Let them eat cake
Earlier this week, Netflix announced that it expected to lose two million subscribers, and its stock price fell by 35%. This triggered some opining about the subscription streaming model and the true cause of the company's downfall. The Wall Street Journal's reporting referenced the widely accepted theory that the pandemic forced homebound people to consume more media and, with the easing of restrictions, more of them are now canceling their subscriptions. (In other words, Netflix has become a victim of the post-pandemic "vibe shift.") Others have emphasized the influx of stronger rivals (e.g. HBO Max) and "fiercer competition to create original content," as the New York Times put it. Netflix itself claims that the problem is password sharing, which it plans to crack down on — nothing helps boost subscribers like treating them as adversaries.
Netflix is also planning to launch an ad-supported tier, which would change the value proposition for full subscribers from "get the kind of content that advertising models can't support" to "get the ad-supported content without ads." That's a very different purchase, because the business model (and not "vibes") dictates the nature of a platform's content: Ad-supported content needs to hold viewers' attention almost against their will so they will be exposed to more advertising; ad-free content needs to satisfy viewers' vanity about their own tastes or their need to be a part of cultural moments that are being exclusively staged behind the paywalls. Ad-supported content is designed to place people into marketing demographics so that they see the ads concocted to appeal to them; ad-free content is an advertisement for itself, constituting its audience as a singular demographic in itself. Or to put this distinction in quasi-aesthetic terms (that is to say, in even more ideological form), ad-free content has to be perceived to be "good" or "worthwhile" on its own merits, whereas ad-supported content is fundamentally a means to a different end. In practice, that basically means that viewers consume the absence of ads as "prestige" regardless of the content itself. The content's quality in and of itself becomes unknowable, impossible to perceive independently from its context.
Platforms have unprecedented data on viewers' habits, but this data is far more lucrative when it is used for ad targeting rather than aligning content with what viewers seem to already want. After all, the whole point of the ad-supported content business is that whatever it is people think they want is entirely malleable and has no grounding or substance or bearing on what they should be fed. Surveillance (data collection, A/B testing, algorithmic filtering, etc.) is not oriented toward discovering what sorts of specific desires are already there but uncovering the mechanisms by which different people can be more reliably made to want certain things on cue.
In an essay about the meme-turned-Netflix show Is It Cake, Emilie Friedlander gets at this point through the popularity of "durational gag" videos in social feeds:
A doctor wearing surgical gloves spends 13 minutes trying to extract something slimy-looking, and potentially alive, that has burrowed inside of a white dude’s dreadlock. (It’s just a rubber toy). Over seven minutes, a “hairdresser” submerges a bright red wig in a pot of boiling water, claiming this to be a strategy for removing hair dye.
Nobody consciously wants to watch these, but the incentives for tricking them into watching them are strong enough to induce creators to find a way. Then, content algorithms reward those creators for their success, becoming a discovery mechanism for cutting-edge attention-manipulation techniques. "Why bother trying to make work that is smart, meaningful, or even remotely enjoyable, when this is the sort of content that always wins?" Friedlander asks.
Of course, "smart" and "meaningful" and "enjoyable" are all moveable feasts. You could argue that audiences are having recalibrated what they experience as "smart," "meaningful," and "enjoyable," or that those qualities have never been all that important to them in practice. (Cue the Lacanian arguments here about how we don't even enjoy "enjoyment.") But nonetheless, Netflix, in trying to continue to add cheap content and bring in more viewers, finds itself beholden to this model of content provision, which ultimately hinges on seeing audiences as valuable insofar as they can be predictably manipulated and not insofar as they can be satisfied. Or rather, it is compelled to try to make audiences equate "satisfaction" with "being manipulated into watching something." (I couldn't stop binging!)
Friedlander, in a nod to Is It Cake, describes this as Netflix trying to "have its cake and eat it too":
It’s thinking in platform logic first, then going through all sorts of contortions to justify the fact of its creation. Sure, there’s something cynical about making a show out of a meme, but at least it knows it’s being cynical. Yes, it’s clearly tapping into the same anticipation-reward loop that a viral video about a bug in a dreadlock does, but it’s doing it in a way that feels elevated, stylish, even a little smart.
This suggests not only how quickly "smart" can been revalued, but also how that becomes the platforms' main function: alienating people from their own sense of standards, even while insisting they are algorithmically catering to their specific tastes.
In editorial conversations at Real Life, we've occasionally categorized Netflix's shows as "couples content": deliberately mediocre material that is acceptable to partners who can't otherwise agree on what to watch and want a stopgap measure to avoid having to deal with it. By design, such content must mute viewers' enthusiasm, because any enthusiasm runs the risk of alienating those who don't share it. It must instead be adequate and neutralizing, so it can be consumed as a testament to the rectitude of compromise.
But it may be that streaming services can't be the avatars of compromise for very long. They are predicated on the false promise of everything, which can only be delivered as an individualized form of nothing. You can have anything you want as long as it is nothing in particular. Netflix's decline could be interpreted optimistically as people coming around to wanting something rather than nothing again, though I tend to think it's merely failed to deliver nothing with due expediency, and more people are getting their nothing elsewhere.