Netflix and the Media Monoculture

Netflix executives are probably shitting themselves right now.

As per The Guardian:

"Netflix reported on Tuesday that it had lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade. The announcement spooked Wall Street and sent shares plummeting more than 35%, erasing more than $50bn in market capitalization from a company whose stock was already down more than 40% on the year."

The cause of this is apparently two-fold: (1) the pandemic is finally abating which means people are socialising again; (2) many are put off by the Netflix Board's recent plans to block access to accounts with users from multiple locations.

Needless to say, I won't be disappointed if Netflix becomes irrelevant. What Netflix has done to online culture has been immeasurably harmful, having had a stranglehold over content consumption for the past decade. One can only hope its grip is finally loosening so that the media monoculture (as coined by Lindyman AKA Paul Skallas) can die the death it deserves.

With Netflix at the helm of modern-day media consumption, culture has become alarmingly monolithic and uniform. To quote Gerry Spence, we are an "amorphous glob of sameness". Everyone only ever talks about what’s on Netflix or Disney+ these days - content carefully curated by our corporate overlords for the median NPC. The powers-that-be get to decide what to stream and what to cancel, and this inevitably has the top-down effect of influencing our collective subconscious. This is the reason why "politically agnostic" people lean left without even realizing it; as Marshall McClulan once articulated - "Does a fish know it's wet?".

The media monoculture wasn't as pronounced when I was growing up as a teenager because we had to find creative ways to consume content back then. The problem is accessibility. Back then, finding good films and music was difficult; less accessibility = increased effort to find good content. This lack of accessibility allowed people to discover all sorts of new weird shit (brought on by the need to conduct independent self-research) and that’s how different subcultures sprung up and individuals had more distinctive identities in the past.

To the person reading this: Give up SaaS, take the P2P pill.