How will we spend the remaining 700,000 hours of the twenty-first century? In the metered time of our own discretion, there have never been more opti

Enter the Supersensorium

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2021-07-09 15:00:08

How will we spend the remaining 700,000 hours of the twenty-first century? In the metered time of our own discretion, there have never been more options for our personal entertainment, nor have they ever been more freely available. We find ourselves strolling the aisles of a vast sensorium. On the shelves is a trove of experiences: video games, movies, TV shows, virtual reality, books, and comics, all prepackaged for our consumption. What had previously been accomplished for food through the distribution of supermarkets has now been done with experience itself. The recent grand opening of this supersensorium has been mediated through the screen, a panoply of icons, images, links, downloads, and videos auto-playing, which we browse through entirely at our leisure.

In June of 2018 the shares of the company most devoted to this sybaritic vision, Netflix, finally broke the $400 barrier. Since 2008, Netflix stock performed better than Amazon and Google combined. If you had bet $1,000 dollars in January of 2008 on streaming entertainment as a cultural force, you’d now be taking home a cool $100,000. In that time, too, Netflix has accumulated over 130 million subscribers, and with their data collection begun a massive production mill, one optimized by continuous A/B testing of viewer preferences and behavior, including tracking technologies that register where viewers press pause and when they let episodes run late into the night. All of this in an effort to supplant what CEO Reed Hastings has openly identified as Netflix’s number one competition: sleep.