Still Watching

The are you still watching? prompt appeared sometime around 2016 and immediately became the most passive-aggressive feature in streaming. Netflix, having watched you not move for three hours, slides a menu onto the screen to check if you’re alive. You click yes. Another episode starts. You are, technically, watching. Whether you’re experiencing it is another question.

I watched four seasons of Orange Is the New Black in what felt like a long weekend and came out the other side feeling hollow and accomplished at the same time. That’s the Netflix experience—you’ve consumed an entire arc of story and character and consequence, but the platform is already recommending the next thing before the credits finish rolling. No space to sit with it. No natural stopping point. Just the algorithm, waiting.

What’s strange about Netflix’s dominance is how fast it happened. The name comes from "internet" and "flicks," which sounds obvious now but felt like hubris in 1997 when they were still mailing DVDs. By 2017 they were making Narcos and Sense8 and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and spending more on original content than most traditional studios. They went from a distribution service to a cultural institution in about a decade, which is either impressive or terrifying depending on how you feel about cultural institutions controlled by recommendation engines.

The Sense8 cancellation still sits badly with me. Eight interconnected characters across the globe, a genuinely weird and ambitious premise, two seasons of building something unusual—and then gone. Netflix is very good at producing television and very casual about ending it. The algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away, and it doesn’t explain itself.

But I keep paying for it. Of course I do. The are you still watching? prompt has never once made me stop.