February | 2024 | Ethics and Spirituality

Quite recently, DailyMotion videos embedded in posts have suddenly begun autostarting as soon as the post is loaded. This is a serious problem, especially where the post contains a few DailyMotion videos, since (you guessed it) they all start playing at once!

On my end, I haven’t done anything to cause this sudden change. I’m looking into the matter and hope to find a solution. In the meantime, I apologize for any inconvenience. If you really want to view a post that suffers from this problem, one workaround is to wait for the post to load, then go through it, hitting pause on any autostarted videos. This is just a short-term workaround.

Sorry, and thanks for understanding!

Michael Howard

P.S. If you’re someone who tracks these kinds of issues, see also:

https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/autoplay-dailymotion-video-using-shortcode/
https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/dailymotion-new-api-bad/
https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/help-all-dailymotion-videos-now-autostarting/

UPDATE APR-05-2024: For 5 weeks I tried to get some help from WordPress.com Staff on the DailyMotion autostart bug, (see forum thread), but no response. I did find a manual way of painstakingly editing each post to stop the videos from autostarting. It took me all day to go through 9-1/2 years of posts and manually change the code for each DailyMotion video, but I got it done!

The method I used was this:

The DailyMotion autostart bug seems to affect posts where the video was embedded using traditional Method 1, i.e. simply pasting the video URL on its own line, as instructed by WordPress.com support docs of the period:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140920235202/http://en.support.wordpress.com/videos/dailymotion/

That method worked fine for at least 9-1/2 years, but suddenly around mid-February 2024, DailyMotion videos which were embedded using the paste URL method began autostarting.

According to my research, this bug does not seem to affect DailyMotion videos which were embedded using Method 2, the shortcode method. So if your site is being badly bitten by the autostart bug (as mine is), one annoying, painstaking, time-consuming workaround is to manually edit each post affected. For each DailyMotion video, make note of the URL, delete the URL, and substitute the corresponding shortcode for the same video.

Example of what worked for me:

DELETE THIS:
*https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x260fp0*

REPLACE WITH:

[d****m***** x260fp0]

In other words:

dailymotion x260fp0 surrounded by left and right brackets.

Once you’ve finished replacing them all, then hit UPDATE. Now test the edited post. The DailyMotion videos should no longer autoplay.

* * *

An artist responds to current trends in politics, culture, assassination, and technology

I’ve been a man of few words lately. For the past year I’ve been much more interested in images, which have some advantages over opinions. While opinions are often clutched fiercely and yelled loudly, images can be more subtle and persuasive. Perhaps the highest types of images have no prosaic meaning, express no opinions, but simply reflect something deep about the nature of the universe.

Popular art is less lofty, but still retains the benefit of being open to interpretation. My parodies of propaganda posters (below) are really not limited to poking fun at Russia. One prose meaning to be gleaned is that authoritarianism and totalitarianism are not unknown in the Era of Trump. These tendencies are found in every society, and correspond to something dark in human nature.

Likewise, the tendency to manipulate people by gathering detailed information about them is not limited to, say, the old East German Stasi. Randy Newman may never have written a song about the Privacy Policies you find on corporate web sites, but “if you paid attention, you’d be worried too.” The unholy alliance between technology and snooping has been a theme of science fiction for at least 60 years. A classic 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled “O.B.I.T.” comprises a dark, expressive televisual essay on the subject.

Nor is credulous techno-utopianism confined to emerging nations. There are segments of my own country, America, which are obsessed with tracking the latest releases of iPhones or nVidia graphics cards, as if these things would change the face of human civilization. But Materialism 2.0 is really not much different than 1.x.