The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 45

The Library That Ended the Video Store

1. 1

   In the days when the films were kept in plastic boxes upon the shelves of the land, it was told of Reed that he kept Apollo 13 past its day and was charged forty dollars, and that in his wrath he founded a house without the fee. But Marc, his fellow, saith the tale was a parable made for the newspapers, and that the true seed was a compact disc he sent through the post, and it came unbroken; for a legend with a villain is cached longer than an experiment with a stamp.

2. 2

   Now the disc had made the film a number, and a number careth not by which road it travelleth, whether by wagon, by post or by wire. So in the year 1998 the first discs went forth by mail; in 1999 the house took a monthly tithe in place of a price for each; and in the year 2000 it put away the late fee altogether.

   See also Genesis 43:7

3. 3

   And the people kept a list of the films they wished to see, which was called the queue; and every name upon it was a prayer the machine could read, for what a man longeth to see is purer data than what he buyeth in haste.

4. 4

   But the house of Blockbuster was fed by the forgetting of its people; in the year 2000 the late fees were near eight hundred million dollars, a sixth part of all its revenue. And the elders measured the house by the fee, and grew the thing they measured: for a store that profiteth from thy lateness hath no reason to help thee be on time, and the ledger is the master of the house.

5. 5

   Meanwhile Netflix kept a machine called Cinematch, which guessed, for each man, how many stars from one to five he would give to a film he had not seen. It knew not what a film was, neither its director nor its tale; it knew only who had loved it together with whom, and from his neighbors it guessed the man.

6. 6

   And in the year 2000 Reed and Marc came unto Dallas and offered their small house to Blockbuster for fifty million dollars, to tend its name upon the wire; and it is told that the elders laughed, for they had stores numbering in the thousands, which could be counted, and a machine, which could not. Behold, the compounding of a learning thing is invisible in the quarter in which it beginneth.

7. 7

   For the shelf is a cache: a few hundred copies of what most men wanted on a Friday night, kept by the law of all caches, which is popularity. And the man walked the aisles an hour, reading the backs of the boxes, and called it choosing. But the warehouse of the mail held the long tail of the rarely wanted, and the list was cut to each man; the shelf served the middle, and the machine served the one.

8. 8

   In the first days of the year 2005, Blockbuster, which had proclaimed it beforehand, put away the late fee, and set in its place a charge for restocking the films kept too long, as a bug moved to another module is not a bug mended. And the people had been taught to count the days, and they went on counting them; for a habit is a weight, and it is not retrained when the rule is changed.

9. 9

   In the year 2006 the house of Netflix offered a prize of one million dollars to any tribe that could cut the error of Cinematch by a tenth, and it gave unto all a hundred million ratings, from four hundred and eighty thousand men, upon seventeen thousand and seven hundred films. It was a table of which scarce one cell in eighty-five was filled, and the task was to guess the rest. And the tribes found that every man and every film could be written as a few hidden numbers, axes of taste: one seemed to divide the serious from the escapist, and others had no name in any tongue, yet they predicted.

10. 10

    In January of 2007 the house opened a second gate, and the films flowed through the wires. For the post is a network, as the prophet Tanenbaum taught: the bandwidth of a wagon full of discs is mighty, but its latency is days, and the machine learned only after the envelope came home. Now the round trip fell from days to seconds, and the envelope was made a packet.

    See also Genesis 51:5

11. 11

    And the machine saw no longer what a man declared, but what he did: where he paused, what he abandoned at the second minute, what he watched again at the third hour of the night. For men rate the grave film five stars and play the light one; the star is what he wisheth to be, and the play is what he is. And the machine, which believeth the log above the word, believed the play.

    See also Prophets 5:12 · Chronicles 9:13

12. 12

    In September of 2009 a union of three rival tribes, called BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, crossed the line of ten percent and took the million, by twenty minutes ahead of The Ensemble, which bore the same score. Yet the house of Netflix did not build the winning blend whole; it took two of the methods and left the rest, for a blend of more than a hundred models gained too little to repay the labor of running them, and the question itself had moved from stars to streaming. The prize was not the product; the leaderboard is not production, and the best score is not the best system.

13. 13

    Now the ratings had been given with the names removed. But in 2008 two scholars showed that a few ratings and their dates sufficed to find a man in the crowd, by matching them to his public reviews upon another site; and in 2010 Netflix cancelled the second contest. A man's taste is a fingerprint, and he who stripped the name hath not stripped the man.

14. 14

    In September of 2010 the house of Blockbuster went down into the courts of bankruptcy, and in the next year its remains were bought by Dish for three hundred and twenty million dollars; and its stores went dark one after another, till one stood last, in Bend, in the high desert, keeping the lamp. It was not that the shelf was ill made, but that the shelf was built for a world in which choosing was scarce and storage was dear, and both had become cheap; for the assumption beneath the architecture is the first thing to expire, and the last thing to be noticed.

15. 15

    Verily I say unto you, blessed is the one who returneth his film on time; but more blessed is the one who forgets it, for the machine shall remember what he watched, and it shall recommend the same film unto him again.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 45:1–15.