
1. Netflix’s competitive set is sleep?
2. A powerful view about how we consume ideas today and why that needs to change.
This is flooding (a term I just coined, so I would know): the practice of unleashing a mass torrent of the same stories by the same storytellers at the same time, making it almost impossible for anyone but the same select few to rise to the surface.
But this infinite cycle of death and renewal is the perfect metaphor for what has actually happened to monoculture in a world that runs on social media, which is that each week it is resurrected around something new, for a brief period, with all the loudest voices in attendance, before expiring again, only to coalesce the next week around something else.
We choose virality instead — repackaged, reshaped, shareable versions of what has come before — and equate it to quality because of its resonance…This isn’t quality, or real diversity; it’s familiarity.
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