When I open Netflix at the end of a long day, it sometimes takes me an hour to decide what to watch. I think this makes me quite stupid. Although maybe I’m also hoping you’ll tell me that endless scrolling is a perfectly valid new form of entertainment. -Loser
Dear Doom,
You may vaguely remember the “Surprise Me” option that Netflix introduced during the pandemic. The feature, basically a glorified shuffle button, was designed precisely for users like you, Hamlets of the streaming era, tragically frozen by indecision. The fact that it was quietly removed last year, apparently due to “low use”, would seem to favor his theory about displacement as a new form of entertainment. If people like you don’t hand over the burden of choosing to an algorithm, then surely everyone is getting some kind of perverse pleasure from your indecision.
I guess you could argue that unrealized possibilities are the best form of entertainment there is. Ask all the people who continue to browse Zillow even after they’ve purchased their “forever home,” or who secretly browse apps once they’ve committed to a monogamous relationship. All the beautiful faces you swipe left will remain perfect in their potentiality, unaffected by the squeaky voice, the weekend sweatpants, all the sad realities of the embodied personality. The house you never buy will always be a platonic ideal, without the headaches of incontinent scoundrels or unruly neighbors. The movie you watch, night after night, will never let you down with expository dialogue or a predictable ending.
I can already hear the dissidents protesting: Rewards require risks! Nothing is risked, nothing is gained! I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but I really don’t think it applies to your problem. Like the “Surprise Me” article, these truisms assume that chronic indecision arises from an excess of tempting options, that there are simply too much There is good content and perfectly satisfactory options are ignored in the hope that there is something better around the corner. But let’s face it, we don’t exactly live in the golden age of cinema. If their catalog is anything like mine, it’s full of reboots, recycled IPs, and docu-series cowardly trying to capitalize on the success of the latest hit show. I’m pretty sure that your compulsive scrolling is due less to an excess of promising selections than to a dearth of them: that it’s instigated by the depressing knowledge that you have infinite options but few real options.
We are all complicit in this. The next time you’re dissatisfied with the narratives on offer, get off the couch and create something better.
I hate subtitles. My partner can’t watch TV without them. Aid. (I’m not referring to foreign language material here.) —Eyes Up
This one’s pretty easy, Eyes. Your partner is unable to do without subtitles. You’re just upset about them. You lose.
Why is it so difficult to interact with screens in dreams? -Current cut
Power, you seem to belong to a minority of humans who have found a screen in their dreams. Browse any Reddit forum on the topic and you’ll find endless conspiracies attempting to explain why these devices we check hundreds of times a day are absent from the melodramas of our REM cycles. (A couple of possibilities: phones are karmically transparent; our unconscious, which knows we’re all in a simulation, sees all of reality as a screen, so representing devices could risk infinite regress.) When we dream of digital technologies, they are impossible to use. The telephone is made of wood or stone. The laptop screen is filled with meaningless numbers in tiny, illegible fonts. None of the applications open. The threads of text are reduced to endless green and blue bubbles full of gibberish. It’s like a count of Alice in Wonderland written by William Gibson.
The dreaming mind is fundamentally archaic. It is a machine that constantly rewinds the trajectory of human progress, tormenting us with primitive fears and ancient archetypes (snakes entering the garden, rivers flowing blood) that have long been dormant in the collective unconscious. Sleep is pretty much the only time when your lizard brain, the amygdala, functions freely without interference from the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s tireless fact-checker, which represents the logical mind that knows how to process abstract ideas, log on Instagram and make a Venmo transaction. Many people find reading and writing almost impossible in their sleep, which makes sense given that literacy is (relatively speaking) a fairly new technology. Our history with screens is even shorter: just a blip on the time scale of human history.