New Browser Plugin Replaces King’s Coronation With Indigenous News
While many across the globe are soaking in the festivities surrounding King Charles III’s upcoming coronation, not everyone is quite so enamored with the Royal Family. Maori artist Hamiora Bailey, for one, has come up with an online plugin that lets readers tune out the news.
Dubbed Pikari Mai!, the browser add-on that pledges to “switch off the toff” is free to download. It was created in collaboration with advertising agency Colenso BBDO, which lent its data scraping technology to scan webpages for words and images linked to the monarchy.
“For Indigenous people, the fanfare and coverage surrounding the Royal Coronation [are] more than just annoying. So we’ve created Pikari Mai, a plugin that lets people put down the potae, by replacing royal gossip with Indigenous news,” Bailey explained.
Instead of just censoring content about the royals altogether, text and pictures related to the subject will be replaced with Indigenous news written by Maori publications. This move harkens back to how the community in New Zealand has never ceded its sovereignty to the crown.
In fact, as The Guardian pointed out, the country continues to confront its “violent colonial legacy” left behind by the British. And although Buckingham Palace has offered formal apologies for the past atrocities, not all wounds are healed just yet.
Bailey hoped that by developing the plugin, Maori residents would be able to achieve an independent train of thought, where the focus can be shifted to the community instead of having to rationalize or contextualize themselves “as victim or respondent.”
Not to mention, Maori authors only make up 1.8% of journalists at news outlets. By switching out news of the King’s coronation for these articles, the initiative hopes to raise the profile of these reporters’ works and expand the reach of Indigenous stories across the web.
Pikari Mai! is now available for download on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
[via The Guardian and Stuff, images via various sources]
