NETFLIX, the Culture Of Fear

 NETFLIX, the Culture Of Fear

Netflix, is an American media services provider and production company headquartered in Los Gatos ,California which is founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scott's valley,California. The company's primary business is its subscription-based streaming services which offers online streaming of a library of films and television programs, including those produced in-house.

As of April 2019, Netflix had over 148 million paid subscriptions worldwide, including 60 million in the United States, and over 154 million subscriptions total including free trials.

It is available worldwide except in mainland China (due to local restrictions), Syria, North Korea, and Crimea (due to US sanctions). The company also has offices in the Netherlands, Brazil, India, Japan, and South Korea. Netflix is a member of the Motion picture association (MPA).

So, Netflix being a home to many documentaries and original series about horrific medical experiences and mysterious ailments, but one is causing way more of an uproar–and real world pain, according to some–than the rest. The Netflix document-series Afflicted has emerged as the most controversial of the bunch since Season 1’s release in August, inspiring a number of op-eds claiming that the show’s depiction of chronic illness harmful.

In one of the article its given that a group of writers, activists, artists, filmmakers, physicians, patients and scientists have banded together to pen an open letter posted on Medium and launch a #Me-action petition.

The open letter was published on September 17 and signed by over 40 people–including Lena Dunham, Monica Lewinsky, and Ally Hilfiger. In it, the signees claim that the subjects featured on the show were treated unethically, were mislead, and the victim of factual errors and omissions that presented them as having psychological issues.

The letter reads: “Rather than authentically depict these participants’ experiences and the biomedical research that might explain their illnesses, Afflicted used every creative tool and untenable journalistic practice to advance a narrative that suggests these patients’ problems are primarily psychological, a theory that is not supported by the evidence.”

The subjects say that was a misrepresentation, as they were told beforehand that their illnesses would not be presented as psychological. The letter also alleges that some subjects were sent to questionable medical practitioners and were made to undergo unnecessary procedures. The letter also claims that while some of the participants had sought psychological help, they were depicted as if they had turned it down.

And also, the open letter says the documentarians left out critical laboratory and research findings, and also edited out research scientists who backed up the subjects’ claims

“The inclusion of people with disabilities in the telling of their own stories is essential to the creation of compelling, ethical, authentic cinema,” reads another part of the letter.

“Netflix has been an important platform for this conversation with programs such as The Punk Rock Singer, My Beautiful, Broken Brain, To The Bone, and Unrest. Yet Afflicted was helmed by apparently able-bodied people, and displayed the disabled as curiosities for the entertainment of others.”

The open letter and petition are asking for Afflicted to be removed from the service and for a formal apology to be issued.

And also rumors about the cutthroat environment at Netflix have circulated for years, but this week the Wall Street Journal revealed just how Darwinian it gets (paywall) at the streaming video and studio company.

And also in addition, while the Los Gatos, California-based firm has been open some aspects of its culture—for example, a policy of letting “adequate” employees go and replacing them with stars—the Journal story reveals various harsh psychological conditions under which Netflix employees labor.

Here’s some of the brief about this:

The “keeper test” pressures managers to fire or be fired

One of the ways in which adequate employees are kicked to the curb is by failing the “keeper test.” According to the Journal, managers must regularly review their staff members against the question: Would you fight to keep this person on your team?

But while rank-and-file employees only have to watch out for a tap on the shoulder, middle managers are also under pressure to fire someone or fail the keeper test themselves.

One former marketing executive told the Journal that when she was let go by her boss, the head of marketing, with the then-chief talent officer, Tawni Nazario-Cranzin, in the room, she asked the latter, “What could I have done differently?”

It was 2014, and the two were sitting in a New York hotel room, since the marketing executive had spent the weekend prepping for the season two launch of Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black. The Journal reports:

“She said Ms. Nazario-Cranz told her she should have fired somebody on her team faster.

“I was trying to help somebody in their career, and they maybe saw that as a sign of weakness from me,” the former executive said. She cried all the way home on her six-hour flight to Los Angeles, wondering how she would break the news to her pregnant wife.

Executives support a “culture of fear”

According to the Journal, when one public relations employee talked at a department meeting about his constant fear of being fired, the response was: “Good, because fear drives you.”

That reportedly came from Karen Barragan, head of publicity for original series, who denied making the comment. She told the Journal that open discussions of awkward issues are common at Netflix, so that employees “can get better.”

Mistakes are “sunshined,” North Korea style

When someone has behaved inappropriately or taken some ethically questionable action, they are asked to “sunshine” the incident in front of a group of their peers. The Journal described this as “Netflix lingo for an apology or act of transparency in front of colleagues.”

The story describes one event involving the aforementioned Nazario-Cranz:

Hastings was dubious when he found that the executive had taken some of her team to get their hair done and bought makeup on the company’s dime ahead of a launch event in Milan a few years ago. Mr. Hastings asked her to “sunshine” what she did in front of dozens of top executives.

Ms. Nazario-Cranz argued that if a manager took two men out for a round of golf and expensed the outing, it wouldn’t have been so controversial. “It spun into an issue of gender equity,” an attendee said.

In 2017, Nazario-Cranz was either fired by Hastings, as sources told the Journal, or, as she claims, left as part of a mutual decision, “spurred in part by a heart condition and desire to spend more time with her children.” Nazario-Cranz told the Journal she “loved” and helped create Netflix’s culture.

Not all former staffers are so enamored with the company’s emphasis on radical transparency. Reports the Journal: “A Korean employee who left earlier this year from the Singapore office said the culture encouraging harsh feedback at times reminded her of North Korea, where mothers are forced to criticize their sons in front of the public.”

Employees have to use cultish jargon in everyday conversation

One interviewee said speaking the peculiar Netflix dialect is mandatory for survival at the firm. The story outlined a few choice phrases, like “north star” and “context, not control,” which naturally caught the eye of the Journal’s in-house linguist: