The End In The Middle.
What now can teach about next...
Netflix was founded as a mail delivery DVD rental service on August 29th, 1997, after founder Reed Hastings was fined $40 by Blockbuster for late return of the movie Apollo 13. According to cosmologist J Richard Gott this means the company is likely to fold somewhere between 2030 and 2097. Though of course Netflix as we know it, the digital streaming platform of unique original content that has helped reshape the TV industry, that didn’t exist until 2013. So if you’re wondering how long you’ve got to get your pitch in, Gott’s equation suggests the company will probably vanish somewhere between 2025 and 2049.
As David Runciman eloquently explores in this podcast about the end of democracy, when attempting to use Gott’s Copernican Principle to make a statistically rational guess about the lifespan of something, it’s essential you know which story you’re telling and where that story actually starts. However, focusing on entities with clear beginnings, Gott was able to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifespan of Broadway shows with surprising accuracy. In one regard at least, his principle also supports my dubious attempt to position the global response to the corona virus as hopefully marking the start of the end of life as we know it.
Gott’s logic hinges on the idea of our basic universal unimportance mapped onto the essential physics of story telling. As Copernicus pointed out, we are not the centre of the universe or even the centre of the solar system, we are not important. Gott figured therefore it’s highly unlikely (though not impossible) that our unimportant lives bear witness to the important stages in the existence of, well, anything. It was, he figured in 1969, unlikely that his visit to the Berlin Wall was special, unlikely to coincide with either the very start, very end or exact middle of the history of the structure. Those points, start, middle and end are special in a way that the bits in-between are not.
These points are also of interest to one of my favourite scientists of story, John Yorke. Yorke realised that, whilst an act structure is an intellectual imposition, the start, middle and end are fundamental points in time dictated by physics rather than Syd Field. Trying to define the narrative meaning of these points, Yorke concludes that the end is the opposite of the start and the midpoint is the moment in the journey between opposites when you first become what you will be. The middle is where the end is first apparent and from there on, inevitable. In Apollo 13 it’s when they make a plan to get the astronauts home and declare “failure is not an option”.
In the collapse of modern society it could well be the point where we first face up to a challenge that is genuinely global.
Yorke is, of course, running in the opposite direction from Copernicus. Life and stories both exist in time but unlike life, stories do preference their subject. The main character in a story is the centre of their universe. Or to put it another way, he wasn’t vain, that song really is about him. This is where I’m happy to admit that my attempt to position covid as a midpoint becomes story-telling rather than physics.
Gott would point out its just as unlikely for us to witness the middle of something as it is for us to see either its start or end. However his theory is one of probability, all the examples I’ve given work on the fairly loose claim of being 50% accurate. Unlikely things happen and as unlikely as it may be we do live to witness starts, middles and ends all the time. Moreover stories are so integral to our understanding of our existence that they hold not just a descriptive power, but a creative one too. Wider socio-political forces were drawing the cold war to an end but the specific cause of the fall of the Berlin Wall was an administrative mistake which became a self-fulfilling prophecy - a narrative too powerful to stop, the story became the truth.
David Runciman is right, starts can be surprisingly hard to pin down. Middles are even blurrier but John Yorke’s description of what a middle looks like does give you somewhere to start being authoritatively wrong. If we take Yorke’s sense of the midpoint as the first moment you become what you will be at the end, then the release of the platform’s first original content in 2013 is a reasonable mid-point in the existence of Netflix. Which would mean Yorke and Gott together could agree on 2030 as the year Netflix ends. More pertinently, if we are living through the middle years of our society we are unlikely to see its end, but where-ever we are in time, the story we tell about now creates the future we are inexorably heading into. Whatever the future is, you are living out its ghost today.