The battle for your attention span is not a war with a winner. It is a divorce. Popular media is finally admitting that it cannot be everything to everyone.
In the summer of 2013, Netflix released all 13 episodes of House of Cards on the same day. It felt like a gift. No commercials. No waiting. Just pure, unadulterated binging. A decade later, that gift has turned into a contract dispute.
You might just remember why you fell in love with stories in the first place. And if you don’t? Well, there’s always the scroll. It will be waiting for you. It always is. Deeper.24.08.08.Aubrey.Lovelace.Interlude.XXX.1...
“The traditional three-act structure is dying,” says Helena Vance, a screenwriter who has worked on three major streaming pilots. “You can’t spend ten minutes setting up a character anymore. If you don’t grab them in the first 90 seconds, they’re gone. They’ve literally opened another tab.”
Welcome to the Great Unwinding—the strange, chaotic era where the entertainment industry is frantically trying to figure out what we actually want, and we are too busy scrolling to tell them. If you have watched a movie recently, there is a 50% chance you watched it while also looking at your phone. This is not a moral failing; it is the new normal. Popular media is no longer competing against other shows. It is competing against the infinite scroll of TikTok, the dopamine drip of Instagram Reels, and the algorithmic trance of YouTube Shorts. The battle for your attention span is not
For the masses, entertainment will become even more gamified. Expect interactive Bandersnatch -style choices baked into every reality show. Expect AI-generated “alt endings” you can unlock for a fee. Expect your favorite pop star to release a “scroller version” of their music video—edited vertically, captioned automatically, and over in 45 seconds.
Why take a risk on a new idea when you can bet on a known variable? In the summer of 2013, Netflix released all
By J. Samuels
But even the superhero factory is showing cracks. The Marvels underperformed. Ant-Man shrank. The audience, exhausted by homework (you have to watch two series and three movies to understand one new film), is starting to rebel. Here is the twist in the third act. As the mainstream media gets louder, faster, and more referential, a counterculture is emerging. It is not happening on Netflix or in theaters. It is happening on a cozy website called “Are.na,” on private Discord servers, and in the resurgence of physical media.