We Used to Wait

by David Roth

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

I think of Netflix mostly as a dire sort of weather system. This is unfair, maybe, as it is also and foremost an application, a very successful business, and it remains the premier place to experience the color red on film at its most dispiritingly oversaturated. Only on Netflix can you see the 2018 film Bird Box, which the company claimed was a massive global hit, or 2021’s Red Notice, which Netflix says has been viewed more than 230 million times. There are reasons to believe some or all of this, and roughly equally compelling reasons to believe none of it, but there’s no reason why anyone should care about any of it. That these movies seem like posters for fake movies you might have seen hanging in the background of a scene from another, real movie is a much more accurate reflection of how they were conceived, and what they are for. Netflix exists, like other contemporary businesses exist, primarily to grow shareholder value; these movies are, more than anything, the proof of that growth—some numbers that turn into some other numbers—sometimes with the ancillary and unfortunate involvement of Ryan Reynolds and sometimes not. 

The long shadow that Netflix casts in my mind, though, suggests something more intimately sinister. As a streaming service that I mostly don’t watch, Netflix is just one button among others, the one with multiple seasons of Is It Cake? on it, but as an emblem of the cynical and anhedonic cultural moment it has come to rule, it is more than that. It is that weather system, a bleary jag of close, dense, stifled bright-gray days when it doesn’t even really seem to cool down at night. It always looks like rain but the air just swells and swells instead; it is stifling in ways that somehow turn people into much worse drivers than they ordinarily are; it is a heat that wakes up the bad smells latent in the pavement, somehow, such that the layered ghosts of ancient piss haunt even the shortest walks. You can’t do anything with it, because weather isn’t negotiable like that and because the decisions that brought it down over everyone were made some time ago. The traffic just sits there, fuming haplessly in its stink. There are legible technical reasons why all Netflix productions tend to Look Like That, but the reason it feels the way it does is that it sucks.

It’s this that is replacing television and not so much eating as idly chewing on the movie business. Everything looks wrong, it’s too bright or too clear or else soggy with grayed-out CGI murkiness; it feels like you’re watching it on your phone even when you’re not. It feels like you’re watching it on your phone on a slow-moving bus, really. A host of recognizable artists is there on either side of the cameras but their talents seem somehow diminished, in many cases they look and feel a bit more haggard and sad; it is not the images that seem overcompressed but the stories and performers in them. Some of that is maybe the result of all these stories unfolding in a world in which the color red is all fucked up, which would bum me out as well. But a lot of it is very plainly earned, a pinched smallness that radiates from the inside out. It feels bad. And yet, somehow, when the question was posed to the Flaming Hydra team of what we missed about the vanished or vanishing internet, my first thought was of my Netflix queue. 

This was some time ago; we both wanted different things, then, Netflix and I. What I mostly wanted, cycling through periods of what could only nominally be considered employment and shorter, more anxious periods of what I thought was freelancing, was for werewolf movies of my choosing to be delivered to my home on DVD. I needed money for rent and food; I wanted to make that money from writing instead of doing other things, and mostly had not yet figured out how to do that. Netflix, which at the time was a service that sent DVDs to your home in exchange for a monthly fee, was largely extraneous to the fundamental challenges in the previous sentence, but it also played a bigger part in my life than I feel comfortable acknowledging even now. Here, and basically only here, I planned ahead with some delight; Netflix expedited this, and built a large and growing business in doing so. A symbiosis, of sorts; I wouldn’t have said we were friends.

During periods of low inspiration and employment, when I was getting my ass handed to me pretty much every day in pretty much every other facet of life—doing but mostly just occupying various temp jobs at a reliably hungover B-minus level, having my pitches and stories rejected and ignored, and learning very little from either experience—my command of my Netflix queue, the care with which I programmed the hours during which I might have been working, was a rare area of mastery. 

I was not much of an employee, and not yet much of a writer, either, but the DVD of Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers that I got in the mail was watched and back in the mail within 24 hours. I attended to my Netflix queue with a degree of close attention that I could not or anyway certainly did not bring to any other aspect of my days. I’d been this way with video stores before, but those were already going away; Netflix was not yet in the streaming business, nor yet an experiment in the algorithmic manufacture of taste. My relationship with it was appealingly binary—they sent me a movie and I received it, and then we ran it back in reverse—and existed on a scale that I could manage. (This has been the most interesting throughline to the Vanishing Internet essays, I think: the extent to which the thrill of being online seems to curdle once it leapt from computers and onto our phones, and from being a sort of escape and into something inescapable.) I rated the movies I watched and received recommendations from the site in turn, and I considered those and incorporated them into my queue in turn. Even the queue itself, a list of titles sprawling deep into the triple digits, proved instructive, as I ranked and re-ranked and so reasoned my way towards an understanding of what I actually wanted to watch as opposed to what I merely wanted to want to watch.

Part of the promise of the internet, as I have experienced and understood it, always came down to its oceanic and ungovernable vastness. I do not want to conquer it, and I am aware that, in the same blank way that the ocean is, it is home to a lot of things that would be happy to eat me right up. The pollution and predation to which it has been subjected by human thoughtlessness has made the internet a hotter and more volatile and less hospitable place. There are so many jellyfish out there now, and even the high tide stinks of rot and gasoline. 

This is the weather system that today’s Netflix feeds and is fed by; a service that once sent me what I wanted grew and grew, optimizing and refining itself ever farther from those simple and useful origins into something that can only offer me things I don’t want—overwhelmingly, artless, spammy, and uncanny things that Netflix itself makes or buys in the belief that it has unlocked some algorithmic secret solution to the question of “what people want to watch,” when the point of it and the fun of it, and the bit I miss most, was the work of figuring all that out for myself. 

Of course the reds are wrong, and the grays bleed artifice from the edges of every frame, and the stars are shrunken and dim. Netflix is compressed in every way, no longer invited or received into the time allowed for it but quite literally and neverendingly piped in. The care that once held it all together and gave it real dorky verve—which came from the people programming their idle hours from the shelves of a video store without walls—has been replaced with something colder and more predictable, something that feels and functions much less like a decision than it used to. The old way just didn’t scale.