What you think you are consuming is not what you think it is. Whatever you think you are buying, eating, paying for, you are wrong. It will change. TV is not TV. Bananas are not bananas.
The other day my wife and I changed the way our internet and television service are provided. Bear with me, the details are important. We had been using Google Fiber for several years, which is a product similar to Comcast -- with Google Fiber you get a wi-fi signal to your house and also what we modern humans call "cable TV" -- a few hundred channels wired to your house. The main difference between Comcast and Google in this regard is that when you use Google, your self-esteem in 13.4% higher, because Google is not always kicking you in the nuts for no reason, although they are still happy to take your money for a product that doesn't always work as advertised.
Anyway, Google has decided it wants to stay in the wi-fi business but no longer wants to be in the "cable TV" business. So basically Google informed all their customers they would no longer support cable TV, but we would need to go find our own wireless TV provider like Hulu or Fubo or YouTube or one of these or, alternatively, go back to Comcast, which is sort of like asking the Scottish to go back to English rule in the 1600s. To quote the Scottish: "We'd rather our whole country dine on one wee sausage and suffer mass starvation than dine in your Buckingham Palace."
So instead of having a wired TV connection into our house, we now simply have a wi-fi connection in our house that feeds the internet, and then also provides a signal for streaming TV.
OK, so those are the relevant details. Hope you are still reading.
When I was a kid we "ate bananas." You would go to the banana tree in the backyard and pick and eat a banana. We also "watched TV." I assumed that was a thing, a staple, a thing that would never change, that would always be consumed the same way. It was made, as such. We watched network TV, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and later Fox. That's all there was. You plugged it in to the power, put the rabbit ears up, and the ears got the signal out of the air and into the TV. Simple, you could watch Charlie Rose on Nightwatch at 2 a.m., before you knew he was a loser and a predator. You could watch until 3 a.m. when the local CBS affiliate (at that time KSL) would SIGN OFF and all there would be would be a SOARING EAGLE until 5 a.m. when the national news started up again on the east coast. Or if you had your house wired for TV with an antennae on the roof, you could just plug your TV into the wall with a wire and it would work every time; this is what we had and all my friends had growing up, just normal network TV, three channels, plus PBS, and then later Simpsons and Married with Children on Fox, which no one was allowed to watch if you were Mormon.
So in those days you would turn the TV on and there was Dukes of Hazzard with Bo and Luke figuring out how to get out of whatever quagmire Boss Hogg had concocted for them, and then it goes to commercial, and back to the show and back and forth, and everything you are seeing is coming to you from the singular network signal. The product they are giving you is a TV show surrounded by ads. That's the product, that's what you are consuming. You are consuming 1 hour of television at a time, or thirty minutes for a sit-com. So you start to assume that a TV show is a certain thing, a product, an hour-long show. You get to consume something in a certain way, like a banana.
Later, with cable TV, starting with MTV and HBO, we realized you could take a bunch of these signals and have them come through a cable box into a home, so you were not limited to the satellites blasting network TV through the air, but you could get other stuff like MTV or ESPN through a wired connection, but these products were similar -- hour-long shows mostly with commercials that you would consume about an hour or half-hour at a time. They were similar to TV in the sense that they came into your home through a wire, and similar to TV in that all shows were either 30 minutes or 60 minutes and contained commercials, basically a similar product offered through a different service.
Then streaming TV comes along and On Demand, like Netflix or HBO On Demand and these are shows that are just sitting there in inventory -- you don't have to "wait" for the wire or the satellite to blast it through the air or wire and then receive it in real time. These are digital products that are just sitting there and you push START whenever, like a CD or something. So now you begin to see that these products are a bit different, the streaming content is just content, no ads, it's 42 minutes of art for a drama or 22 minutes or whatever for a sit-com. That's what it is. It's no longer an hour. It's either 22 minutes, or it is 42 minutes.
But now it's changed, AGAIN. TV isn't TV, it's not network TV, it's not cable TV. It's different again. With our new Google streaming service (YouTube) plus Google wi-fi, TV is totally different. Now when we get into a show, the whole thing is there, like the entire HISTORY of Dukes of Hazzard is just sitting there, like all 400 episodes or whatever. Is this what you wanted? But the thing you are being asked to consume is like a whole season or a whole show (all 500 episodes) -- it's just sitting there in inventory as a whole block of crap or art. TV shows new and old, movies, all just there in constant inventory waiting to be selected; no longer subject to the whims of programming. Some of the content is free with your plan (not free!) and some of them cost more (in addition to your plan!). And you are paying a monthly fee for all this shit, but when you try to watch a show, IT ADDS THE COMMERCIALS BACK IN AGAIN. So, sort of like Hulu, except you are paying a lot more to YouTube than Hulu, and still they screw you with the commercials.
Anyway, the thing I thought was TV is not TV. TV isn't free, isn't coming through the wall, isn't from the government, it's not "an hour," it's not forty-two minutes either. It's some sort of content that some people own and can change into various blocks or units and sell you all or part of it as they wish. That's what TV is, it's a variable and arbitrary unit of media or artistic content that can be sold in a variety of ways. They can sell you 9 minutes of this and 4 minutes of that and 2 minutes of this and ten seconds of that. And it's not wired to anything, it's all coming through wi-fi. So of course you don't own anything -- you don't own DVDs or VHS tapes or anything -- they can change the inventory constantly. Oh, you want to watch the Director's Cut of Rambo IV where he becomes a barber, well, too bad, that's not there anymore, it doesn't exist, but you can watch Rambo IV in Russian subtitles (which is weird because shouldn't Rambo know Russian by now so that when he speaks to Russian soldiers we at home would need English subtitles!)
Imagine like I had a banana tree in my backyard. Every time you want a banana, you go back there and pick a banana. Simple, right? You are hungry, go to the tree, pick a banana, eat a banana. Bananas. Like network TV, turn it on, there's the TV. Stable TV, stable banana tree. Predictable and glorious and simple.
Then you grow up and you are hungry and you assume there are bananas on the banana tree, and you go out there, and no fucking bananas. The bananas are now in the mailbox, and they cost two dollars each. But they are not full-size bananas, they are banana units that are sometimes two-fifths the size of what you used to think is a banana, or sometimes the bananas have a plastic wrap on the outside you have to read for 12 minutes with instructions on how to peel the banana. You thought the bananas grew on trees, but they don't, they are independent creations, and the tree was just the distributor, but now the USPS owns all bananas and they distribute the bananas. And every time you want a banana you have to listen to the postal service worker sing dirty cowboy poetry in Esperanto. And you are supposed to be thankful to have a banana at all, because you know, there is no guarantee of bananas.
