The Atlantic
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Why the Internet Is Boring Now This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Ian Bogost has lived through more than a few hype cycles on the internet. The Atlantic contributing writer has been online, and building websites, since the early days of the World Wide Web. I spoke with him about what happens when new technologies age into the mainstream, how the web has in some ways been a victim of its own success, and the parts of the internet that still delight him.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The spat that made Congress even worse The “America First” chaos caucus is forcing a moment of truth. Your childhood home might never stop haunting you. The Web Is FineLora Kelley: Is it fair to say everything online is deteriorating? Or is that too dramatic?Ian Bogost: It’s easy to focus on the stuff that seems bad or broken, because it is noticeable and also because the internet is built for complaining about things. And it’s natural that one of the things we like to complain about the most on the internet is the internet itself. But there’s a lot of stuff online that’s really amazing, and we should be careful to keep that in mind.The things that feel like deterioration are the result of a saturated market. There’s no longer any incentive for tech products to be as good for consumers as they once were. That’s in part a cost issue—a lot of tech was effectively subsidized for years. But also, the delightful or even just straightforwardly functional services created years ago don’t have to be quite so friendly and usable. Because of their success, there’s not as much of a need to satisfy people anymore.These products are now like a lot of other things in our offline lives—fine. When you go to buy a car or a mattress or whatever, it’s just kind of the way it is. We’ve reached that level of cultural ubiquity with computers.Lora: Is it inevitable that products will become boring once they become the mainstream? Is there any way around that, or are we stuck in a cycle of novelty to boredom?Ian: That’s the cycle, and it’s good. Boredom means that something is successful. When things are new, they feel wild and exciting. We don’t know what they mean yet, and there’s a lot of promise—maybe even fear.But for something to truly become successful at a massive scale—for millions or billions of people to develop a relationship with a product or service—the product has to recede into the background again and become ordinary. And once it reaches that point, you stop thinking about it quite so much. You take it for granted.Lora: You have written about your experience using, and building websites on, the internet in the ’90s. What parallels do you see between the early web and this current moment of generative AI?Ian: I remember living through the early days of the web, and we never had any idea that millions and billions of people would be using these data-extraction services. None of that occurred to us at the time. I don’t think there’s a very strong cultural memory of the early days of the web. We have a lot of stories about the excesses of the dot-com era, but the more ordinary stuff didn’t get recorded in the same way.Everything that we did, we had to convince some old-world business that it was worth doing. It was a process of bringing the offline world online. In the decades since, technologists have started disrupting the legacy businesses and sectors through innovation. And that worked really well from the perspective of building markets and building wealth. But it didn’t necessarily make the world better.Generative AI feels more like those early days of the web than social media or the Web 2.0 era did. It’s my hope that maybe we’ll go about this in a way that draws from the lessons learned over the past 30 years—which, of course, we probably won’t. Technologists shouldn’t be trying to blow things up; rather, they should make use of what technology allows in order to do things better, more equitably, and more effectively.Lora: In 2024, do you still find the web to be a site of wonder?Ian: Being able to talk to family and friends as much as I want, for free, is still historically unusual and delightful. The fundamental feature of the internet still exists: I can look out and get a little buzz of delight just from seeing something new.Related: The web became a strip mall. Social media is not what killed the web. Today’s News A New York Times report found that an upside-down flag, a “Stop the Steal” symbol, flew at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house in January 2021, when the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear a 2020 election case. The man who bludgeoned Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022 was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. He is awaiting a state trial later this month. Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant who was convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, was released from prison yesterday after Texas Governor Greg Abbott granted him a pardon. Dispatches The Books Briefing: Alice Munro’s death was an occasion to praise her life as a writer as much as her actual work, Gal Beckerman writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Max Guther The One Place in Airports People Actually Want to BeBy Amanda Mull On a bright, chilly Thursday in February, most of the people inside the Chase Sapphire Lounge at LaGuardia Airport appeared to be doing something largely absent from modern air travel: They were having fun. I arrived at Terminal B before 9:30 a.m., but the lounge had already been in full swing for hours. Most of the velvet-upholstered stools surrounding the circular, marble-topped bar were filled. Travelers who looked like they were heading to couples’ getaways or girls’ weekends clustered in twos or threes, waiting for their mimosas or Bloody Marys … While I ate my breakfast—a brussels-sprout-and-potato hash with bacon and a poached egg ordered using a QR code, which also offered me the opportunity to book a gratis half-hour mini-facial in the lounge’s wellness area—I listened to the 30-somethings at the next table marveling about how nice this whole thing was. That’s not a sentiment you’d necessarily expect to hear about the contrived luxury of an airport lounge. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Graeme Wood: The UN’s Gaza statistics make no sense. Many Indians don’t trust their elections anymore. Giant heaps of plastic are helping vegetables grow. Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. RIP. The dream of streaming is dead, Jacob Stern writes. The bundles are back.Pick apart. The sad desk salad, a meal that is synonymous with young, overworked white-collar professionals, is getting sadder, Yasmin Tayag writes.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
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The Spat That Made Congress Even Worse Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics.Unless you are perpetually online, you may have missed the drama. I’ll recap: The scene unfolded during a meeting held to consider a Republican motion to—what else?—hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. So things were already off to a wild start. Then, after her line of questioning went off the rails, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took a jab at Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas: “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”The personal remark was rude and certainly lacked decorum, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out: “How dare you attack the appearance of another person?” And she demanded that the words be struck from the record. Greene, of course, was not chastened.“Aww, are your feelings hurt?” the Georgia Republican shot back at Ocasio-Cortez, in a pitch-perfect impression of a schoolyard bully.“Oh, girl. Baby girl, you do not want to play,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, letting decorum slip on her side. It looked as if the committee was about to witness fisticuffs. Moments later, Crockett chimed in with a question for the committee’s Republican chairman, Jim Comer of Kentucky, that was actually an idiosyncratic barb directed toward Greene. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”Comer was clearly confused, “A what now?”The exchange felt like a bizarro session of British Parliament’s famously combative, point-scoring Prime Minister’s Questions, only the accents were worse, the insults were at least 50 percent less clever, and instead of congressional business as usual, it felt like watching business fall apart.At first, admittedly, seeing people stand up to Greene’s bullying was heartening. An unabashed troll, she pulled the stunt of wearing a MAGA cap and heckling President Joe Biden at his State of the Union address. And mocking the eyelashes of a colleague at a congressional hearing? That’s next-level mean-girl garbage.Unfortunately, the unedifying display in the House Oversight Committee only produced more incentives for bad political behavior. Progressive posters on X praised Crockett’s alliterative insult. Even LeVar Burton, the former host of the children’s TV series Reading Rainbow, applauded her: “Words of the day; bleach, blond, bad, built, butch and body …” Burton wrote on X.Really, no one comes off looking good here. This may sound sanctimonious, but: Members of Congress should be better than personal insults and body-shaming commentary. And both Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett have to know by now that, as the idiom goes, wrestling with pigs makes everyone look sloppy. What would Michelle Obama—patron saint of Democrats, who famously instructed Democrats to high when Republicans go low—think about Crockett’s response?Zoomed out, this unseemly episode is just one more sad example of partisanship and performance politics, two forces that continue to rile Americans up and drive us apart. Our politicians are not exactly covering themselves in glory right now. Back in 2009, Joe Wilson shocked the country when he yelled “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address. Cut to January of this year, when Republicans heckled Biden, and he swapped jibes with them like a comedian at a low-rent comedy club.While the leader of the Republican Party is on trial in New York, GOP lawmakers have been on a weeklong prostration tour, flying from all corners of the country to gather like eager groupies outside the courtroom, desperate for a chance to impress the boss. In addition, a Senate Democrat from New Jersey is on trial for taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent, and a Democratic congressman from Texas is facing his own charges of corruption.Biden, an institutionalist, likes to appeal to our better angels and assure Americans, This is not who we are. Maybe not. But this is definitely who we elected.Illustration Sources: Nathan Howard / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty.theatlantic.com
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The Sad Desk Salad Is Getting Sadder Every day, the blogger Alex Lyons orders the same salad from the same New York City bodega and eats it in the same place: her desk. She eats it while working so that she can publish a story before “prime time”—the midday lunch window when her audience of office workers scrolls mindlessly on their computers while gobbling down their own salad. Lyons is the protagonist of Sad Desk Salad, the 2012 novel by Jessica Grose that gave a name to not just a type of meal but a common experience: attempting to simultaneously maximize both health and productivity because—and this is the sad part—there’s never enough time to devote to either.The sad desk salad has become synonymous with people like Lyons: young, overworked white-collar professionals contemplating how salad can help them self-optimize. Chains such as Sweetgreen and Chopt have thrived in big coastal cities, slinging “guacamole greens” and “spicy Sonoma Caesars” in to-go bowls that can be picked up between meetings. The prices can creep toward $20, reinforcing their fancy reputation.But fast salad has gone mainstream. Sweetgreen and similar salad chains have expanded out of city centers into the suburbs, where they are reaching a whole new population of hungry workers. Other salad joints are selling salad faster than ever—in some cases, at fast-food prices. Along the way, the sad desk salad has become even sadder.Anything can make for a sad desk lunch, but there’s something unique about salads. Don’t get me wrong: They can be delicious. I have spent embarrassing amounts of money on sad desk salads, including one I picked at while writing this article. Yet unlike, say, a burrito or sushi, which at least feel like little indulgences, the main reason to eat a salad is because it’s nutritious. It’s fuel—not fun. Even when there isn’t time for a lunch break, there is always time for arugula.[Read: Don’t believe the salad millionaire]During the early pandemic, the sad desk salad seemed doomed. Workers sitting at a desk at home rather than in the office could fish out greens from the refrigerator crisper drawer instead of paying $16. Even if they wanted to, most of the locations were in downtown cores, not residential neighborhoods.But the sad desk salad has not just returned—it’s thriving. Take Sweetgreen, maybe the most well-known purveyor. It bet that Americans would still want its salads no matter where they are working, and so far, that has paid off. The company has been expanding to the suburbs since at least 2020 and has been spreading ever since. In 2023, it opened stores in Milwaukee, Tampa, and Rhode Island; last week, when Sweetgreen reported that its revenue jumped 26 percent over the previous year, executives attributed that growth to expansion into smaller cities. Most of its locations are in the suburbs, and most of its future stores would be too.Sweetgreen is not the only company to have made that gamble. Chopt previously announced that it would open 80 percent of its new stores in the suburbs; the Minnesota-based brand Crisp & Green is eyeing the fringes of midwestern cities. Salad has become so entrenched as a lunch option that even traditional fast-food giants such as Wendy’s and Dairy Queen have introduced salad bowls in recent years. Maybe the most novel of all is Salad and Go, an entirely drive-through chain that sells salads for less than $7. It opened a new store roughly every week last year, and now has more than 100 locations across Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas, with plans to expand to Southern California and the Southeast. Its CEO, Charlie Morrison, has positioned it as a cheap and convenient alternative to unhealthy options: a rival not to Sweetgreen, but to McDonald’s.Indeed, sad desk salads can be made with shocking speed. According to Morrison, you can drive off with your salad in less than four minutes. Other chains including Just Salad and Chopt are opening up drive-through lanes to boost convenience. Sweetgreen, which has also dabbled with the drive-through, has installed salad-assembling robots in several locations, which can reportedly make 500 salads an hour.[Read: Your fast food is already automated]Greater accessibility to salad, in general, is a good thing. America could stand to eat a lot more of it. No doubt some salads will be consumed outside of work: on a park bench with friends, perhaps, or on a blanket at the beach—a girl can dream! But surely many of them will be packed, ordered, and picked up with frightening speed, only to maximize the time spent working in the glow of a computer screen, the crunching of lettuce punctuated by the chirping of notifications.As I lunched on kale and brussels sprouts while writing this story, my silent hope was that they might offset all the bad that I was doing to my body by sitting at my desk for almost eight hours straight. Dining while distracted makes overeating more likely; sitting for long stretches raises the risk of diabetes and heart disease. People who take proper lunch breaks, in contrast, have improved mental health, less burnout, and more energy. No kind of cheap, fast salad can make up for working so fervidly that taking a few minutes off to enjoy a salad is not possible or even desirable.Earlier this month, Sweetgreen introduced a new menu item you can add to its bowls: steak. The company’s CEO said that, during testing, it was a “dinnertime favorite.” That the sad desk salad could soon creep into other mealtimes may be the saddest thing yet.theatlantic.com
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The Dream of Streaming Is Dead Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle.Now the bundles are back. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that, starting this summer, they will offer a streaming bundle of Disney+, Hulu, and Max. Then, on Tuesday, Comcast said that next month it will introduce a streaming bundle of its own, packaging Peacock, Apple TV+, and Netflix. This bundle, called StreamSaver, will be available only to Comcast’s broadband, mobile, and TV customers. Some smaller mini-bundles already exist, but for the most part, the streaming wars had become a battle royale—no alliances, everyone for themselves. Now the combatants have aligned in two blocs, sort of like the Avengers versus the Justice League—except that, confusingly, Marvel movies (Disney) and DC movies (Max) are now part of the same bloc.It’s not cable, but it’s not not cable either. Streaming hasn’t quite come full circle, but it’s three-quarters of the way around. These bundles are ending an entire era of streaming, with its unsatisfying free-for-all of services. This new era may well be better than the one before it. But the dream of streaming as a cheaper, better version of cable is dead.For a while, it did actually exist. When Netflix launched its streaming service back in 2007, the company pretty much dominated the market without much serious competition. You could watch basically everything with no ads, and for less than $10 a month. Then, beginning at the tail end of the 2010s, all of the big legacy entertainment companies tried to get in on the action. “For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars,” the media-industry analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. The current streaming landscape, despite offering unprecedented abundance, is a nightmare to navigate. To watch entertainment now requires wading through a frustrating array of streaming services: Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu, yes, but also Peacock, Paramount+, AMC+, and others.But this hasn’t brought in the types of profits that companies hoped for. Last year, Disney, Comcast, and Paramount collectively lost several billion dollars on streaming. Making and licensing shows and movies, it turns out, is not cheap. And people are willing to pay for only so many streaming subscriptions. Even when the new services managed to attract subscribers, they weren’t able to hold on to them; in industry parlance, churn was too high. Streaming services have tried to recoup their losses by raising prices, creating ad tiers, and cracking down on password sharing.Going it alone hasn’t worked, so now they’re teaming up. Neither mega-bundle has announced details about costs, but Comcast’s StreamSaver will be sold “at a vastly reduced price” relative to individually subscribing to all three services, the company’s CEO, Brian Roberts, said during the announcement this week. Packaged together and sold at a discount, each streaming service will make less per subscription, but perhaps collectively they will be more competitive and hold on to more of their subscribers. That’s the idea, anyway.For consumers, these bundles are probably a good thing. There’s a reason so many people rejoiced at the prospect of cutting the cord—but cable was simple. With streaming, keeping track of all your accounts and all your passwords and where to watch whatever you want to watch—that is not simple. And then, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, one of the services you subscribe to informs you that you’ll have to shell out for the premium tier if you want to watch a certain show or movie. If you can convert three separate subscriptions into a single cheaper one, as the new deals will seemingly allow some people to do, that’s a win.The new bundles don’t exactly restore order and sanity. The array of overlapping options is itself confusing. In addition to the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle, there is also a Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle, which does not include Max. But if you really want to watch sports, you’ll presumably go for the ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros. Discovery bundle, named Venu Sports. And if you’re a Verizon myPlan customer, you can subscribe to a Netflix/Max bundle—even though those two services are part of opposing three-service bundles, as announced over the past two weeks. Making matters even more complicated, some of the bundlers are already themselves bundles. Disney owns Hulu and ESPN. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN and Max. Bundles are bundling with bundles.Even more bundles are likely in the works, and they may save people some money. But they will not resolve the fundamental tension in what people want out of cable, or streaming, or whatever it is that serves them up stuff to watch. On the one hand, we like having everything in one place. On the other, we don’t like paying a lot of money for things we don’t use. Cable satisfied the former desire but not the latter. Streaming, after the fleeting honeymoon period when you could find almost anything on Netflix, satisfied the latter but not the former. With the new bundles, the streamers are trying to strike a balance between the total consolidation of cable and the total chaos of streaming. That new balance may well be superior to the status quo, but the trade-off between having things in one place and paying for things you don’t need will remain. As long as it does, we’ll never feel totally satisfied.theatlantic.com
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Back to Bland Watching Back to Black, the new Amy Winehouse biopic, made me want to look up footage of the late British singer to be reminded of her originality and her liveliness, which no work of fiction could hope to ever fully capture. But in the search process, I ended up staring, for an inordinate amount of time, at Funko Pop dolls. Winehouse has been sold in three versions of the ubiquitous collectible figurines. Each affixes her trademark Cleopatra makeup to the same blank, black eyes that grace the Funkos of superheroes, sports mascots, and various other figures who did not sing songs about oblivion and then die of alcohol poisoning at age 27.To say that Back to Black gives Winehouse the Funko treatment on the big screen would not quite be fair; the movie renders her life with some intelligence, mercy, and painterly craft. But it certainly partakes in the tradition of turning a complex human being into a generic image, defined by superficial traits and tics, for other people to project their feelings upon. No great entertainer ever escapes this fate, but Back to Black should be an occasion to ask why cultural canonization requires such a relentless sanitizing process, and who is served by this sugarcoating.Back to Black begins with the adolescent Winehouse (played by Marisa Abela) at home with her boisterous, working-class Jewish family, singing jazz standards together. The spicy and sad songs she writes in her bedroom soon earn her international stardom—though she’s far less interested in the fame game than in her romance with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), whom the film portrays as a pub-dwelling bad boy who snorts cocaine before breakfast. Her cabbie father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan); her flinty grandmother, Cynthia (Lesley Manville); and her manager Nick (Sam Buchanan) try to steer her toward stability, while paparazzi, industry pressures, and drugs tip her toward destruction. Winehouse’s real-life trajectory was chaotic, but Sam Taylor-Johnson’s filmmaking relays the emotional beats in appealingly direct ways. During Winehouse’s exciting come-up, London’s graffiti pops colorfully in the background; later, as she sinks into drugs and isolation, the city feels dead and desaturated.Abela is a remarkable actor best known for her role on the HBO and BBC banking drama Industry. That show subverts her pageant-worthy poise and winsomeness; she plays a devil disguised as an ingenue. But in Back to Black, she’s playing an ingenue disguised as one of the most caustic and willful pop stars ever. Abela nails many of Winehouse’s mannerisms, though the mouth movements she makes while singing scat vocals do look like something Kristen Wiig would do on Saturday Night Live. The bigger problem is that her version of Winehouse is unshakably sweet and hapless, a puppy dog in smeared eyeliner. Each defiant or self-destructive choice she makes therefore feels oddly under-motivated, even arbitrary.[Read: Is old music killing new music?]This is more the fault of the script than the acting. The film does not really attempt a coherent argument about what forces created such a sui generis artist, or about the ones that drove her to doom. It touches lightly upon various themes of her story—such as the U.K. tabloid industry’s savagery—without saying much about them. The one point of emphasis is Winehouse’s pivotal and intense relationship with Fielder-Civil. Their temporary breakup inspired the lyrics of her breakthrough album, Back to Black, and the best sequence of the film depicts her recording that masterpiece while stunned numb from heartbreak. But the film fails to conjure an on-screen version of Fielder-Civil with any charm, much less a perspective. The viewer is left feeling, as many onlookers at the time were, baffled by the romance.Back to Black’s cast and crew have talked proudly about not portraying anyone as a “villain,” cutting against media narratives blaming Fielder-Civil, Mitch, or anyone else for Winehouse’s struggles. The film wants to be a counterweight to the 2015 documentary Amy, which collaged material from throughout Winehouse’s life to disturbing effect. Some viewers condemned that film for using lurid paparazzi footage of Winehouse at her lowest, and Mitch has said he was portrayed unfairly. But whatever the validity of such critiques, Amy did attempt to place Winehouse’s life within a complex web of cause and effect, personal and cultural. After all, if we are going to re-create a tragedy, should we not try to understand it?Back to Black, by contrast, just makes entertainment out of a saga that was, and should be, excruciating to witness. Winehouse is reduced to a list of traits—beehive hair, jazz inflections, inexorable addiction—that can be easily reproduced in merchandise and licensing for many more years to come. What’s especially jarring is that the film romanticizes Winehouse’s distaste for stardom, careerism, and money itself (“I ain’t no Spice Girl,” she says early on). The image of the iconoclastic, pure artist remains broadly marketable; the ideals behind that image, less so.theatlantic.com
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Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2024 The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) just announced the winning images in its annual members-only photo competition, selected from more than 8,000 entries in seven categories, including Birds, Mammals, Other Animals, Plants & Fungi, Landscapes, and Nature’s Studio. Contest organizers were kind enough to share some of the winning and honored photographs with us below.To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.theatlantic.com
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The Sadistic History of Reality Television More than a decade after watching it, I still get twitchy thinking about “White Bear,” an early episode of Black Mirror that stands as one of the most discomfiting installments of television I’ve seen. A woman (played by Lenora Crichlow) groggily wakes up in a strange house whose television sets are broadcasting the same mysterious symbol. When she goes outside, the people she encounters silently film her on their phones or menacingly wield shotguns and chainsaws. Eventually, trapped in a deserted building, the woman seizes a gun and shoots one of her tormentors, but the weapon surprises her by firing confetti instead of bullets. The walls around her suddenly swing open; she’s revealed to be the star of a sadistic live event devised to punish her repeatedly for a crime she once committed but can’t remember. “In case you haven’t guessed … you aren’t very popular,” the show’s host tells the terrified woman, as the audience roars its approval. “But I’ll tell you what you are, though. You’re famous.”“White Bear” indelibly digs into a number of troublesome 21st-century media phenomena: a populace numbed into passive consumption of cruel spectacle, the fetishistic rituals of public shaming, the punitive nature of many “reality” shows. The episode’s grand reveal, a television staple by the time it premiered in 2013, is its own kind of punishment: The extravagant theatrics serve as a reminder that everything that’s happened to the woman has been a deliberate construction—a series of manipulations in service of other people’s entertainment.The contrast between the aghast subject and the gleeful audience, clapping like seals, is almost too jarring to bear. And yet a version of this moment really happened, as seen about an hour into The Contestant, Hulu’s dumbfounding documentary about a late-’90s Japanese TV experiment. For 15 months, a wannabe comedian called Tomoaki Hamatsu (nicknamed “Nasubi,” or “eggplant,” in reference to the length of his head) has been confined, naked, to a single room filled with magazines, and tasked with surviving—and winning his way out, if he could hit a certain monetary target—by entering competitions to win prizes. The entire time, without his knowledge or consent, he’s also been broadcast on a variety show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.Before he’s freed, Nasubi is blindfolded, dressed for travel, transported to a new location, and led into a small room that resembles the one he’s been living in. Wearily, accepting that he’s not being freed but merely moved, he takes off his clothes as if to return to his status quo. Then, the walls collapse around him to reveal the studio, the audience, the stage, the cameras. Confetti flutters through the air. Nasubi immediately grabs a pillow to conceal his genitals. “My house fell down,” he says, in shock. The audience cackles at his confusion. “Why are they laughing?” he asks. They laugh even harder.Since The Contestant debuted earlier this month, reviews and responses have homed in on how outlandish its subject matter is, dubbing it a study of the “most evil reality show ever” and “a terrifying and bizarre true story.” The documentary focuses intently on Nasubi’s experience, contrasting his innocence and sweetness with the producer who tormented him, a Machiavellian trickster named Toshio Tsuchiya. Left unstudied, though, is the era the series emerged from. The late ’90s embodied an anything-goes age of television: In the United States, series such as Totally Hidden Video and Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape drew millions of viewers by humiliating people caught doing dastardly things on camera. But Tsuchiya explains that he had a more anthropological mission in mind. “We were trying to show the most basic primitive form of human being,” he tells The Contestant’s director. Nasubi was Tsuchiya’s grand human experiment.The cruelty with which Nasubi was treated seems horrifying now, and outrageously unethical. Before he started winning contests, he got by on a handful of crackers fed to him by the producers, then fiber jelly (one of his first successful prizes), then dog food. His frame whittles down in front of our eyes. “If he hadn’t won rice, he would have died,” a producer says, casually. The question of why Nasubi didn’t just leave the room hangs in the air, urgent and mostly unexamined. “Staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option,” Nasubi explains in the documentary. “It’s a strange psychological state. You lose the will to escape.”But the timing of his confinement also offers a clue about why he might have stayed. 1998, when the comedian was first confined, was a moment in flux, caught between the technological innovations that were rapidly changing mass culture and the historical atrocities of the 20th century. Enabled by the internet, lifecasters such as Jennifer Ringley were exposing their unfiltered lives online as a kind of immersive sociological experiment. Webcams allowed exhibitionists and curious early adopters to present themselves up for observation as novel subjects in a human zoo. Even before the release of The Truman Show, which came out in the U.S. a few months after Nasubi was first put on camera, a handful of provocateur producers were brainstorming new formats for unscripted television, egged on by the uninhibited bravado and excess of ’90s media. These creators acted as all-seeing, all-knowing authorities whose word was absolute. And their subjects, not yet familiar with the “rules” of an emerging genre, often didn’t know what they were allowed to contest. Of Tsuchiya, Nasubi remembers, “It was almost like I was worshiping a god.”In his manipulation of Nasubi, Tsuchiya was helping pioneer a new kind of art form, one that would lead to the voyeurism of 2000s series such as Big Brother and Survivor, not to mention more recent shows such Married at First Sight and Love Is Blind. But the spectacle of Nasubi’s confinement also represented a hypothesis that had long preoccupied creators and psychologists alike, and that reality television has never really moved on from. If you manufacture absurd, monstrous situations with which to torment unwitting dupes, what will they do? What will we learn? And, most vital to the people in charge, how many viewers will be compelled to watch?Some popular-culture historians consider the first reality show to be MTV’s The Real World, a 1992 series that deliberately provoked conflict by putting strangers together in an unfamiliar environment. Others cite PBS’s 1973 documentary series An American Family, which filmed a supposedly prototypical California household over several months, in a conceit that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”But the origins of what happened to Nasubi seem to lie most directly in a series that ran on and off from 1948 to 2014: Candid Camera. Its creator, Allen Funt, was a radio operator in the Army Signal Corps during World War II; while stationed in Oklahoma, he set up a “gripe booth” for soldiers to record their complaints about military service. Knowing they were being taped, the subjects held back, which led Funt to record people secretly in hopes of capturing more honest reactions. His first creative effort was The Candid Microphone, a radio show. The series put its subjects in perplexing situations to see how they’d respond: Funt gave strangers exploding cigarettes, asked a baker to make a “disgusting” birthday cake, and even chained his secretary to his desk and hired a locksmith to “free” her for her lunch break. “With the candid microphone, we are at the beginning of the Age of the Involuntary Amateur,” one critic wrote in 1947. “The possibilities are limitless; the prospect is horrifying.” Sure enough, a TV series soon followed.For all that critic’s revulsion, Funt was earnest about the potentially revelatory power of his shows. He was seemingly influenced by two parallel trends. One was a sociological school of thought that was trying urgently to analyze human nature following a wave of real barbarities: the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s great purges. The other was an interest in art that captured the contours of real life, in an outgrowth of the naturalist movement that had come out of the late 19th century. Émile Zola, one of its practitioners, argued in The Experimental Novel that fiction writers were essentially omnipotent forces dropping characters into realistic situations to consider how they might respond. Literature, he argued, was “a real experiment that a novelist makes on man.”The invention of television, as the academic Tony E. Jackson has argued, offered a more literal and scientific medium within which creators could manipulate real human subjects. This was where Candid Camera came into play. Funt’s practical jokes—setting up a subject in an elevator in which every other person suddenly turns their back to him—tended to consider the nature of compliance, and what humans will go along with rather than be outliers. Candid Camera was considered so rich a work that Funt was asked to donate episodes to Cornell University’s psychology department for further study.Funt was also highly influential to Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who turned his Yale studies on conformity into a documentary titled Obedience. The Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961, asked members of the public to inflict fellow subjects with electric shocks—faked, unknown to them—when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Inspired by the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and the experience of his own family members who’d survived concentration camps, Milgram tweaked the Candid Camera model to more explicitly study how far people would follow orders before they objected. As the film professor Anna McCarthy has written, Milgram paid particular attention to the theatrical elements of his work. He even considered using recordings of humans screaming in real, rather than simulated, pain to maximize the authenticity of the subject’s experience. “It is possible that the kind of understanding of man I seek is an amalgam of science and art,” Milgram wrote in 1962. “It is sure to be rejected by the scientists as well as the artists, but for me it carries significance.”This studied interest in human nature continued in PBS’s An American Family; its presentation of ordinary life up close, the anthropologist Margaret Mead once argued, was “as important for our time as were the invention of the drama and the novel for earlier generations—a new way for people to understand themselves.” Throughout the later decades of the 20th century, television was similarly fixated on exposure, although shock value quickly took priority over genuine curiosity and analysis. During the ’90s, on talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and Maury, people confessed their most damning secrets to anyone who cared to watch. Series including Cops and America’s Most Wanted offered a more lurid, voyeuristic look at crime and the darkness of human nature.[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]By the time Tsuchiya had the idea to confine a man to a single apartment to see whether he could survive the ordeal, the concept of humiliation-as-revelation was well established. “I told [Nasubi] that most of it would never be aired,” the producer explains in The Contestant. “When someone hears that, they stop paying attention to the camera. That’s when you can really capture a lot.” As an organizing principle for how to get the most interesting footage, it seems to stem right from Funt’s secret recordings of people in the 1940s. Tsuchiya appeared to be motivated by his desire to observe behavior that had never been seen before on film—“to capture something amazing … an aspect of humanity that only I, only this show, could capture.” And extremity, to him, was necessary, because it was the only way to provoke responses that would be new, and thus thrilling to witness.The reality-show boom of the early 2000s was intimately informed by this same intention. When Big Brother debuted in Holland in 1999, it was broadly advertised as a social experiment in which audiences could observe contestants under constant surveillance like rats in a lab; the show was compared by one Dutch psychologist to the Stanford prison experiment. (Another called the show’s design “the wet dream of a psychological researcher.”) The 2002 British show The Experiment even directly imitated both the Stanford setup and Milgram’s work on obedience. But although such early series may have had honest intentions, their willingness to find dramatic fodder in moments of human calamity was exploited by a barrage of crueler series that would follow. The 2004 series There’s Something About Miriam had six men compete for the affections of a 21-year-old model from Mexico, who was revealed in the finale to be transgender—an obscene gotcha moment that mimics the structure of Candid Camera. Without a dramatic conclusion, a nonfiction series is just a filmed record of events. But with a last-act revelation, it’s a drama.Contemporary audiences, blessedly, have a more informed understanding of ethics, of entrapment, and of the duty of care TV creators have to their subjects. In 2018, the British show Love Island spawned a national debate about gaslighting after one contestant was deemed to be manipulating another. There’s no question that what happened to Nasubi would trigger a mass outcry today. But reality TV is still built on the same ideological imperatives—the desire to see people set up in manifestly absurd scenarios for our entertainment. The Emmy-nominated 2023 series Jury Duty is essentially a kinder episode of Candid Camera extended into a whole season, and the internet creator known as MrBeast, the purveyor of ridiculous challenges and stunts, has the second most-subscribed channel on all of YouTube. What’s most remarkable about The Contestant now is how its subject managed to regain his faith in human nature, despite everything he endured. But the ultimate goal of so many contemporary shows is still largely the same as it was 25 years ago: to manufacture a novel kind of social conflict, sit back, and watch what happens.theatlantic.com