Netflix's success was a token of something unexpected despite having roots in the early 2000s. Television, the idiot box, the dreaded “unity machine,” the reviled “boob tube,” was declared by the smart money to be dead meat in the twenty-first century, destined perhaps to survive out of sheer inertia serving the poor and elderly shut-ins but eventually to go the way of the typewriter or horse and buggy. Always ahead of everyone in being wrong, the futurist George Gilder had published a book in 1990 entitled Life After Television. By 2007, even Damon Lindelof, co-creator of the hit series Lost, was boldly ready to wrongly proclaim that “television is dying.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1101