Quibi’s competitors are therefore not Netflix and HBO so much as YouTube and Facebook, whose previous competitors were our imaginations and memories. It’s one more thing to do with our phones instead of ever being bored. Framed that way, it sounds like an unnecessary product that may indicate some kind of incipient dystopia, or at least the increasing encroachment of past satire on present reality. In 2006, “30 Rock” imagined a 10-second sitcom made by craven executives for an audience with shattered attention spans. This formerly absurd premise will go on sale this spring.
If you find that vaguely nauseating, don’t worry: Quibi seems to agree. The quicksand spot is one of a series of Quibi advertisements that explore the theme of mobile entertainment as an inappropriate way to spend the remaining moments of your life. There’s a spot in which a mustachioed villain ties a cartoon cowboy to the railroad tracks and the cowboy fishes out his phone to watch Quibis as the train approaches. It’s the least disturbing of all the Quibi ads, by virtue of being a cartoon, which puts us at the furthest remove from the finality of death. At the opposite end of this spectrum is the Quibi ad in which a general informs the president that an asteroid is about to strike Earth. “How long do we have?” the president asks grimly. “Two, three Quibis, tops,” the general replies. At this point a staff member breaks out sobbing, and a Secret Service agent closes his eyes, presumably imagining the family that will be incinerated separately from but at the same moment as him. It’s a naturalistic portrayal of anguish and dread, but then everyone takes out a phone and starts chuckling at Quibis.
This approach — to ironically acknowledge our worst impulses in hopes of justifying them — has become a recognizable strategy in contemporary advertising. (“Satisfy your craving for zero human contact,” urges one ad for the food-delivery app Seamless.) A rhetorical sleight-of-hand that substitutes naming the problem for reckoning with it, this trope speaks to a culture that has become exasperated with itself but which does not expect to change. Anyone who self-deprecates recognizes the technique. “Good thing I’m not stress-eating!” I say, cleverly, as I eat full-size peanut butter cups straight out of the bag. Such acknowledgments allow me to go on doing the things I know I shouldn’t, because unlike the morons who actually engage in foolish behavior in ways that define their being, I’m doing it knowingly. That makes it different, somehow, for reasons I cannot articulate that are nonetheless critically important.
By the same token, it is crucial that we maintain the distinction between our culture, which is amusing itself to death with pocket TVs in a self-aware, ironic way, and the kind of culture that would do that without realizing it. A sincere reckoning with just how much of our lives we spend watching things is probably impossible at this point. We’re not going back, and what addict wants to measure the progress of his addiction? Quibi knows that where willpower has failed, self-deprecation steps in to give our bad habits a patina of sardonic resignation. The subtext of the ads is that, unlike the man sinking in quicksand, the cowboy tied to the tracks or the doomed occupants of the Oval Office, we get that we’re ridiculous. And that ironic distance is just enough to make us feel like we’re not really in this situation.
The ads also make it clear that Quibi knows it is unnecessary. With Netflix, Hulu, fuboTV, Philo, HBO Go, CBS All Access, Disney+, ESPN+, Amazon Prime Video and others, the market for streaming entertainment is thoroughly served. Here is the umpteenth iteration of a technology many of us have come to wish had never happened. The last thing we need is another reason to look at the phone, and we know it. The good people at Quibi know we know it. But they are also pretty sure that millions will pay for it anyway, so let’s just admit that, have a laugh and get on with choosing passwords. And then we can start counting down our remaining days.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/magazine/quibi-ad.html
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