David Foster Wallace predicted the binge culture of today. First it was simply video-on-demand. Then recommendations based on prior viewing. Now it's predictive analytics. It takes strong conscious effort to climb up out of our selected ruts. Not only do the algorithms look at what you like, but they are able to group you with other users like you and make suggestions based on the things people in your cohort like.
In the post-modern age, helped by technology, we dream of achieving 24/7 joy. But behind the joy are the algorithms. In 2012, for instance, when Sarandos commissioned a political drama for Netflix TV called House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, predictive analytics helped justify his decision. “It was generated by algorithm,” Sarandos told me. “I didn’t use data to make the show, but I used data to determine the potential audience to a level of accuracy very few people can do.”
This “if you liked that, then you’ll like this” facility has become commonplace in the new millennium, tailoring cultural supply to your tastes. And yet, customized culture such as that devised at Netflix risks creating what internet activist Eli Pariser in 2010 called “filter bubbles”: each of us isolated intellectually in our own informational spheres.
What Netflix’s notorious binge culture results in is flow by another means, more efficient and more insidious— insidious in that we seem to be getting what we want all the time, and we suppose we have liberated ourselves from the gatekeeper of TV (schedulers), only to be ruled by another, much more sophisticated group of gatekeepers, whose task is to keep us watching while at the same time suggesting that viewers are being liberated by being given more choice.
What fascinated Wallace about this passage was not so much the parodic regress—the tourists watching the barn, Murray watching the tourists, Jack watching Murray, us watching Jack watching Murray watching the tourists watching the barn—but Murray’s assumption of the role of scientific critic at a remove from the culture of gawping. Wallace’s sense was that we’re all gawpers now, lens-dangling barn-watchers as much as pop-cultural theorists. The most absurd aspect of this parodic regress is the person who thinks he can stand outside it, observing with ironic detachment.
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