I have never enjoyed the autoplay feature[1] that streaming services use—the thing where, after finishing an album or movie or tv episode, the service will just keep blasting content at your face until you tell it to stop. It’s a feature that feels designed specifically to erode personal taste, shoveling glop and slop into the feeds of those who don’t care what draws their attention. When you remove choice from a decision, what’s left?

When I started this dumb little blog, I picked the name, If It’s All Flat It’s No Fun as a little ode to a line I’d read about cycling and used for a little zine. It was just about how much I love climbing mountains on a bike.

But I’ve realized the phrase also captures my personal critique of the cultural moment we’re in as it does my love for climbing. Pop culture has always been about the flattening of ideas to reach mass appeal. But with algorithmic feeds, that flattening happens in real time, tuned with data from millions of people that funnels everyone toward the same ends.

Autoplay is a feature in nearly every streaming service (and in a more abstract form, every social network) that pours gasoline on the fire of flattening. It removes the conscious moment of choice. This moment can be hard—what do I want to listen to? What do I want to watch? Is not always evident. Sometimes we fall back on familiar favorites. Sometimes we try something new. Sometimes we watch a movie for 30 minutes and turn it off. Sometimes we find ourselves captured by a movie well outside our comfort zone, breaking through to us in a way we never thought possible.

There’s a promise in algorithms leading us to new things to love. Personalization, after all, is supposed to take what we like, combine it with others like us, and give us new things to love. Sometimes this works! Sometimes you see or hear something magical and new.

But that idea we’d find new things to love over and over can only work free of economic incentives. Media companies want your attention to stay tuned into them and them alone. They will always recommend what will keep you tuned in. The internet has given us all access to as much or as little culture as we want, but if we do not make choices along the way about what we like and dislike, we will always end up being fed the same slop.

None of this is a new thought by any means, but I sometimes wonder if the phrases the giant tech companies use, like “personalization” and “for you” and “curated” give us permission to forget where these recommendations come from. And they certainly solve the “I don’t know what to listen to or watch” problem that we all face sometimes. But at what cost? Maybe the friction of being forced to make that choice is more useful than we realize.

In any case, give turning off autoplay a try. Maybe you’ll like it. You can do so on Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, HBO, and where ever else.

  1. Not to be confused for that new type of autoplay[2] that streaming services are trying. That thing where, if you hover on a movie or TV show for longer than a couple seconds it starts playing? That feature can fuck right off. ↩︎

  2. Or the autoplay thing on social networks, which should absolutely be disabled by default because shit like this always happens. ↩︎