Streaming infrastructure determines the aesthetic shape of the content it carries.

Evidence

To speak of “stream style” is to wade through the seemingly heterogeneous forms that characterize original streaming content and bob the aesthetic coherence of immediacy. This chapter argues for immediacy as stream style by ingesting some media theory, caroming through the infrastructure of the moving-image industry, and passing some features of stream aesthetics. Video struck Fredric Jameson and other observers of the postmodern as the “art form par excellence of late capitalism” on account of its “total flow”; in the too late, immediacy consummates these propensities to instantaneity and dissolution. Video’s essence as instant relay emblematizes the immanentized circuit of value realization that has been the main source of economic activity in secular stagnation, while its fluidity courses in the current that immerses too late capitalism in an ineluctable present. No future, only flow. In the temporality of unremitting instantaneity, in the fluid pressure of stream aesthetics, what used to come after now comes before: the circulatory apparatus for streaming content determines what content gets produced. The end is the beginning; the colonoscope is the camera. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 195

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core Jameson-debt material the reader wants to judge: Kornbluh is explicitly building her argument on Jameson’s ‘video as art form par excellence of late capitalism’ and ‘total flow.’
• DEFINE: The chapter title ‘immediacy as stream style’ — the distinct aesthetic category she adds beyond writing and film to her map of immediacy.