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I Recently Canceled Netflix, and I Don’t Miss It
Selectivity over saturation is the future.
I’m no longer chilling with Netflix.
Up until last month I’d had an account for almost 15 years, starting with the DVD by mail thing that made the company famous. Giving it up was hard, even though I barely watched it anymore.
I found that increasingly there was less and less stuff on there that appealed to me. The tenth season of Stranger Things? GTFO. How old are those “kids” now anyway, like 30? Good lord, will they just get fucking eaten by a monster already and be done with it?
Netflix had its moments. Back in the day, I enjoyed Orange is the New Black. A show not exactly made for me, but one I looked forward to every year. But even then it became clear that the streaming model was built not on worthwhile storytelling, but on filling up space with “content” meant mainly to mildly appeal to different audiences. But it “appeals” only in the sense of a corny corporate joke that you laugh at out of politeness, not enjoyment.
The last straw might have been Rebel Moon, which is like the quintessential douchebag dudebro film, making 300 look like a Ken Burns documentary by comparison. Zack Snyder’s cringy Star Wars ripoff, following his 2021 Aliens ripoff Army of the Dead. Who the fuck thought that film merited a two-part release? What algo called for that? And for what audience? Lobotomy patients? Was it made for headless torsos stored in a medical school morgue waiting to be dissected? Or maybe Rebel Moon wasn’t even made for humans. Maybe it was actually meant for AI bots roaming the dead internet, to placate them from wiping out humanity.
I’m so done with some computer algo dictating how and when I watch something. Here are words that come to mind that describe what it feels like getting puppet stringed by some Silicon Valley dork’s coding: Unnatural, weird, uncomfortable, disappointing, unsettling, uncanny, unsatisfying, creepy, skeevy, and just plain wrong.
“Attention by algorithm” is such a strange thing. Letting some impersonal random code feed you “content” (hate that word) on some digital liminal space just feels bizarre. Dystopian, almost.
