well written also by you informing us ... it seems that the U.S. and U.K. are having some of the same problems right now, but what they can't yet do is keep the people from talking ... and perhaps it is a good thing indeed that Hive has not gotten too big, too soon...
Thank you ! It seems to be happening all over the world right now, most especially in the supposedly democratic and free West. The UK regime are certainly trying to stop people talking to each other. They're passing legislation to force pubs, bars and restaurants to report people using "offensive speech" (which one has to assume means anything critical of the government or it's agenda), and it came out just today that for the last several years they've had a unit in Whitehall dedicated to pressuring social media companies to take down or de-rank posts on a whole range of subjects from discussion of immigration and grooming gangs to covid vaccine injuries.
But while a lot of people are sheep who are oblivious to it all, more and more people are waking up and pushing back in a variety of ways. Hive is a good place to talk freely due to it's relative anonymity and decentralisation, and I think more and more people are moving away from monitored systems like WhatsApp ad Telegram to the more encrypted ones like Signal.
I just hope that the establishment realises that the more they clamp down, the bigger the explosion will be. So far, the only ones using violence are the police and their paid counter-protestors; the actual protesters have been peaceful despite numerous provocations and legacy media slurs.
As an African American with both Native and Indian blood, I will just tell you: the West has never been fully democratic. It's just that its governments are openly letting people of European descent know that to their opinion, average people are still serfs, too, and there are not as many steps between serfs and slaves as people think.
Banning something almost always makes it blow up even more. You’d think governments would’ve figured that out by now. 🙄