Netflix and the Broken Promise of Streaming

You’re television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into jagged fragments of minutes, split-seconds, and instant replays. You are madness, Diana, virulent madness, and whatever you touch dies with you.

If Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network were really about television, it would be as timeless as Archie’s jalopy and Ward Cleaver’s boxes full of ticky-tacky. Its relevance would have died with the cathode-ray tube. It wouldn’t elicit those sighs we heave at dystopias too close to our present sorrows. It’s about the twin prisms of technology and time, how they curve and distort the fabric of human life.

Sure, the lives in the film belong to the grizzled American mid-life crisis. There’s some math necessary to account for the middle-aged, the mid-life crisis, the male; “middles” which don’t, in fact, describe the middle at all. But in this particular hour, concern about our machine-optimized future must land somewhere in the center, as well as a nagging suspicion that it won’t inherit anything we value. Network’s an elegy from the old to the young.

So it’s about the Internet. So it’s about television programming, that bigger vessel for radio and movies, which in turn were bigger vessels for the arts of the stage. So it’s about reading.

Oh yes, it’s about reading. Everything was young once—even the stars and the speed of light. In the Greek dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates (Plato’s impersonation of his teacher, anyways) argues that writing, like a statue or a painting, stands silent. It can’t answer a challenge. It “[tumbles] about anywhere among those who may or may not understand [it]… and if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them… The living word of knowledge… has a soul, of which the written word is no more than an image.”

The modern brain may boil this down to “Dunning-Kruger,” because that’s the legacy of pop psychology, but Socrates is actually discussing performance. Epiphany, that dopamine rush of insight, has a dark sister, “apophenia,” the dopamine rush from an overactive imagination. Apophenia constructs castles out of clouds, transforms the slinking silhouettes of moonlit lochs into primeval leviathans. A dash of panache, a sibilant lilt, can bring myth to the surface and overcome reason, if only for a second. Epiphany can become apophenia and vice versa. The sisters share a wardrobe.

Neither Plato nor Socrates foresaw the ubiquity of the written word that we now enjoy. Phaedrus begins with Socrates and a disciple escaping to the countryside to read a scroll together, and they act like British schoolboys sampling Turkish delights. Barring death, an author of the modern world can answer and confront the Socratic method. Perhaps not today, but tomorrow or the day after.

The power of libraries, those vast and generous depths, echo with the call and response of innumerable voices. Lay down a skiff on the water and glide across to meet them. Yes, a few texts fall out of circulation or a current may tug you in the wrong direction. Yes, absurdists (Camus), magic realists (Jorge Luis Borges), and deconstructionists (pick one) will rock your boat and threaten to sink the entire enterprise. You must row constantly. You might never see the conclusive end of a single conversation during your time on this earth.

That continuous process divides amusement from knowledge. It makes those split seconds and instant replays whole, worth writing down, and worth reading. You should be more concerned when you aren’t rowing.

For a brief slice of the last decade, television and movies enjoyed that abundance. For less than a bottle of wine, a Netflix subscriber could sample virtually anything, constrained only by desire and a willingness to grab an oar. A factory worker can’t, in truth, bet their precious matinee cash on the recommendations of cineastes. Critics hunt for the next Oscar winner while most of the population is recovering from Black Friday and the holiday crush.

Lower that barrier to entry and they can, however, ante up and invest their hours piecemeal. Maybe some (or most) folks passed straight through, incurious to Kurosawa and the legion of film buffs bleating about Rashomon. An equal number probably visited their local library on the day of its grand opening, flipped through illustrations in a Dickens collection, luxuriated in the aroma of cedar bookshelves, and never darkened its door again. For every well-read gentleman of yore there were always ten who studied the hunt or a racing sheet instead of their letters. Contrary to popular belief, the great Library of Alexandria didn’t burn and it wasn’t sacked. Like most pagan centers of the world, it probably decayed until the roof fell in.

The 2020s remind us that, if circumstances forced us to rebuild libraries, the biggest menace wouldn’t be looters or an open flame. Wracked by jealousy, their own patrons would rip them apart.

Aughts-era Netflix (“Aughtflix”) skirted the “immutable bylaws of business” and founded something vaguely resembling a public institution (after demolishing video stores, the next best thing). Companies didn’t comprehend that, of course. Their life expectancy has plummeted since the 1950’s and can now be counted in dog years; their behaviors are feral and they can’t concentrate past the next fiscal quarter. From their point of view, Netflix was buying their trash.

Aughtflix’s competitors could have learned from that mistake, maybe observed the swelling tides and the delicate virtual ecosystem girding it. They would have profited greatly from those who could invest in media’s past and future. Instead, they demanded everything back and chased their stupid bone. Everyone more firmly chained to reality recognized that the “streaming wars” would devolve into butchery: cable hacked into ten separate bills.

For the sake of argument, suppose that these separate pools, your Pluses and your Maxes, boasted a volume similar to Aughtflix. Imagine that they achieve the “walled garden” brand loyalty of the console wars, dividing homes into Paramount families and Disney families. What a marketing nirvana!

What a cultural failure. It’s a recipe for disaffection and inertia. Brands bring a modicum of joy at the right moments, but they’re ultimately icons for tribes. They try to freeze out heterodoxy because you need to stay put long enough for us to sell to you, goddammit. To a brand, the complexities of a human being and its flighty affections represent a dilemma, whereas they add to the strength of a public forum.

Brands thrive on selective memory and privation, a fact that eluded us when we digitized everything en masse. Preservation of data became so ubiquitous and cheap that it seemed like a given. In 2010, good information appeared to be the one luxury we could afford and we dismantled our multiplexes and Blockbusters.

The mass deletion of series for tax write-offs, the incipient shuttering of the Internet Archive, the inevitable demise of so-called “live services,” and endless paywalls in news and academia shouldn’t surprise us. (The less said about the prospect of machine hallucinations in search engines, the better.) That scorpion’s just obeying its nature. Information may “want to be free,” as the saying goes, but the full quote acknowledges it wants to be expensive because it’s valuable. There’s no money in a necessity everyone has—a principle for which air would serve as a good metaphor if industrialization hadn’t already commoditized it.

Our misplaced trust will disbar more and more people with lesser means from the grander conversation. They’ll buy fragments of knowledge, the drops siphoned and distilled for their meager pleasure. They’ll have a favorite label to assuage their thoughts on war, murder, and death. They’ll drink their daily bread and laugh at shadows on the wall.

Sean Weeks is a student of classics and mythology who’s wandered slightly off course. If you want to join him in his odyssey, you can visit him at www.weeksauthor.com.

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