Welcome Netflix, another thief of time (I)

The other day I got a call from one of those salesgirls at DSTV. When she asked if I had a few minutes I replied that I didn’t but I was polite and didn’t want to hang up brashly. We hadn’t renewed the DSTV at my office for a month and she wanted to know why. It was when she asked me ‘so what have you been watching?’ that I flipped. “What made you think I’ve been watching anything? Must I watch?”, I almost thundered. I then proceeded to end the call in the politest way I could. The DSTV agent was doing her work, but the call made me reflect on other issues. We live in a world controlled by very powerful people who basically dictate how tomorrow will be. The super strategists of the corporate world especially those driven to max out profits and mindshare believe they have the world in the small of their palms, and they are right. In the estimation and projections of this powerful people, we the multitude are mere pawns… at best robots. They have evolved this reality that everyone must be ‘watching something, for example, and so DTSV is just somewhere in the food chain trying to get its share. We are the small fish they feed upon.

A phenomenon I had thought about sometime back is the competition for our time. Time has never been ‘money’ more than it is today. And smart companies are there just to take that time off you, especially if you don’t know its worth or you appear not to have any use for it. When I consider this competition for time, I see that in our part of the world, what we have are small timers. For example, we may have companies in technology or communication but those companies are perhaps just lucky to be fed into the structure that they don’t own and could probably never own, somewhere in the middle. The crumbs they skim off the people looks big here but is almost nothing compared with the global numbers controlled by companies who own the backbones – like satellites, databases (like Google), soft and hardwares or military intelligence from whence most innovations flow. Even the academia... We are still stuck in decades past here while the academia has plugged into the future elsewhere. We trail behind by light-years even if we have a few bright stars who are able to understand and master what they are taught out there. I don’t see that originality of thought yet. We aren’t poised to upset the world and create the future.. yet. We would have to try a lot harder and the effort, must be herculean. No other choices.

Time has become extremely precious for several reasons. One of them is that human population has increased. Smart people exist everywhere, planning how to game and gyp each other, legitimately and otherwise. For one to make impact with one’s life, one has to spend time incubating one’s nest of eggs. You have to sit on your ideas and hope they hatch. You have to hustle. Get on the streets. Hit the road. In our part of the world, business is very personal. Hardly will anyone avail you an opportunity just because they get your great ideas in their mailbox. Except those ideas are groundbreaking and worldshaking. And those do not come around very often. So, we all have 24 hours a day which must be allocated between sleeping, tending to family, working, bathing and what have you, it is important to know that time, once spent, could never be recovered. It is therefore of utmost importance to guard one’s time, sorry, one’s money.

Back to Netflix and the thieves of time. It is established, that social media, cable TV and other such ‘innovations’ are thieves of time. A large chunk of a typical ‘modern’ person’s day is spent between reading articles, short write-ups, comments/gossips on whatsapp, telegram, facebook, twitter, Instagram, linkedin or the myriad of other social media platforms that do the space, with many more coming. Our children are exposed to more than 300 channels on platforms like DSTV when in our time, our choices were limited. The plethora of choices has not made anyone happier anyway, contrary to the promises of these smart companies through their Ad agencies.

My routine is often to get myself lost in a feel-good, usually very old movie at the end of a very stressful day when one cannot bear leafing through any serious, aggravating book. For that reason I have a fairly large library of some of the best movies ever made… award winners and those who got lost in the crowd… some dating back to the 1940s. Imagine watching ‘To kill a mocking bird’, or ‘Twelfth Juror’, set in black and white, at a time when even the spoken English sounded very different? Imagine if you could find a clear copy of Things Fall Apart, Ti Oluwa Ni Ile, or any of the Tunde Kelani gigs? Maybe I am a sucker for anything historical. But I don’t stop there. I also collect some of the latest awardwinners, especially one with great story lines. I never watch a movie these days, without putting on the subtitle. A lot gets lost without it. Slangs, fast-spoken words and so on.

But my little secret reverie is almost over. Innovation has brought another of its disruptions. DVDs are being phased out, and no one is asking us whether we want it or not. I have watched my favorites stores shrink to a closure. Virgin Megastore where I used to browse to get some of the best, is phasing out its DVD section entirely. Ditto Music CDs are almost museum pieces. Forget that we in these parts would never be found in the forefront of these innovations, but we are great early adopters. The drivers of innovation, and thieves of your time, believe that we should now stream movies, watch for a while and lose them. We are in the era of subscriptions. More next week

Time has become extremely precious for several reasons. One of them is that human population has increased. Smart people exist everywhere, planning how to game and gyp each other, legitimately and otherwise.