Intro
This is an excerpt of a chapter of my upcoming E-Book CCRU Sightings: Encounters with the Outside (or Capitalism, a Love Story). The book connects, reduces, and clarifies many of my blog posts here into a coherent, dark, comical hyperstitional exploration of how flows emerging from the CCRU have infected the mainstream culture without us knowing it. This particular excerpt can be read with two other blog posts in mind - The Ballad of Kevin Spacey (Space(y)-Time Hyperstition) where I show how Netflix Original House of Cards and Kevin Spacey make eerie fictions become real, and Lemurian TV War (there's a war on for your time) which is my continuation of the CCRU's appendix TV Demonism, a text that highlights the presence of deep, dark, occultist state control and its effects on and in the media.
Nick Land’s Crypto
Netflix Brand
The story goes like this: a little-known Californian company
named Netflix is founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Its
service is simple – rent DVDs to people around America. In 5 years it has 600
thousand members. 3 years later, over 4 million. 2 years later in 2007 it
introduces streaming alongside DVD
renting. Within the decade it spreads across the world and introduces a
streaming only plan. 2 Years later in 2012 it makes another huge move from
renting and streaming others content
to coproducing its own content with another company which culminates in the first
‘Netflix Original,’ Lilyhammer. 1
year later Netflix is making its own
content completely in house, the first pure Netflix Original House of Cards.
If we consider the major events in Netflix’s history – the
founding of the company for renting DVDs, the global spread of the company and
its shift to streaming, its first coproduced original content, and its first
wholly original content - we see that the major changes occur in a 13 year
period between 1997 and 2010, a 2 year period between 2010 and 2012, and
finally a 1 year period between 2012 and 2013. Things pick up speed from 13 –
an unlucky and occult number - to 2 – a twinning number - to 1, all culminating in a political drama
that blends reality and fiction at an alarming rate.
This makes perfect sense as it is but makes even more perfect sense when we consider
the following: Hasting studied computer science, Randolph studied geology, both
were rich entrepreneurs. Could one imagine a more accelerationist resonance
than computer technology interfacing with an understanding of global territory
all within a Californian backdrop? Could one name a better combination for
cultural world domination than West Coast technoscientific global investors? I
think not.
But Hasting and Randolph don’t get all the credit. They’re
merely meat-bags channeling an impersonal vector of capitalism that froths
beneath the surface of Netflix. That is, due to advancements in technology
resulting in changes in media distribution and consumption and how these
advancements and changes benefit people’s economic and time preferences, people
go from primarily renting DVDS to streaming content online in their homes (a
sign of what Guattari would call Integrated World Capitalism’s tendency to
miniaturize its machines as to be internalized by the consumer). Netflix simply
rides the wave, appropriates the forces, and in drafting off these forces, cuts
away its dead weight and tightens its feedback systems; it decentralizes,
dematerializes, deterritorializes.
No more physical DVDs; no more time and money invested in
coordinating bodies to ship and handle DVDs. In fact, Netflix even does away
with the need for an other altogether –
no more simply sharing others’ content, or cooperating with others to produce
content, etc. Like the self-sufficient and auto productive monstrosity of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Netflix
produces and distributes itself in digital bits, incorporeal fragments,
throughout the air. It makes itself the ether, it builds itself into the fabric
of our shared world and the subjectivities produced therein.
If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s an instance of
letting ‘the process,’ with all its spatial-territorial variables, determine
what sticks and what goes, a method that does away with as much mediation, and
human agency as possible. That is, this is all a lot of words to say Netflix is
accelerationist. A banality, but one we need for what is to come.
...
