Is The Future Of Entertainment Popping A Binge-Watching Pill?

In a bid to maintain their position at he front of the pack, forward thinking CEO Reed Hastings shared his thoughts on what’s next in entertainment at The Wall Street Journal‘s recent WSJD event. He says in the long term, movies and TV shows “will be like the opera and the novel” by way of certain “substitutes” that will become increasingly common. 

One such substitute he mentioned was an entertainment pill, capable of gifting the user with a night of entertainment with no need for an internet connection. From one perspective, this all sounds like your run-of-the-mill recreational drugs, but on the other side, it’s so far forward it’s almost difficult to comprehend. But let’s be clear – he’s definitely not referring to smashing 5 dingers at Future Music Festival and pashing 15 randoms. Rather, it would be legal, safer, much more refined drug with way less side effects. 

Far from beginning work on the Netflix drug, Hastings’ half-joke comment was likely intended to show the company’s willingness to adapt and open minds to new forms of entertainment, even if it seems controversial by today’s standards. But the question does raise an interesting point – what is the future of drugs and how does that fit in with the future of entertainment? 

Drugs as a form of entertainment isn’t anything new, either. We’ve been smashing magic mushrooms as a race for thousands of years. In fact, some scientists think our ancient psychedelic adventures played a part in our brain development, opening neural pathways that would not have been possible otherwise. In a current sense, drugs still have some hefty stigma attached to them, but the tides are beginning to turn. According to The Atlantic, the percentage of Americans that support the legalisation of marijuana grew from 12% to 58% in just two generations. 

The legalisation of marijuana in some US states could even be seen as the beginning of the Netflix drug. It shows a softening of attitudes towards the drugs that are deemed safer and in some circumstances, beneficial from a medicinal standpoint. It’s this changing of attitudes that will eventually herald an age of commercially developed designer drugs for all sorts of circumstances. 

Pills for mental enhancement – called Nootropics – are already making waves for entrepreneurs looking to boost their capacity for learning and generally get more out of their days. They’re even here in Australian, with startup company Noots distributing the drugs across the country for those who yearn for better functioning brains. Don’t we all, tho?

But when we talk about a designer drug for entertainment, what would that entail? Modern weed farmers, for example, are already combining different strains and engineering the plants to provide different types of highs. In the same way you might enjoy a light beer on those nights you don’t wanna completely write yourself off, a lighter strain of pot will offer you a similar, lighter experience. 

On the weirder end of the spectrum, we may develop a drug that dictates our mood, giving us the ability to change our own emotions, rather than being stuck with the unyielding sadness that hangs around after watching a sad movie or seeing someone in a pair of Crocs. Drugs are less likely to become about completely pummelling the user and more about achieving the outcome they desired in the first place, whatever that me be. In other words, people might drink to excess to feel happy, and they will for a little while, but it won’t lasts. The drugs of the future will likely be a safer, precise approach to that feeling they were after all along. 

There are a shit-tonne of challenges that need to be faced before we even get close to this – how do they make future drugs non-addictive? How do you curb the abuse of these substances? Should we even be engineering these types of experiences? It’s a long road and in the meantime, we’ll just stick to binge-watching Netflix.