The Death of Productivity

It started as a suspicion. It has since become full blown paranoia, a delusional ranting that, centuries hence, will either prove me brilliant or insane, depending on the whims of history. My theory, which I will share with you, is this: somewhere along the line, recently, in fact, the progress of technology experienced a sudden, jarring shift away from its original intention, which was to facilitate human achievement. Everything we've ever invented, at least in theory, was meant to better our lives in some way. Now, of course, you can argue that there are many inventions that were either worthless, or just scams, to which I would reply that the people inventing them were either dumb, or knew what they were doing and deciding that conning people was achievement enough.

So why do I think that's changed?

The main culprit: Television on DVD, and its even more insidious counsin, Television via Netflix Instant Queue.

If you're not familiar with why this is a problem, let me elaborate. Take something as addicting as television. We've all watched it at some point. Most of us fall into one of three camps: addicts, fair-weathers, or deniers. The addicts are the folks that love television, have all their favorite shows, and even more impressively, can tell you what time slot they're on, week to week, which is amazing to me when it seems network time slots are shuffled more often than a deck of cards.

The fair-weathers are the middle of the road group, the normal people, which I suspect most of us would identify with. We have some shows we like, and we'll even watch them from time to time, but the idea of television as a hobby is strange to us. We can't imagine having a lifestyle that would be conducive to making it in front of the television at a predetermined time each week. Typically, for us, there's a lot of times that there's "nothing on." As you can determine from my language, I identify with this group.

The deniers, of course, are the people who threw the television out of the second story window. They may or may not have electricity in their homes. We won't be talking about them today. If you're one of them, and you're reading this, enjoy the feeling of superiority as you contemplate what to do with all of your free time.

At any rate, for us fair-weathers, there were always a number of fail-safes installed into the television experience to prevent us from making the dangerous slide into addict territory. Typically, the annoying omnipresence of commercials was a big one, since you can essentially figure out of every hour watched, how many minutes were absolutely wasted, which is not to say that watching a show is productive in the first place, but you get my point. The other fail-safe was the implacable nature of the cable network. Your show comes on when the network says it comes on, you get to watch the show the network wants you to watch, and you get to watch as much of that show as the network says you can. If you want to catch another episode? Too bad! Wait till tomorrow, or hope there's a marathon on. Maybe back-to-back episodes, if you're lucky. For many of us, given the choice between doing anything else and watching television meant the choice was largely predetermined.

This brings me back to the twin evils of television on DVD and Netflix Instant Queue.

Take your favorite show. Your very favorite. Doesn't even matter if it's been canceled in its first season. Now imagine that you can watch any episode, whenever you want, as many times as you want, for as long or as short as you want. South Park at three A.M.? Done! Law & Order at noon? No problem.

But there's still a fail-safe there, to keep you from completely destroying yourself watching television for days on end. You'd have to actually go out and buy the dvd collections, right? And typically, they're expensive, often in the neighborhood from 30 to as much as 80 dollars a pop. So you're pretty much limited only to shows you've already watched, so maybe you can enjoy showing them to friends, or just having them to catch an episode here or there that you might have missed.

Enter the Netflix Instane Queue.

This spigot of life-destroying toxicity strips away every fail-safe we've ever created. There are no commercials. You watch what you want when you want, for as long as you want, and now, you don't even have to leave home! And it costs the same whether you use it once or one hundred times a month! You cannot even begin to comprehend its addictive evil, until long after the tendrils have coiled around your eyes, pulled you in close, and gently soothed away your doubts with the tender promise of "just one more episode."

At one time in our history, we knew that "just one more" only held the truly addicted. Because most of us would rather get up and do something than watch infomercials, even if that meant going to sleep.

That safety net is gone.

If you can take away anything from this, it would be to enjoy your free time while it's still yours. Because one day, you may wake up, dazed and confused, illuminated only by the warm, red glow of the Netflix home page, a remote in your hand, and one thousand text messages from your friends, family, teachers, co-workers and the state department, asking you if you have in fact, died and are in need of proper burial.

And the worst part of all? You won't even know whether or not you should say no.