A fascinating story emerged about Netflix last week.
The Daily Mail reported that the streaming TV service was developing new interactive technology allowing viewers to direct the plots of certain TV shows, Choose Your Own Adventure style.
The company later told me that the experiment was focused on children’s programming, more as a developmental learning tool than as some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.
Illustration: Mountain People
No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the US’ zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services such as Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on in Austin through this week.
So why not extend the idea to the plots of your favorite shows?
The Mail even went so far as to envision viewers of the British historical drama The Crown making it so that Princess Margaret gets to marry her sister’s equerry, Peter Townsend.
Of course, as Princess Margaret knew all too painfully, history saw no such union.
However, that is no big deal anymore — at least if you consider the way people are being primed to shape the arc of the narratives on their highly personalized electronic screens to suit their own tastes, even if it means banishing inconvenient facts.
As Dan Wagner, the data wiz for the campaign of former US president Barack Obama and current Civis Analytics chief executive, put it when I bumped into him in Austin over the weekend: “You used to be a consumer of reality, and now you’re a designer of reality.”
Understanding how that is playing out more broadly will help explain why you and your aunt’s new boyfriend can see the same events unfold in Washington and have utterly different ideas about what just happened.
Allow me to direct you to the real-world, choose-your-own-adventure news media misadventure of the past week, which I will call “POTUS45, Episode 6: The Presidential Wiretap That (A) Was, (B) Wasn’t, (C) Was Because He’s a Russian Agent and Oh, Sister, Is He in Trouble.”
It started with US President Donald Trump’s Twitter posts accusing Obama of having wiretapped his telephones at Trump Tower. Game on.
If you were inclined to believe Obama did what Trump said he did — indeed, if you wanted to believe it — you probably would have tuned into Fox & Friends that Sunday morning for Adventure A.
There, you would have seen radio host Mark Levin, whose show was credited with helping to spur Trump’s accusations, laying out the case for Trump, saying: “This is about the Obama administration’s spying.”
The proof, you would have heard him say, was already out there in the mainstream media — what with a report on the British Web site Heat Street saying that the FBI had secured a warrant to investigate ties between people in Trump’s campaign and Russia, and articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere about intelligence linking people in Trump’s campaign to Russia, some of it from wiretaps.
“These are police state tactics!” Levin would tell you.
The next day, perhaps your Twitter or Facebook feed turned up a post from the blog Gateway Pundit — recently granted a White House press credential — speculating that maybe, just maybe, the FBI director “Let Hillary Off the Hook Because She Knew About FBI Wiretapping.”
As the week unspooled, you would have seen commentary on why Trump’s charge was so believable (Breitbart) and, shockingly, how it is even possible that the CIA hacked e-mails from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, but made it look as if Russia had done it (Bill Mitchell, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity).
Sure, you would have picked up static from other sources that made some of this seem ridiculous. However, that stuff is for the followers of Adventure B, relying on fact-based journalism from seasoned reporters with deep contacts and established (and, yes, sometimes imperfect) protocols for fact-checking — all of which the Adventure A people view with deep suspicion that the president is only too happy to stir.
If you were among the Adventure B folk, maybe you saw former US director of national intelligence James Clapper Jr tell Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday that the FBI had not secured a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on Trump’s aides.
You probably would have seen the news, first reported by the New York Times, that FBI Director James Comey had asked the US Department of Justice to deny Trump’s charge (to no avail) and the viral video of ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos telling a presidential aide: “That’s false,” as she tried to reprise the Adventure A argument that mainstream news reports backed Trump’s wiretap accusation.
You would have seen PolitiFact’s point-by-point rebuttal of the same argument — and, finally, a week later, reports about how evidence for Trump’s charge still had yet to surface.
Or, lastly, were you an Adventure C kind of person? If so, you could not get enough about how Trump’s wiretap allegation and the Russian connections could lead to his impeachment (MSNBC; The Independent; US Representative Maxine Waters), and your Facebook feed probably included the learnprogress.org headline “The FBI Is Now Officially CRIMINALLY Investigating Donald J. Trump.” (Nothing in the posting it links to shows evidence for any such thing.)
As Stephanopoulos told me when we spoke by telephone over the weekend, the trend might have been heading this way for a while — you do not need an algorithmic feed to turn on Fox News or to catch Rush Limbaugh.
However, in the era of the curated digital news stream, the choose-your-news phenomenon has “ended up in a whole new place,” Stephanopoulos said.
It is easy to overdo it, he said, given that no specially tailored plotline can fully tune out the contradicting details of another one.
“Filters do have to contend with each other in some way, too,” he said.
Really, arguments between adherents of the different adventure plots are the stuff of cable news programming, with each narrative vying for supremacy in debates that too often become arguments over established facts that should be indisputable.
Because, after all, one of the plots we are talking about here is of the sort that democracy depends on — that would be Adventure B, the one based on established facts that exist in the real world — and the others are of the sort that threaten to undermine any shared sense of truth while driving us into our corners.
At South by Southwest, a lot of words have been spilled on what to do about it, and just how urgently this multidimensional view of reality needs to be addressed — and how to do so.
At a Mediapost event on the “post-fact era” I participated in on Saturday, PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan said the truth would always come out, eventually.
“At some point, evidence and facts will win out over an idea that has no substance,” she said.
Our Mediapost conversation wandered into whether the big platforms could inject individual information streams with more fact-based items that might run counter to a person’s baseless beliefs. Intriguing.
However, there is not a ton of economic incentive for the platforms to give people what they do not want.
Late on Sunday, I checked out a virtual-reality exhibit presented at the Austin Motel by digital creative collective the Future of StoryTelling. You could throw on the goggles, become a bird and fly around.
If virtual reality can allow a human to become a bird, why could it not allow you to live more fully in your own political reality — don the goggles and go live full time in the adventure of your choosing: A, B or C.
Just watch out for that wall you are about to walk into in real life. Or, hey, do not — knock yourself out.
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