Screens of the Apocalypse

How We’re Worshipping the Great Glowing Rectangle in 2025

I’ve seen the future and it is binge-watching.

Forget the crackling antenna rabbit ears of your childhood, the greasy-fingered remote battles over Wheel of Fortune, the sacred cable box rituals passed down from our bloated Boomer forefathers. Those days are dust. We are now living in the High Church of Streaming, and the television—the once humble box of family unity and static—is now an altar for the individualized, algorithmically blessed hallucination we call “content.”

According to Nielsen’s June 2025 data drop, 46% of Americans are glued to streaming platforms. That’s right—nearly half of us are jacked into the Matrix with a Roku stick or Smart TV welded to our eyeballs. Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Disney+, Tubi, Pluto, PornHub Premium—hell, some of you are probably watching reruns of Golden Girls on TikTok, one vertical slice at a time. Who am I to judge?

But let’s not pretend the old world is gone. Like ghosts at the feast, Cable and Broadcast still haunt the flickering screen. Cable’s clinging on at 23.4%—a quarter of us still flipping channels like it’s 2003 and MythBusters might save the republic. Broadcast sits at 18.5%, likely watched by your grandparents and the paranoid guy down the street who thinks streaming is a Chinese mind-control operation (he’s not entirely wrong).

Then there’s the 12.1% labeled “Other.” What the hell is “Other”? My theory: a mad mix of YouTube rabbit holes, Twitch streamers shrieking into LED voids, church sermons from Arkansas, and that one guy who still owns a VCR and refuses to surrender his copy of Die Hard With a Vengeance. God bless him.

But let’s not reduce this to numbers. Let’s talk about the vibe.

In 2025, television isn’t a passive activity—it’s a drug, a weapon, a mirror, and a lover. It’s the AI whispering your name through a TikTok cooking video. It’s the voice in the dark telling you to watch just one more episode. Television isn’t something you watch—it watches you. It knows what you want before you know you want it. It’s dopamine-on-demand, pumped through pixels, paced by analytics, engineered for compulsion.

Cable is the ghost of Christmas Past. It’s that bloated cousin at Thanksgiving, still bragging about “appointment viewing” like that means something anymore. “We’ve got 400 channels,” it says proudly, while streaming raises one eyebrow and replies, “Cool, I’ve got infinite.” Cable’s hanging on by a thread, bolstered by sports, legacy deals, and people too scared to cancel.

Broadcast is the cockroach. Eternal. Local news at 6, reality singing competitions at 8, crime dramas starring actors who peaked in 1997 at 10. It may be the last stand of network monoculture, but damn it, it’s still here. Somewhere, someone is watching Jeopardy! with a microwave dinner and feeling real.

And streaming? Streaming is the Roman Empire. Luxurious, invasive, decadent, and doomed. It seduces with prestige drama and true crime sagas. It burrows into your brain and builds a nest. You don’t “watch” streaming—you enter it. You become one with the stream. And the stream, in turn, studies you like a lab rat hooked up to electrodes, whispering: “If you liked Mare of Easttown, you’ll love Dead Moms of Duluth.”

The irony is that television was once communal. One set, one family, one show. Now, it’s hyper-individualized. You could have five people in a room, each watching something different on five different screens, calling it quality time. We’re together, alone. Glued to glowing rectangles, bathing in curated stimulation, ignoring the strange, real world just outside the frame.

You see, the television isn’t dead—it’s been reborn. It’s not the centerpiece of the living room anymore; it’s a shapeshifter. It’s in your pocket, on your wrist, baked into your car, embedded in your fridge, probably one day in your cornea. Your screen is your world. Your screen is your god.

Let me be honest—I’m guilty too. I stream Coltrane documentaries, old jazz bootlegs, and French noir films at 2AM. I YouTube spiral into avant-garde music theory and conspiracy theories about Miles Davis faking his death. I know this beast. I feed it. It feeds me.

So what do we do?

We acknowledge the fire. We use it—but we don’t let it burn us down. We remember that there’s a world off-screen too. One where jazz still swings in smoky rooms, where conversations aren’t transcribed by Siri, and where the only “platform” that matters is the one you’re willing to stand on and speak your truth.

Until then, enjoy the stream, brothers and sisters. Just don’t drown in it.

Broadcasting from the borderlands of nostalgia and futurism, this is Bret Primack—signing off, streaming out, forever buffering.

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Until we meet again, let your conscience be your guide.