Auto-play and binge release are engineered erasures of viewing choice and tempo

Evidence

In 2016, Netflix instituted Auto-play functionality, which automatically starts the next episode as the previous concludes, pacifying the viewer out of even pressing a button to affirmatively continue. The rare perverse director with adequate clout, such as David Lynch, can insist on week-by-week release (as for his 2017 reboot of Twin Peaks), and heirloom companies like HBO can still get away with spacing the initial rollout of original content to generate suspense and differentiate from the stream. But binge is the way and the life; the constant stream an oceanic jet of immersive flow. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Auto-play as engineered passivity connects to the book’s broader argument about immediacy erasing the mediating act of choosing — the button press as residual mediation.
• SEED: David Lynch’s insistence on weekly Twin Peaks release as an aesthetic stance against the binge model is a vivid case for an essay on tempo as authorial control.