Contemporary streaming services encourage us to binge-watch. The services automatically ‘play next episode’, and rarely do we have the will to change channel. Under these conditions, our desire for film and television of aesthetic quality is waning. But, through curation, social groups and supporting personal projects, we can fight back against this era of media as a narcotic, writes Matt Strohl.

Aesthetic weakness of will is usually thought of as an incongruity between one’s judgment about the quality of an artwork and one’s liking for it. If I think the Twilight movies are bad but I can’t help but like them, that’s supposed to be aesthetic weakness of will. But is liking really a matter of the will? I might be able to take actions meant to diminish my liking for Twilight: carry around a picture of Bella and Edward and look at it every time I feel nauseous, tell everyone I meet that I like Twilight to give them the opportunity to shame me, or deliberately watch the movies more often than I want to so that I become sick of them. If I judge that I should take these actions but then fail to follow through because I love Twilight too much, that sounds like weakness of will. But the liking itself? I don’t think so. In any case, what if my all-things-considered judgment is that I should just go ahead and like whatever artworks I happen to like whether they are bad or not? Surely subsequent incongruity between my judgments about a work’s quality and my liking for it would not constitute weakness of the will.

I want to suggest an alternative way of thinking about aesthetic weakness of the will: it’s basically the business model of Netflix.

Around the time Netflix transitioned from a DVD rental service to a streaming service, something else was happening: TV was getting amazing. Production values improved and narratives mimicked great serial novels. Structures of mystery and revelation, suspense and climax, buildup and payoff, unanswered questions and seductive cliffhangers now propelled our interest forward, enticing us to just power down the whole damn season in two days. Streaming dovetailed beautifully with this style of television. Watching TV the old-fashioned way entailed waiting a week for each new episode. With streaming, there were no such barriers. It was truly a time to binge.