We are now binge-watchers of TV shows. I don't like watching TV, but find myself sometimes in the throes of a binge-watch, and all the guilt associated with such a mindless pleasure. It's no doubt a phenomenon, especially with Netflix.
In a recent Wall Street Journal event, Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings claimed that the future of TV could come by taking a hallucinogenic pill that takes you on a trip, and another pill to bring you back. The pill would give you the same experiences that at the moment come from streaming services like Netflix. He made this prediction not as an innovative idea--though who knows, he might run a pharmaceutical spin-off--but as a potential threat to TV:
“In twenty or fifty years, taking a personalized blue pill you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable,” Mr Hastings said. “And if the source of human entertainment in thirty or forty years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble.”
Hastings is being facetious here--it won't take thirty or forty years for pharmacology to be used as a delivery device for simulacra. And the many who reacted to Hastings predictions as a mere throw-back to the 1960s or A Brave New World are missing the point entirely. Pharmacological simulacra will be a reality as Hastings predicts, but within only 5-10 years--just long enough for brain chips to advance enough for them to become ubiquitous and the ideal source for television and every other kind of human experience. In fact, this will be the time when TV is obsolete, given that the brain chips will create virtual reality in the brain itself. The kind of voyeurism that TV provides will become internalized.
Reed Hastings at WSJ on Future of Netflix
Virtual Reality goggles are one way that televisual experiences are being enhanced into personal experiences. Hospitals, in the absence of the kind of pharmacological solution Hastings doled out in the WSJ event, have turned to VR to provide pain relief, the 'trips' of which harken back to the opium dens of the Asian 19th Century. A problem with VR goggles today is the spread of ocular herpes--the result of VR parties in which like drugs of the 60s people pass around and use, regardless of how sweaty and grimy the goggles are after a while. A hallucinogenic drug could provide a deeper internal experience while mitigating the risk of ocular herpes.
In spite of Hastings predictions, it could be the case that we're all just living in a simulated reality already--at least according to Elon Musk, who believes that with the ubiquity of computers and the sophistication of video games, we are already living in a simulated reality. Hence, the technology simply has to develop a bit more before we see the kinds of things Hastings is predicting way too far into the future.
Elon Musk: Are we living in a video game? Yup.
By 2040, we'll be living in a highly sophisticated virtual reality world in which perhaps we'll have an avatar watching streaming TV for us.
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