From meaningless content to doomscrolling
One of the truly essential Substack writers is Justin E. H. Smith, who is neither a journalist nor a start-up freelancer but a major academic philosopher and polymath scholar of (what always strikes me as) ten thousand interesting things. His newsletter from two Sundays ago was a typically undefinable reflection on (inter alia) memory, streaming, tense, eternity, and the internet. Here are some sample grafs that bring home one of the essay’s central points:
If this assessment sounds bleak or cynical, consider Amazon’s recent acquisition of MGM for $8.45 billion. Jeff Bezos now holds the rights to numerous treasures of twentieth-century American entertainment, not least Albert R. Broccoli’s almost boutique-style James Bond films with their iconic, mythos-incanting musical opening numbers. Bezos has explicitly stated his intention to “reimagine and redevelop that I.P. [sic] for the 21st century.” On the surface, his idea of what a “good plot” looks like would seem to make twenty-first century content scarcely different from the most archaic and deep-rooted elements of myth and lore. Thus he thinks there needs to be a heroic protagonist, a compelling antagonist, moral choices, civilizational high stakes, humor, betrayal, violence…
“I know what it takes to make a great show,” Bezos has confidently said, “this should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have these basic things in common.” The problem is that Bezos’s purpose in returning to a quasi-Proppian schema of all possible storytelling is not at all to revive the incantatory power of cliché to move us into the ritual time of storytelling. It is rather to streamline and dynamicize the finished product, exactly as if it were shipping times Bezos were seeking to perfect, rather than the timing of a hero’s escape from a pit of conventional quicksand.
And so the college freshman imagining her life as a show seems doubly sad: she turns to the closest thing we have to new narrative art in order to frame her own life and make it meaningful, but the primary instances our culture yields up to her to help with this framing are in fact only meaningless content being passed off as narrative art. It is no wonder, then, that what she will likely end up doing, after the passing and briefly stimulating thought of life itself as a TV show, is to go back to doomscrolling and vain name-checking until sleep takes over.
Do go read the whole thing; the closing section is eloquent, incisive, and damning in equal parts. Then do your duty and subscribe.
