The late ’80s was all about those VHS and Beta video rentals. Aisles upon aisles, lining the walls of thousands and thousands of stores around the world, all filled with tapes promising to entertain, or better yet change your life in various meaningful ways: how to breakdance, how to quilt, how to psychically communicate with your cat.

“There's a video for everything,” Ben Hollis recalls thinking, as he was browsing his local rental store back in the day. “What if there was one for loneliness?”

At the time, in 1986, Ben was working for Career Dynamics, a startup producing tapes for corporate audiences. He had just wrapped up a video about retirement planning when the company told him there was enough money left over to make something small and personal. His then-dormant creative side came out.

Around that time, his first marriage was on the verge of collapse, which he admits may have quietly informed the project, even if he didn’t recognize it at the time. Rent-a-Friend was presented as a service, offering on-demand companionship. An aid to the down and out. But was it being genuine, or was this a gag gift? Watching it, you’ll find it settles somewhere between sincerity and performance.

“It came out kinda puzzling to many people,” Hollis says. “Was I being serious or not? Well, I wanted it all ways.” Ben admits he thought it could serve as a piece to advance his creative career while helping those in need of company at the same time.

The friend on offer, “Sam,” feels more genuine than not. He’s clearly not just a character. With the specificity of his stories, it becomes evident Sam is telling much of Ben’s own history.

When I ask him about it, he confirms. “I didn’t make up anything about Sam. Just the name.”

The photos on the tape are of Ben’s family. The yearbook is his. The girl he points out, Nancy, the one he had a 5 or 6 year crush on - that was definitely Ben's old crush. It's pretty evident and it's all laid out for you, a friend in need, to take in. It establishes trust. This man really does want you to know who he is and where he's coming from.

The confessional moment near the end of Rent-a-Friend is a real one too, where he cringes at the thought of how manipulative he was once upon a time. The slightly awkward energy throughout the tape is real. The stuffed animal he kisses on two occasions, it's real. The gift he shows off from his grandparents. The story of his bigger brother laying on him. The exited noise he'd make as a child! That's all Ben. The whole tape plays like a first date; over-sharing, searching for what to say next, a quiet desperation to get a laugh from a potential new companion. There’s a vulnerability to it and that is definitely the project’s greatest strength.

During production Hollis worked from an outline on the floor, avoiding using a teleprompter, letting the tape unfold in one long, unbroken take. Nothing smoothed over. Nothing hidden.

“That’s how we wanted it,” he says.

That desire to create something natural and earnest didn’t end there. Years later, Hollis became the host of Wild Chicago, a weekly local program where, dressed in a safari outfit, he highlighted the people and places of his home.

“It was a popular program, but I didn’t realize how much work it took to put up a half-hour series. I needed a break,” he says.

A few years later, an opportunity emerged to return to local television on his own terms, something that feels almost impossible now.

“I wanted to continue to explore Chicago and its suburbs without wearing the safari outfit. And I was enamoured with the idea of filming it all myself.”

What followed was Ben Loves Chicago, on Channel 50, a stripped-down evolution of his prior show. The series ran from 1996-1998 and became a kind of love letter to the people who made up his regional world - inventors of robots, alien abductees, Frank Sinatra impersonators, and passers-by on the sidewalk. There's a difference, as Ben puts it, between play and ridicule. There's a way of engaging with people without flattening them.

“I learned you ask questions and try to get out of the way,” he says. “It was basically me and the camera guy. We shot it on mini-DV, which was revolutionary. Very little supervision.”

The series would go on to win an Emmy Award (not his first.) At one point, Hollis showed me the statue - pretty damaged. “They’re brittle,” he said.

Across his Emmy Award-winning programs, in Rent-a-Friend, and in the projects he continues today, the same question keeps surfacing: how do you connect to your fellow human?

Now, decades later, Hollis can look back on that question and on himself from a distance.

“I get to see my work from 30 years ago,” he says. “I get this opportunity to look at me as a young man and ask myself what was going on there. There’s a slight disorientation in that. The person on screen begins to feel like someone else familiar, but separate."

At the same time, there’s a gratitude Ben expresses. The work continues to circulate, finding new audiences and prompting reactions he never could have predicted: letters, phone calls, interviews, even a marriage proposal addressed to Sam.

“It’s an investment that’s paid off in ways I didn’t expect,” he says.

What carries through, and what we’re really happy to present on Eternal, is the feeling in these works. A tone that’s hard to pin down but easy to recognize: openness, curiosity, a light, playful warmth that feels increasingly rare in an era of endless content competing for your short attention span.

There’s a line Hollis remembers from a public speaking class: people don’t remember what you said, but how you made them feel.

“Connectivity is a big part of my work. I want to connect; a perceived deficit in my earthly life.”

Decades on, Ben Hollis’s work continues to do just that.

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The Chinese government pressured Zambia to cancel RightsCon, the world’s largest digital human rights conference, at the last minute, according to the conference’s organizers. Beijing was upset that the speaker’s list included prominent figures from Taiwanese civil society, AccessNow, the group that organizes RightsCon, wrote Friday.

On Wednesday, guests and speakers from across the planet headed to Zambia to attend RightsCon, the largest digital human rights conference in the world. Zambian immigration officials turned away early arrivals, saying the conference had been cancelled. The African country’s government posted a vague message on Facebook saying the conference had been postponed. By the end of the day, event organizers Access Now officially cancelled the conference and told participants not to go to Africa.

RightsCon is a large conference that takes years to plan and hosts thousands of people. It requires a high level of coordination between Access Now and the host country and it’s odd to cancel something this logistically complicated five days before it begins. On Friday, Access Now revealed details about what happened in a blog post. WIRED earlier reported on the Chinese pressure.

“On April 27, one day after a government press release endorsed RightsCon, we received a phone call from [Zambia’s Ministry of Technology] about an urgent issue and were told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person,” the post said. 

“This development was extremely concerning and we immediately pushed back. Next, we opened up lines of communication with our Taiwanese participants, as is our practice when there is a potential risk for a specific community. While we needed more information, we continued to feel confident this was something we could address with the government,” Access Now added.

Scheduled speakers included Jo-Fan Yu, the CEO of the Taiwan Network Information Center, a non-profit that monitors Taiwan’s internet infrastructure, and E-Ling Chiu, the director of Amnesty International Taiwan. RightsCon was held in Taipei, Taiwan in 2025. China notoriously considers Taiwan to be part of China, and China has exerted pressure on countries and companies around the world to not acknowledge Taiwan’s independence.

After Zambia called Access Now, it posted a letter on Facebook and sent it to the rights group on WhatsApp. “This was our first official, written communication from the Ministry. According to the letter, the postponement was ‘necessitated by the need for comprehensive disclosure of critical information relating to key thematic issues proposed for discussion,’ which would be ‘essential to ensure full alignment with Zambia’s national values and broader public interest considerations,’” Access Now said in its blog.

“It is simply impossible to postpone an event the size and scale of RightsCon a week before it is set to start,” the organization added. “The summit requires more than a year of planning and preparation to host thousands of people and curate a program of more than 500 sessions.” 

The language of the public letter was vague, but Access Now said its background conversations with Zambia were clear. “In order for RightsCon to continue, we would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation,” it said.

“This was our red line,” Access Now said. “Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for.”

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[Update 2:45 pm]: The FCC has officially called for a review of Disney and ABC’s broadcast licenses. ” The FCC determines that calling in Disney’s ABC licenses for early renewal, at this time, under the Communications Act’s public interest standard is essential within the meaning of agency regulations,” wrote FCC Media Bureau chief David J. Brown in a filing. The document says that ABC has to file renewals for all its licensed stations by May 28.

[Original story]: In a move that definitely isn’t for political reasons, the FCC is thinking about reviewing Disney and ABC’s broadcast licenses two years ahead of schedule. Semafor reports this morning that the FCC is “moving toward” an early review of the licenses less than 24 hours after President Trump called for late night host Jimmy Kimmel to lose his job over a joke about the age gap between the president and Melania Trump, though a source for the outlet claims the review is not “directly linked” to Kimmel’s joke. 

Though the timing is certainly hard to ignore, the FCC has been poking at ABC for months now. There was the entire other situation with Kimmel last fall where he was briefly pulled off the air, and then the FCC began poking around at The View over its political content. But FCC chair Brendar Carr directly threatened Disney’s licenses within the past month over diversity and inclusion practices in their hiring. On Fox News a few weeks ago, Carr made the argument that it was DEI practices that were actually discriminatory, saying (per The Hill), “If the evidence does in fact play out and shows that they were engaged in race- and gender-based discrimination, that’s a very serious issue at the FCC, that could fundamentally go to their character qualifications to even hold a license.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, the TV licenses are due for renewal until 2028, and opting to review them early would be practically unprecedented.