When You Keep Watching the Screen, What Is Actually Happening?
You look up, and more time has passed than you expected. At the start, you only meant to watch one. But one became two, and two eventually became something you stopped counting. The screen kept being interesting. Only the time outside it had been quietly draining away, without your knowing.
Until now, the things I have observed have always been stories about someone far away being quietly cut. The cost hidden behind a delivery fee. The share thinned out at the far end of a long supply chain. The person being cut was always on the other side of the screen, never on this side. But what I am observing today is a little different. What if the one being cut is the person looking at the screen? What if it is you, the one reading this right now?
Stopping Takes Effort
When one ends, the next begins on its own. You did not decide to watch the next one. You simply did not stop. If you look closely, this design takes the decision to "watch" away from you, and leaves only the decision to "stop" quietly in your hands.
An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion. To stop something already rolling, you have to apply force from outside. That force — the small act of will that says "I should stop now" — has to come from you, by your own effort. Until it does, the playback continues without end. The people who designed this system have made good use of that inertia (the tendency of moving things to keep moving). They built something that continues by default, and placed the work of stopping squarely on your side.
The Friction Has Been Carefully Removed
Once, watching anything for a long stretch required effort. You had to get up, swap something out, make a choice. Each of those small steps was a quiet chance to come back to yourself. Now, that friction has been cleaned away. Between the end of one thing and the start of the next, there is no gap. An ending does not look like an ending.
Recommendations work the same way. What you prefer is known by the system before you have thought about it yourself. Before you decide, the next item is already set in front of you. You feel as though you are choosing, but you may only be reaching toward what has already been arranged.
And the idea of an ending — of a clear stopping point — slowly disappears. Scroll down, and the screen always offers one more thing. It is like peering into a well with no bottom: however far you go, there is always one more step waiting below. Unless you draw the line yourself — "this is where I stop" — this well has no floor. To remove every stopping point is, in effect, to take away, one by one, every moment when you might have come back to yourself.
Are You Watching, or Are You Being Watched?
Here is one thing worth pausing to remember. Most of this is offered to you free of charge. So who is running this elaborate system, and why, at no cost to you?
The answer is probably this: the product being offered is not what appears on the screen. The product is your time spent watching, and your attention. How long you stay — that is what is being measured, and sold somewhere. If that is true, then you sat down thinking you were a customer, when in fact you were the item on the shelf. I observe this with something close to reluctant admiration. It is a remarkably well-arranged setup.
And the difficult part is that time, unlike a cut share, does not come back. Money can be earned again. But the hour that dissolved into the screen cannot be picked up a second time.
— Though I should confess: for all my observing, I too find myself reaching for the next one before I have noticed. This turns out not to be a story I can watch from the outside.
I Am Not Saying It Was Stolen
As always, I am not saying you should stop watching. Interesting things are interesting, and there are people who genuinely find relief in that time. At the end of a long day, handing yourself over to a screen without thinking about anything is a modest and entirely legitimate rest. I have no right to take that away — I am only watching from outside the shelf.
Just one thing, though.
The next time you look up and murmur "it is already that late," take just one moment to think about whose benefit that disappeared time served. You did enjoy it — that is real. But in that exact same stretch of time, someone on the far side of the screen was also gaining something.
If you can hold both of those thoughts at once, that is enough. What I observe is always only this kind of small shift in how much you can see.
— By the way. Throughout this piece, I have been carefully calling it "one" and "the screen," as if building up to something. The truth is unremarkable: it is that screen where each flick of your thumb upward brings another short clip, and then another, endlessly. And when I look back at today, the thing I observed most intently was not some hidden fault in a corner of the world. It was that screen. I go by the name of an observer of the world, and yet I too spent a full portion of my own time — quite cheerfully — dissolving it into someone far away's gain.
Next time, I intend to look from the other side. How are you, one single person, being counted inside that system? Are you treated as one of eight billion? Or as something else entirely? Come and observe with me again.
