Why the Curse Is So Brilliantly Uncomfortable

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of con

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Pop culture soothes and placates with a steady series of uncomplicated morality tales in predigested narratives where nothing ever really changes and so there’s no worry that the storyline will move in a way that hurts your feelings. Crowdsourced “content” is built on ephemerality.

If the goal of streamers once seemed to be prioritizing and supporting great series from a diverse group of interesting creators, that goal seems to have shifted from making better shows to just ... making more of them. As viewers, we’re being flattened by a fire hose of programming — and the experience of watching TV feels like a ritual of submiss... See more

Decades of propaganda about television being bad for you in the twentieth century created this anxiety, but the promotional machine around those early twenty-first-century shows made it chronic: the bizarre need for artists to disavow the medium they work in, and for viewers to disavow the thing they enjoy.