In video stores, the absence of a desired title used to force customers to choose a substitute. Now, thanks to streaming video, you’re never put in a position where you won’t get what you didn’t already want.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Alexander Sallas holds a Ph.D. in English from Western University and is working on a book about deus ex machina.
Of all the summer jobs I held in my late teens and early 20s – dishwasher, shoe salesman, sushi waiter, interior design consultant, heavy metal drummer – probably the most anachronistic was video store clerk.
The year: 2015. The location: Family Video on Barton Street East, in Hamilton. With Blockbuster Canada having shuttered its doors four years earlier, the American rental chain had crossed the border, opening some 10 locations in a dicey wager on a seemingly passé business model.
After a couple of months dutifully manning the cash and stocking the shelves for fewer and fewer customers, I was summoned to a meeting with the freshly promoted and fervently perspiring district manager, who informed me I was being let go for my “low sales.” It would seem the same fate befell him, because the store shut down shortly thereafter. (Family Video’s final Canadian location, in Windsor-Essex, closed in 2019. Their 248 American stores lasted until 2021.)
On those occasions when a patron did enter the shop, they would often be on the hunt for something specific – and, unable to find it, be forced into an unplanned decision. A nearby title in the same genre. A different film featuring an actor or director they recognized. Sometimes something chosen at random, or – riskier still – a movie based on my recommendation. (“Have you seen It Happened One Night? No? In the Mood for Love? … Okay, what about The Human Centipede?”)
In today’s era of streaming services, such forced encounters with cinematic contingency have all but vanished. No shelves sit half-empty; no discs become damaged or misplaced; no forgetful borrowers or nefarious scoundrels keep films for weeks past their return dates. That is to say, no absence compels a substitution. You’re never put in a position where you won’t get what you didn’t already want.
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That convenience comes at a cost. Crave, Netflix, Paramount+, Prime Video, Tubi and other streaming platforms never push us into a state of productive frustration. At a video store, an unavailable movie exposed you to something you hadn’t planned on, or perhaps even heard of. Streaming largely eliminates such unpredictability. The result? A self-appointed echo chamber that masquerades as consumer choice. What presents itself as maximum apparent optionality is, in practice, a system optimized to return us to what we already know. The more choices we’re given, the less we genuinely choose – and the less we grow.
Critics and philosophers have long grappled with that problem. Plato warned that a life governed by unrestrained desire produces confusion rather than advancement. More recently, Slavoj Žižek has suggested that late capitalism promises limitless choice while quietly foreclosing genuine freedom.
Even more radically, in the early 19th century, Hegel made dissatisfaction itself the engine of human development. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, he argues self-realization proceeds dialectically: We encounter contradiction or resistance, and out of that struggle a higher form of understanding emerges – a process he calls Aufhebung, or sublation. We come out the other side improved by the battle, a “synthesis” of what we were and what opposed us. But it is a kind of unhappiness, or dissatisfaction, that sets that movement in motion.
We arrive at a greater understanding by passing through discontent, overcoming it, and beginning the cycle again.
While I certainly don’t agree with all of Hegel’s ideas, there’s immense wisdom in that one. Growth – aesthetic, intellectual, moral or otherwise – rarely occurs under conditions of seamless satisfaction. It depends on friction: the frustration of desire, the interruption of habit. Unhappiness – thwarted desire, we might say – is the precondition for self-improvement. It drives us to reflect and revise, to learn about ourselves and others. That is why Zeus, in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, insists that humans “suffer into truth,” and why Nietzsche urges us not to merely be who we are, but to become who we are.
The death of video stores, then, reveals a broader social dilemma. As convenience increases, the pressure to confront the unfamiliar diminishes, and with it our capacity for growth.
That same stultifying dynamic shapes the uneasy relationship between news and the internet. Increasingly, algorithm-driven feeds mediate exposure, particularly among younger Canadians; according to Pollara, more than 50 per cent of Gen Z now get their news from social media.
However, what circulates there is increasingly the output of recommendation systems designed to minimize friction and maximize retention, rather than the result of editorial judgment. That’s not an informed public; that’s a managed audience.
By giving the public what they think they want, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube spare them the discomfort of doubt. Like streaming services, they cater to pre-existing expectations, reinforcing familiar tastes and leaving little room for challenge. They disseminate “content” – which is to real news what Chef Boyardee is to pasta – designed to engage, not inform. A 2023 study, for example, found that only six of every 6,000 recommended videos on TikTok qualify as news.
As a result, when we’re coddled by systems that privilege engagement over understanding, we lose the civic utility of humility – the recognition that we might be wrong. When algorithms present endless affirmations of our existing preferences and beliefs, conviction easily curdles into certainty. In such an environment, it’s little wonder why political polarization accelerates: No friction remains to slow it down.
So, I look back on my (brief) tenure at Family Video with a certain fondness. Blockbuster’s would-be successor may have been a dinosaur in a digital age, but it performed a social good. People do not always want what’s best for them, and they rarely grow when nothing resists their desires. Video stores stood contra mundum, right against an evermore online world, upholding the value of productive frustration: the always aggravating but often moral work of being denied what you thought you wanted.