Bo Burnham in Inside. Image: © Netflix/IMDb
Cast in galactic green lights and seated at a keyboard, a manic Bo Burnham serenades the internet. Long hair hangs across his dark tea shades and a haggard beard traces his chin. He looks like someone slipped Jesus acid. ‘Welcome to the internet’, his wily voice coaxes, ‘have a look around.’
Burnham’s internet is a place for everything. For drawings and games and civil rights discourse. For racial slurs and photos of women’s feet. It is a crucible in which everything captivating, boring or depraved bubbles to the surface of our consciousness, ready when we are. There is no room for apathy, Burnham harps, no time for boredom when so much is there to be grasped. As his singing accelerates and his examples become ever more erratic, Burnham’s point, the central current that courses throughout his most recent special Inside, becomes clear.
The internet is the domain of the insatiable. It is unbounded. It is all-engrossing.
And, whether we like it or not, it is very much out of our control.
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Since its conception, the World Wide Web has provided a forum in which diverse ideas and opinions can be exchanged. It is a democratising tool, one that allows the distribution of creative work across an ever-expanding community. This is clearly beneficial; the sharing of art and cultural experiences undeniably moves us forward. However, as our conception of and relationship to the creative process evolves, and obstacles to accessibility are ostensibly removed, a new challenge is presented to those tasked with creating artistic ‘content’—volume.
Audiences want more: more content, more of the time. Impatience for the ‘new’, Burnham notes throughout Inside, has festered into a voracious desire for stimulation. Within the confines of our various screens, audiences live out a digital life revised, reimagined and bolstered by content. It is available constantly, across platforms whose differences cannot readily be delineated. In a landscape that condemns apathy and boredom in favour of stimulation, artists are condemned to a cycle of relentless production, governed not by themselves but by the medium that dictates artistic consumption. It is a game of catch-up, and as Burnham explicates, one artists are losing.
In a landscape that condemns apathy and boredom in favour of stimulation, artists are condemned to a cycle of relentless production.
Irrespective of genre or form, one certain impact of globalising the art space is the increased concentration of works within it. Over 40,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify daily. SoundCloud hosts over 25 million artists and creators, and streaming services such as Netflix and Stan offer more television and film choices than would physically be possible for any one person to enjoy in their lifetime. Importantly, as Martin Scorsese wrote in Harper’s Magazine earlier this year, despite the abundance of film, television, music and performative art they offer to audiences, these platforms lack dedicated curation. Films often end up ‘dumped’ onto platforms with little fanfare, buried by faceless algorithms—the processes of artists completely lost in a void of digestible media. Put simply, Scorsese argues for the power of the curator: He suggests there is no way of engaging with the art we have access to, when the focus is volume rather than organised quality. Though we can push through it, momentarily satisfying our urge to consume, in doing so the great beauty of the artistic experience is lost.
With this change, the way that we enjoy art is similarly altered. In the context of streamable television, the distribution of episodes has shifted from a week-by-week model to the release of full seasons at once. Clearly, consumption of that content is far more likely to be rapid and concentrated than spaced out. According to Nielsen, upon its release, more than 360,000 households watched season two of Stranger Things in a single sitting. Though some platforms remain loyal to the episodic model—HBO most notably— the success of behemoth Netflix places them squarely in the minority; a novelty, rather than the new norm.
The consequence of this reality is the narrowing of the brief window—in some cases, as brief as a day—in which the demand of the audience is satiated. The burden shifts, very quickly, back upon the artistic entity for the provision of more. More seasons, tracks, interviews—anything that can sustain or prolong the enjoyment the content itself initially provided. Sometimes this is quelled by the announcement of renewed seasons (for instance, the fourth season of Netflix’s Sex Education was announced just nine days after the release of its third), but ultimately, artists are immediately forced back into the mindset of production. There is no time for digestion, no opportunity for reprieve.
Audiences are not intrinsically callous—but online, where what we crave is delivered at such high frequency and volume, expectations inevitably change.
To isolate this from the expansion of the internet is naïve. Audiences are not intrinsically callous. But online, where what we crave is delivered for consumption at such high frequency and volume, expectations regarding its production inevitably change. Hedonism is an ethos buried in all people; the internet and its capacity for constant satisfaction has merely dragged that urge to the surface.
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By streamlining access to their content, and stripping back the boundary that separates them from their audience, the internet similarly threatens our capacity to exhibit empathy for artists as people. In 2019, Lorde delayed production on her third studio album, Solar Power, following the death of her dog Pearl. The personal loss, Lorde articulated, was ‘indescribably painful’; one that destabilised the ‘bright energy’ of her creative process and demanded space for solitary ‘time and recalibration’. She asked for patience—not because she felt she was owed it, but because she feared it wouldn’t be given. The vulnerability of her expression is palpable and was, by some fans, respected as a demonstration of acute fallibility. A reminder that there remains a person behind the revelled work; a human being whose frailties and sensitivities are not so distinct from their own. And yet, for others, this obstacle towards the production of the album was something to be endured. Online conversation about the album was dominated by its delay, rather than its potential content. In some ways, Lorde’s fears materialised. For many, the entitlement to the deliverance of the artistic work overwhelmed the personal circumstances of its creator. A dog’s a dog—you can cry after uploading to Spotify.
That demand did not diminish upon release. In reviewing Solar Power, Pitchfork labelled the album ‘a little incoherent’; something ‘too sweet to be biting’; well-written, but without the emotional devastation that both Melodrama and Pure Heroine could boast. Where Lorde’s previous works spoke of grating teenage angst, or a painful separation, Solar Power aimed for a little less, focusing instead on the joy that flows from engaging physically with the natural world. To many, that difference was disappointing. Audiences who have relished the heart-breaking lyricism of ‘Liability’ or ‘Ribs’ wanted to feel that grief again. Lorde, fresh from her own recovery, was simply on a different wavelength.
Solar Power is a reflection of the artist’s own personal contentment, brimming with a self-assuredness emblematic of the mature artist that she has become. It is certainly possible to critique the album for its musical elements—its lack of a crescendo, or the insincerity of what Pitchfork astutely deems its ‘slack, demo-style recording’. However, this should not be conflated with Lorde’s own emotional trajectory towards self-fulfilment. To be disappointed solely in this joyful shift in her discography is to be disappointed that Lorde herself is no longer in pain. And that in itself is confronting. Despite the porous barrier that exists between ‘them’ and ‘us’, audiences do not have an inherent right to an artist’s personal experiences. Lorde doesn’t owe us repackaged grief, just because we’re not in the mood to feel light.
Despite the porous barrier that exists between ‘them’ and ‘us’, audiences do not have an inherent right to an artist’s personal experiences.
Though intrusion into the private spheres of artists by audiences has always occurred—the speculation around the inspiration for Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘drivers license’, for instance, echoes that which greeted Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’— it is exacerbated to an extreme degree by the wide-reaching tendrils of the internet. Our online presence brings us together, but it also fosters a sense of expectation amongst in-touch audiences for artists to continually cater to personal demands. We’ve become used to getting what we want, and by stripping back the boundary between artist and audience, the internet has empowered us to confidently ask for it.
In 2021, to avoid online media is to jeopardise commercial success. Not only is the internet birthing entire new generations of mainstream artistic talent, as Olivia Rodrigo exemplifies, the majority of art and entertainment is, by volume, consumed via online platforms. Even staunch cinephiles like Scorsese and Denis Villeneuve have been forced to reckon with the concurrent release of their works in theatres and streaming platforms (Scorsese’s The Irishman on Netflix, Villeneuve’s upcoming Dune on HBO Max). Across almost all genres, there is no evading the new status quo.
For some artists, this invitation of the public into their private creative spheres offers a uniquely positive opportunity for personal communication with their audience—the exact kind of connection the internet was designed to encourage. Lorde, as one example, communicates tour, album and personal updates to her fans via semi-regular emails. However, doing so inevitably encourages a parasocial relationship—a highly emotional response, akin to intimacy, that draws audiences closer to the individual they idolise. The distinction between artist, character and audiences dissolves, and with it, the necessary distance between a creative entity and the people they appeal to. Artists are forced to operate in the space in order to retain social relevancy, but in doing so are denied the freedom from demand and expectation that often facilitates the production of their best work.
The exploration of this conflict in Inside is particularly enlightening. Burnham is a performer bred of the internet. His career began in his bedroom, from which he broadcast a series of increasingly viral online videos. The internet is not merely something that informs his art, but the very medium in which it primarily materialises; it is, as Cassie da Costa and Chris Murphy note, his ‘cross to bear: the great joy and sorrow of his life.’In Inside, Burnham acknowledges this relationship in a moment of self-flagellation, watching projections of his early videos in silence. It is a painful, ominous scene, one that oozes with a sense of foreboding. Within the space of Inside’s claustrophobic four walls and within his relationship with the online sphere, Burnham is a man trapped; one who no longer has a space in which he is freed from the expectations of others.
The position of Burnham and his contemporaries was an inevitability of our transition online—to platforms that defined themselves by access, breadth, speed and replicability.
Though Inside is certainly informed by Burnham’s experience, the sentiment is universal. It’s also something we should have seen coming. In a 1999 BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, David Bowie referred to the fledgling internet as an ‘alien lifeform’. When Paxman pressed him, asking how a ‘tool’ could possibly be framed in such a way, Bowie responded with distilled prescience. Because, he replied, the ‘state of content is going to be so different to anything we can really envisage at the moment’. His reason for the change? Namely, that ‘the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.’
He was right. The position of Burnham and his contemporaries was an inevitability of our transition online—to a platform or platforms that defined themselves by access, breadth, speed and replicability. The internet, a creature of our own making, elicited this change because that is how we wanted it. It did—as Burnham reflects in ‘Welcome to the Internet’—‘all the things we designed it to do.’
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The final moments of Inside are perhaps its most rich; they are also the hardest to watch. Burnham, finally freed from his work by its completion, looks to step outside—back to the real world, out of the camera’s view. Instead, what awaits him is another stage, and a spotlight that cannot be side-stepped. At his fear, an audience laughs uncontrollably. It’s a compelling narrative device, albeit largely fictitious. As we see briefly, Burnham’s prison-studio sits in the backyard of the large house he shares with his partner.
Watching this unravel is strange. Alone, buried in my couch, I was filled with a sense of urgency—a need to do something, anything, to relieve Burnham of the pain he was clearly suffering. But I also felt guilt. Throughout his remarkable special, Burnham condemns the voyeurism of the internet. And yet, paradoxically, Inside cannot exist without it; the only way to engage with it is online. The voyeur, Burnham seems to suggest, is me. And you. People trapped, like he, by the demands of an insatiable medium. It is a tough, confusing pill to swallow.
Then it is over. There is hardly time to read Burnham’s name in the credits before my screen is minimised. ‘So this is how it ends,’ he hints elegiacally in ‘Goodbye’. Not with a bang, but with Netflix jostling me, helpfully, in the direction of something new.
Inside is available to stream on Netflix.
