It has nothing to do with the price, although the increase doesn’t hurt for putting things in perspective.

I’ve talked about this phenomenon to a few people, but it seems like the kind of thing that’s worth documenting at this juncture as I cancel Netflix today, because I think it has some implications for broader incentives and how money messes with people’s better motivations. I’m also considering creating a “War on Capitalism” category for posts here because the broader “Politics…” one is starting to feel like it’s getting thrown at too many disparate ideas. We’ll see.

Anyway, I like movies. Quite a bit, I feel, perhaps more than most people. Although I traditionally don’t like watching movies at home. I’ve spent a lot of time discerning why I love movies in theaters and am kind of annoyed, generally, by the process of watching movies at home. Most of it, I’ve found, is about immersion. I’m able to really lose myself in a film and the world it’s creating when it’s on the big screen in a huge dark room and I don’t control the timing of the event. It is just that: an event. I cannot pause the movie, I cannot rewind it, I cannot determine the parameters of the environment. I am part of something larger and bearing witness and thus I have no choice but to let go and be captive to the universe around me. Whereas that element of control that a remote offers, combined with the reduced sound and size and co-viewers, saps the surreality from the perspective and reminds me, repeatedly, that this is just a movie I’m choosing to watch and I can break the spell of illusion any time I want.

And that immersion gap is the hinge point for a lot of my enjoyment of experiencing a film. If I’m constantly hyper-aware of the fact that I’m in a fictional space with fictional characters, I’m far less likely to learn anything from what they’re trying to illustrate. The reason I like fiction is that there’s more truth in it than the often blatantly biased “non-fiction” presentation of an argument or perspective. If I’m continually being reminded that it’s just a bunch of actors, then that goes out the window. Which it can, because I’m in a room with windows, as opposed to the theater.

But I’ve been able to put up with shifting gears to a lot of home-watching, first because Em and I were trying to save money after moving to Jersey (and she had spent years lobbying me to watch more at home because she liked couching it, which makes her citation of that as a flaw in our relationship thereafter so unfair and ridiculous) and then later after she’d robbed me. It’s not as much fun, but I did it enough that I got used to it and didn’t mind so much. And then, in the last six months or so, I started noticing a creeping phenomenon from Netflix subscription that was having a detrimental impact on my life.

Netflix is a subscription service, and an unlimited one at that, with the only restriction on one’s capacity for utilizing it being how many movies one wants to pay for at a time and how quickly one can turn those movies over. There is also streaming, sure, but I forgot to buy a laptop with an HDMI port and thus my connecting it to the TV screen is extremely complicated and requires unhooking my desktop speakers and a bunch of other garbage, making it unpalatable. And I really don’t like watching movies on the laptop itself, since that’s a whole extra stairstep down in the immersion factors discussed above. Once in a while I’d watch something in bed with a headache, but the reduced immersion made it almost a non-starter.

So for the most part it’s about turning DVD’s over. And one has this pressure in the back of one’s mind that makes it clear that the value of the subscription is maximized by turning over the most number of DVD’s possible. Ideally, from an economic perspective, one would watch ever DVD the day it arrived and ship it back that night. This would make the price per movie the lowest possible and thus maximize the value of the service.

As a result, even though I am often able to resist economic motives and urges, I would feel this light but needling pressure to watch movies whenever they were available so I could ship them back and get more movies. The irony being, of course, that the reward for satiating this feeling of pressure was the opportunity to feel it again, sooner and more frequently. Which I feel is actually true of a lot of capitalist motivations, when it comes down to it.

This becomes especially problematic when what I most want to do at home most of the time is either read or work on a creative project. Given that I’ve mostly been reading library books lately, or books purchase for me or a while ago, there’s no economic pressure there. And creative projects, except for the occasional “next big thing” to win the Internet, are also the opposite of a financial incentive. Both of those pursuits tend to be ends in themselves, where the process of doing them is their own reward. Whereas watching movies, something that should probably also be an end in itself, had been corrupted by Netflix implying how I could best value its service.

The problem, of course, is that I actually prefer doing things that are an end in themselves, but frequently would choose to watch a movie because of this slight monetary motive. There were several nights in sequence when I was really into my book and would prefer to read it, but somewhat begrudgingly forced myself to watch a movie first so I could turn it over. This, my friends, is insane behavior. It’s totally irrational and it’s exhibit 342001389B in why capitalism is crap.

So I’m unhooking myself from the machine. In retrospect, maybe it’s entirely about the price. Obviously if Netflix were a free service, I’d feel none of the economic compulsion and thus be content to keep it for the occasional filmy distraction. But it’s just that, a distraction, stealing time from the pursuits I actually prefer. And I hear they have DVD’s at libraries from time to time, so I’m not completely stranded on that front if I want to have a movie night. Libraries, one of the few bastions of salvation from this collective insanity we’ve all decided to embrace in society so it can motivate us to ruin our lives.