Recently, I assigned my students Natalie Wynn’s (aka “Contrapoints”) 35-minute video “Incels.” Though I’ve watched and taught this video several times, I always give it a rewatch before teaching it. Often my re-watching is distracted, but this time I’d left it off until the morning I was teaching—and I was teaching at 8:30 am. Panicked about time, I pulled “Incels” up on YouTube and played it at 1.5x speed. 


When I arrived to class, one of my students said she’d really enjoyed the video, and that she’d watched it at 1.5x speed. I gasped and said, “How could you!” She shrugged and I think it was this very nonchalance that compelled me to admit to her, “Okay, I did, too.” I know my students skim their readings because I, too, skim my readings—so why is it so wrong that a student should skim their viewing?


Admittedly, some of the ominous creepiness of the “Incels” video is either fully lost or made comical by speeding up the video. But this change can actually lead to new ways of interpreting the text. In her DSI talk “The Right to Speed-watch (Or, When Netflix Discovered Its Blind Users)” Neta Alexander, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colgate University, rethinks the common assumption that speed-watching is about productivity and “time-hacking.” Instead, she argues that by reframing speed-watching around scaffolding, calibration, and pacing, we can understand it as a crucial means of equalizing media access. 


When Netflix rolled out a playback speed feature to a small group of Android users in 2019, Judd Apatow (ok, who wouldn’t want to speed up an Apatow movie?) led many Hollywood filmmakers and actors in public outcry about valuing craft—nevermind that playback features had already been incorporated into platforms like Vimeo and YouTube for over a decade. 


But as Alexander points out, directors have never been in control of playback speed. “In the early days of moviegoing,” explains Alexander, “it was projectionists and theatre managers who determined the speed of films.” (Projectionists had to move the highly flammable nitrate at a precise, slow speed past the burning heat of an arc lamp.) In other words, films have always been “compressed, extended, or creatively re-edited” to maximize profits for distributors, from early projectionists to altering films to make them “appropriate” for in-flight entertainment.


Netflix’s playback speed feature—embedded into the platform’s interface in 2020—was marketed “in part as an attempt to serve those users who are hard of hearing or visually impaired.” Many who are hard of hearing or visually impaired benefit immensely from controlling the speed of audio descriptions and subtitles. For decades, blind students manually hacked phonographs in order to listen to their assigned homework faster. As it turns out, blind students wanted an “easy sonic font”—a flat vocal affect that allowed them efficiency and control over expressiveness and affect. In Alexander’s words, “the desire to speed through a show or a film should not be easily dismissed as sloppiness or laziness.” Speed-watching is not a productivity hack nor is it a lack of respect for art. Rather, it is an equalizer. 


That said, not all of Netflix’s intentions were about accessibility: Forbes reporter Matt Klien posits that with a playback feature, Netflix doesn’t need an increase in subscribers to have an increase in viewership metrics. In summary, “Same timespan each night, but more content watched.” Here, Alexander intervenes, explaining that features initially designed for people with disabilities “often end up serving a more general population of users. “Disability activism ha[s] long shaped mainstream media technologies,” said Alexander. She invited us to think about closed captioning, which took years of Deaf activism to realize and is now ubiquitous even though in 2010 Netflix fought (and lost to) the ADA when they didn’t want to provide closed captioning.


In order to challenge the pervasive readings of speed-watching as a “time hack,” Alexander turns to the Disability Studies notion of “crip time.” To think about speed-watching through the lens of cripping time, Alexander argues that the need for speed is not “a result of cognitive capitalism, but rather a coping mechanism in a world in which people with disabilities are forced to dedicate unmeasurable energy and time” in order to secure basic accommodations. Crip temporalities reject the idea that speeding things up leads to distraction by emphasizing pacing and calibration. 


To demonstrate this idea, Alexander provided a beautiful close reading of Carolyn Lazard’s CRIP TIME (2018). This short film is a long, very still shot of hands “slowly and methodically” filling up containers with meds. Alexander explains that though you could easily watch it at 2x or 3x the speed, the film’s “call for affective embodiment” and the way in which the film invokes the viewer’s “discomfort and boredom” would “remain unanswered.” The different speeds at which one watches CRIP TIME can raise different types of questions: Are you speed-watching because you’re too anxious or bored to consider what life with chronic illness is like? Are you too triggered by a routine you know too well? As Alexander concludes, “CRIP TIME does not force us to watch it in its intended speed, but it reveals a mostly unconscious decision-making process.” 


Though I certainly sped-watched “Incels” in a “time-hacking” way (yes, I mismanaged my morning routine), after Alexander’s talk, I’m certainly considering the ways in which speeding through this 35-minute video about incels changes it. The narration, the music, the images, the text—how do these aesthetic changes make me ask different questions?


Neta Alexander’s book, Interface Frictions, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.