Why isn't there a media equivalent of "shopping local"?
We are what we watch, and we are all watching the same thing
This year, more than ever, “shopping local” has become a big thing. The pandemic has significantly disrupted independent businesses, and lots of people are keen to protect them.
Independent businesses make cities great places to live in. If every coffee shop, menswear boutique, record store, and mom & pop restaurant in Toronto were replaced by Starbucks, Zara, Penguin Pickup, and Milestones, the city would start to look and feel like anywhere else. Every small business adds to a city’s vibrancy, and to the choices available to its people. During these trying times, people have become more conscientious about shopping local, in the hopes that they’ll continue to be in the company of the places we love.
I think it’s great that we care about supporting diversity of choice in what we buy, but why isn’t there similar care placed on diversity of choice when it comes to what we watch? What would the equivalent slogan of “shop local” be for watching independent media, and why is nobody sharing Instagram stories with that message?
The landing page of not-amazon, a hilarious resource for shopping local in Canada.
These days, it feels like more and more of Netflix’s original releases are leaving a strong impression on popular culture. Isn’t it jarring how everybody was talking about The Queen’s Gambit this month?
Remember Tiger King, and how much of a buzz it created only a few months ago? I have no idea if it’s even on Netflix anymore, and it doesn’t matter — it’s irrelevant now. As Netflix keeps getting better at the “mass” part of mass media, its top releases have taken on a quality of quickly expiring, culturally-significant-for-a-moment content that lasts until the next series is released. Whenever something new comes out, everybody watches it. Should we care that everybody is watching the same thing?
This question was answered in the 1940s by a group of philosophers associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (known as the “Frankfurt School”). The Frankfurt School developed a body of work that would become central to Critical Theory, which seeks to understand how societal structures and cultural artefacts oppress populations, and what it would take to liberate the oppressed.
Adorno on the right, Horkheimer on the left. Tucked-in tie to signal advanced proficiency in philosophy.
Two members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1948. They argued that capitalism replaces the intrinsic value of art or culture with its commercial value, substituting the idea of art for art’s sake with mass culture that sells. Because of this, in a capitalist society, culture, art, and media will regress to that which appeals to the broadest audience.
In other words, what’s happening with the increasing universality of Netflix’s content isn’t just a coincidence. Adorno and Horkheimer would say that the ultimate aim of the Culture Industry, as they coined it, is to turn everybody into similar versions of each other, with similar tastes and shared experiences. If we are all the same, it’s easier for companies to create products and media to sell us that will distract us from our oppressed existences. Right now, by their definition, Netflix seems to be doing a pretty good job of that.
And while Netflix has been killing the original content game, it’s only a matter of time before Amazon, Apple, and other streaming giants catch up (Amazon and Apple together have over 250 billion dollars of cash on hand — if there’s a will, there’ll be a way).
Historically, there’s been a natural division of the media industry. Studios make the content and sell it to distributors, distributors get the content to networks, and companies buy time from networks to advertise their products. Everybody acts in their own best interests, and makes money from it.
Amazon and Apple, however, have business interests in each of those steps. This is how things can start to get messy.
Netflix’s recent tweet shows the significant impact that The Queen’s Gambit has had on the admittedly sleepy and harmless chess world. Sure, online memberships for chess websites soared and chess sets sold out everywhere. Big deal, right?
But what if we swapped out chess with something more divisive? What if Amazon and Apple started creating hit content with the aim of using the success of that content to advance their retail business interests? What’s stopping them from using their media production and distribution capabilities to produce mass media that advances any number of economic, political, or social agendas that might be of interest to them?
Yes, this is an extreme view of what could happen. But, consider that even without these Orwellian shenanigans, the base case is a continued regression of media to a universal taste that is decided for us. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the existence of unique, independent media advances our collective awareness and diversity of thought as a society. Nothing would threaten that more than resigning oneself to only consuming whatever is “recommended” to us by Netflix.
We can talk about how robust Netflix’s recommendation algorithms are and how deeply they understand our tastes, but I think that a big part of the solution still falls to us as consumers to be more intentional in what we choose to watch. It’s easy to put on something mindless, or whatever the hit series of the month is, but just as we vote with our dollars when we shop local, we also vote with our time when we consume media. If we spend all of our time today watching Streaming originals, we shouldn’t be surprised tomorrow if those originals are all that’s left to choose from.
Note 1: I tried to think of an example of something wicked that Amazon could do, but the best I could come up with was Store Wars, starring Alexa, the brave night-shift warehouse fulfillment girl who leads the Amazon Basics Rebellion, sabotaging the Small Business Trade Federation’s Million Store Flotilla and liberating the galaxy from the tyranny of limitless choice.
Note 2: Unfortunately, as cinemas struggle to stay afloat, streaming companies will only become more influential. Last week, Warner Brothers announced that they would release all of their 2021 movies in theatres and on HBO Max simultaneously. This year, streaming may have cemented itself as the most important medium for content going forwards.