Survey #9 Round-up
Hello friends,
Apologies for the late edition. It’s hard work being a MoFo.
More on this in the Programming Updates below.
Link to the new survey is here, also linked below.
Survey Results
Q1: Netflix — approve or disapprove?
Results
Highlighted Free Responses
“Netflix is the root of evil”
“They seduced us with infinite DVD rentals and we woke up hungover next to the entertainment industry's desiccated corpse. Also there's literally nothing good on there”
“I don’t want to cancel Netflix in the event that there’s a cultural touchstone that accidentally ends up there and I don’t want to be left out”
“Mooch for their garbage”
“...Good for multi-tasking and scrolling on Reddit while I half-listen to Lindsay Lohan repeat the synopsis in whichever holiday romcom she's starring in to fund her next plastic surgery.”
Commentary
When I was 8, the most traumatic moment of my childhood occurred.
Before tragedy struck, I was deeply invested in the first season of Ben 10, on the hook for every new episode. Sometime midway through that season, I set the new episode to record on Friday night so I could watch it on the following Saturday morning.
I got up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that Saturday, and ran downstairs to turn on the TV, eagerly anticipating my next fix of cartoon aliens, only to find that the DVR was completely empty. None of the channels worked. No Ben 10.
Our cable package had been canceled.
I soon came to learn that my miserly father had decided that our cable was too expensive; it would actually be cheaper and better to get DVDs from a service called Netflix.
For the next few years, Netflix DVDs were my substitute for cable. Instead of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, I was now getting prematurely exposed to The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, and, upon my dad’s insistence, the Ryan Reynolds rom-com Definitely, Maybe, for some strange reason.
So thanks Dad, for making me even more unrelatable to other kids my age who were all watching Drake and Josh instead of an HBO mini-series about the Cold War.
Despite the dad-maxxing, I definitely appreciated Netflix during these years, and in the early years of its streaming era as it helped me access shows like Arrested Development and Breaking Bad. I continued to see Netflix as a positive force as they moved into more original content, making shows I really enjoyed like Bojack Horseman and Orange is the New Black, and funding genuinely great movies from master filmmakers like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman or Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma.
But nowadays, Netflix feels like it’s almost entirely the slop factory. Most of their mainstream content feels cheap and disposable; as one of you noted, they literally have guidelines for creators to repeat story content so people who watch shows while on their phones don’t miss out on plot points.
All of their shows are visually worse than an average 90s sitcom. They pump out the cheap shlock like True Crime docs and Love is Blind variants like shit out of a butt. I don’t begrudge those shows or people who watch them, but it feels like if you had a good neighborhood restaurant that started serving exclusively reheated Sysco frozen nuggies. Netflix is now effectively TGI Fridays.
Even their investment in prestige projects and directorial vision seems to have gone by the wayside under new leadership. Their competition isn’t really A24 or Warner Bros anymore; it’s YouTube and TikTok.
I’m running long here, but I’ll also make it clear that I mostly disapprove of Netflix because of their effect on the movie industry and movie-going culture. And as most of you know, movie culture does mean something to me.
Despite all this, I will gladly continue to mooch off of Julia’s parents’ Netflix account so I can watch the occasional NFL game or John Mulaney’s talk show. Ultimately, I’m not above some hot streaming trash.
Q2: How would you qualitatively rate the current state of the US economy?
Results
Highlighted Free Responses
“Everything is far too expensive in this goddamn country”
“An economy producing the level of inequality can only be described as in a poor state.”
“The only thing that could make it worse would be an energy crisis - oh wait!!”
“...even as a “winner” of a stacked system who has followed all the rules to become part of the dwindling upper middle class, there is an underlying existential threat of disaster at anytime. This is not a good system.”
Commentary:
What’s wrong with you guys? Don’t you know number go up = economy good? And haven’t you considered teh stonks?? Stop being poor!
I definitely understand a lot of the frustrations and the bad vibes about the economy. Things feel more expensive, and economic security seems more fragile than ever. The inequality of the “K-shaped” economy is definitely a real issue; the fact that Elon Musk is about to become an actual trillionaire is clearly a sign that something has gone very very wrong in our society.
I hear all of that, and I empathize. I share a lot of the same frustrations. Like, when the hell am I ever going to buy a house??
And yet, the econ major in me cannot deny what the numbers say: the economy is good.
Don’t trust the economists? Ask the people:
And yet, why do things feel bad? What’s up with this persistent vibecession?
I think we’ve already covered some of the main issues; affordability, inflation, inequality, tight labor market, the rising cost of Knicks tickets. Etc, etc.
Despite my degree in economics from some stupid school in Tennessee, I can’t really explain it simply, and I can offer no immediate solutions. But if you ever want to save some money, you can always cancel your Netflix subscription and embrace the wonderful life of piracy.
Q3: Do you think Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are genuinely in love?
Results
Highlighted Free Responses
“Yes, but like ever so slightly. Like it feels like they started this as a bit and are in too deep to not have some feelings (right????).”
“Surely we’ve all known a couple that just seemed a little too desperate to let everyone know how much in love they are, to overcompensate for how miserable they actually are.”
“he play ball and she know Aristotle”
“It's a modern 17th century royal wedding for strategic alliances and corporate synergy.”
“They feel like the type of people that deserve each other (meant in both a good and bad way).”
Commentary:
For the longest time, I really thought their thing was all a sham, and expected it to fizzle out like any other PR relationship, a la the Kardashians. But the longer it goes on, it gets harder to be fully in denial of their relationship.
As previously discussed, I’m not a real, full-on hater of Taylor Swift.1 And I’ve got no hate for Travis Kelce - he’s done me well in fantasy football once or twice.
Instead, I’ve landed on their relationship being real and genuine like how relationships like The Bachelor are “real” and “genuine.” I think Bachelor relationships probably feel mostly real to the people on those shows. Everything is so highly orchestrated, condensed, and polished. The Powers That Be are basically calculating the optimal amount of romance for all of their dates and time spent together. When you’re dating the Bachelor, you don’t have to spend the weekend at their apartment, you don’t have to eat their cooking, you don’t have to hear them poop. None of the normal, human things you have to go through in a real relationship. When all the friction of reality is removed and all you do is go on romantic dates, it’s probably a lot easier to convince yourself you’re in love.
I imagine Taylor and Travis’ relationship is like this too. They’re both incredibly busy people, and must each have an army of support staff and assistants organizing their lives and schedules week by week, hour by hour. And I highly doubt Taylor’s calendar has her spending a lot of time in Kansas City waiting for Travis to come home from OTAs. Instead, they get to spend highly orchestrated, tightly scheduled, optimally romantic outings that just happen to have the paparazzi around the corner. So maybe to them, that feels like some simulated semblance of love.
But if she’ll go to Cleveland with him and voluntarily watch James Harden play playoff basketball? Well then maybe that’s true love after all.
Q4: How often do you intake nicotine?
Results
Highlighted Free Responses:
“Regularly in spliffs, without weed only in France”
“PASS ME THAT (JUUL)IUS CEASAR!!!!”
“cigs do look cool ngl”
“There are a lot of young men out there who have literally never smoked a cigarette in their life yet are addicted to zyn, which is extremely fucking embarrassing. Nicotine is bad for you - that's my hot take - but at least you look cool smoking a cigarette. Nobody has ever looked cool with the shape of the zyn container sticking out over their ass”
“...I will say that the worst people on the planet are the ones that reserve judgement for nicotine users (or any other bad habit).”
Commentary
Probably a good thing to see such a high amount of Nevers on here, and probably not too surprising. Many of us grew up in a time when we were successfully indoctrinated against smoking at a young enough age, and old enough to a point where vaping and zyns hadn’t become totally ubiquitous.
However, I won’t deny being a little nicotine mooch fiend. When it’s not around I literally don’t miss it at all. But as soon as I have a beer and there’s a vape around, I do find myself groveling like a pathetic little worm.
I’m mostly convinced vaping or zynning isn’t as bad as smoking is, but I do think it’s certainly not ideal for your health. Similar to what I wrote previously about microplastics, I think we’re probably at a point where there are some clear warning signs, but not quite enough total buy-in and awareness of the science to make it a total taboo like we did with smoking.
I do think it’s really stupid on how Trump cracked down on flavored Juul pods only for that to open up the floodgates for all these secondary vape devices, of which there seems to be a new variant every other week. Airbar, Geekbar, Nintendo Switch 2, whatever the fuck. Now there’s flavored vapes galore and an infinite number of batteries being thrown into the ocean every day. Thanks Donald!
Q5: Do you think you can reliably tell the difference between AI and human generated writing?
Results
Highlighted Free Responses:
“Obsequiousness / overeager tone and formulaic sentence structure. I get more and more work emails written by AI and it makes me disrespect the sender”
“colons are the new em dashes”
“...if it’s for just random online stuff or on social media, could go completely over my head.”
Commentary:
I definitely agree there are some clear tells when something has been straight up lifted from a generic Claude / ChatGPT response. The em dashes are the usual warning sign, but there’s also just this textureless, flat tone that is really hard to ignore once you notice it. There’s other phrases the robots really gravitate towards, such as “doing real work” or “that’s the real tension,” or “you’re not just X -- you’re Y. And that’s Z.”
But if you’re at least a little savvy with AI, your outputs can start to look a lot different.
I sent this around to a couple friends in the past, but this NYT quiz on AI vs. human-generated writing took some genuine thought and close reading to distinguish between the two (not to brag but I did choose the human version every time).
Additionally, this game that asks you to distinguish between a famous author’s writing versus an AI has proven to be much tougher than I thought.
Granted, these examples are just short snippets from an AI being prompted to mimic the voice of another author. In many cases, those authors’ writings may even be in the training data; in these limited doses, this isn’t much too much more impressive than “stochastic parroting.” When it comes to longer, original writing, even AI evangelists will concede that AI still cannot independently write long-form fiction or poetry very well.
However, as the models improve there do seem to be some warning signs, some cracks in our ability to discern the mechanical from the organic. If an AI-generated short story can (maybe) win a literary prize... that’s not just impressive — that’s real work. And that’s concerning.
Next Survey
Find the next survey here. There is no deadline for responses this time (more below), but I’ll still send a few reminders over the next week or so.
Programming Updates
As I’ve started this new job in recent weeks, I have noticed that I have started to lose steam on this newsletter project a bit. As it turns out, my engagement with writing is directly related to how much I resent my job!
So I’m thinking about slowing this down a little bit. Even the bi-weekly cadence is feeling a little tight for me on this new work and office schedule. Granted, I could probably have better time management, but I’ve also had to focus on the NBA Finals.
I’ve decided I’m not going to set a deadline or response limit for the next edition, I’m just going to put it out once I feel that it’s ready. I’m sure you’re all heartbroken to hear this, my loyal and dedicated readers, but I’m sure you’ll do fine without my self-indulgent musings in your inbox for a bit.
Peace and love,
Nathan
Although that Stevie Knicks T-shirt from the Knicks game on Wednesday was cringe.