What to Watch

Every year, many thousands of hours of mass market professional film and video content are produced and released and several of those thousands of those hours are eminently watchable, whatever your taste. Add to that my official count of 2.3 gazillion peta-hours of product already in watchable existence (not including cat videos) and you are confronted with a creepily uncomfortable FOMO on a skin-crawling scale.

How important is it to see Casablanca, Citizen Kane, 2001, The Partridge Family, Batman and the Lion King, when Housewives of Dallas is streaming on Bravo right now!? Depends on what's relevant to your basic grokking of what entertainment means to you. Play that out over the next say, 40 years and you reach an inescapable fact: the longer we live, the more stuff we're missing. It's piling up way too fast and at some point, everybody's gotta take a break to pay the rent! What's a concerned cine-TV-phile to do?

Chill. Produce your own content and let someone else worry about not seeing it. Pick the stuff that matters to you and screw the rest. Or go looking for what might matter to you and download that. Five hundred years from now, there will be 11.7 to the 6th power sextupla-jillion movies, series, holograms, injectibles and implantibles available for your viewing pleasure. And we’re talking the GOOD stuff… Maybe that's what the whole concept of digital immortality is about -- watching a portion of that whilst yer inanimate butt is implanted in some earth-bound cloud farm. Seems plausible. Just hope that don't mean it won't be garden-gated with monthly credit charges that relegate less fortunate souls to dealing with an inevitably endless stream of summer re-runs.