Matt Damon just told Joe Rogan that Netflix wants plot points repeated “three or four times in the dialogue” because viewers are on their phones while watching. The internet, predictably, lost its mind. “Why didn’t The Rip go to theaters?!” people wailed on Twitter, as if they’d personally been denied a sacred experience.
Here’s the thing: they weren’t going to go anyway.
I watched The Rip the day it dropped. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon reuniting for a Miami cop thriller directed by Joe Carnahan? I didn’t need a trailer. As an elder millennial, I fulfill my generational obligation to be in love with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Do you hear me? IN. LOVE.
I suffered through the two hours of ICK that was The Talented Mr. Ripley, I can sit through a dumb dirty cop movie on Netflix.
But as it turned out, I loved it. A tight, propulsive crime movie where everybody’s lying and nobody trusts anybody and the whole thing moves like it respects your time. A perfect modern thriller.
Would I have seen it in theaters? Absolutely not.
Not because I don’t love movies. I do. But we all know what going to the movies actually means in 2026: $16 tickets, $20 in concessions, an hour of ads and trailers before the film even starts, someone’s kid kicking my seat, someone else checking their phone every three minutes, and the constant awareness that I’m trapped for three hours with strangers who may or may not know how to behave in public.
Who has time for that? Not me. Not most people. The data confirms what we already know from living in the world. In 2019, 39% of American adults went to the movies at least once a month. By 2025, that number had collapsed to 17%. Two-thirds of the people who stopped going cite cost as the primary reason. Ticket sales haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Theater chains are filing for bankruptcy. Five thousand seven hundred screens have gone dark.
I’m not crowing about that; AMC is headquartered in Kansas City. I want them to thrive. Plus some of my greatest memories as a kid and teen were in movie theaters. Even as a young adult, the base theater in Okinawa, Japan vibrated with the excitement of nerdy Marines packed in like sardines when the first X-Men movie came out. It was fucking electric. Maybe you experienced something similar with Avengers Endgame.
But those kinds of experiences became rarer and rarer until they all but disappeared. And with the new reality, people made a choice. And they keep making it every weekend when they scroll Netflix instead of checking showtimes.
Damon’s revelation about Netflix’s storytelling preferences—front-load the action, repeat the plot points, assume distraction—has been treated as some kind of scandal. A corruption of the art form. Evidence that streaming is ruining cinema.
But Affleck pushed back on this in the same interview. He pointed out that Adolescence, the Netflix series that just swept the Golden Globes, didn’t do any of that. Long takes of the backs of people’s heads. Silence. Darkness. And it was a massive hit.
His point: you don’t have to dumb it down. But you do have to acknowledge your audience in terms of what they’re willing to give you.
He’s a creator. That’s his job. And if you’re also a creator, it’s your job too.
The Audience for Books is Changing Too
The literary establishment is having the same reckoning and handling it just as badly.
For years, traditional publishing has operated on a set of unspoken assumptions: novels should be 80,000-100,000 words. They should have three acts, internal monologue, scene-setting description, backstory delivered through memory or flashback. They should feel like investments—substantial objects that signal their importance through heft.
Meanwhile, the most popular creators in “reader spaces” are skimming books, complaining there’s “too many words” in them, focusing on the aesthetics of sprayed edges and book covers, and counting the required tropes in a novel instead of patiently waiting for subtle themes to come together across 500 pages.
The most prolific readers are consuming content on phones. In fragments. Between other things. They’re reading fanfiction that updates in 2,000-word chapters. They’re devouring web serials. They’re finishing books in a weekend because the book let them. It didn’t pad itself out to hit an arbitrary word count that makes it look serious on a shelf.
The Twitter Crush is 40,000 words. About half the length of a traditional thriller. It’s entirely epistolary—text messages, blog posts, Medium articles, podcast transcripts, YouTube video breakdowns. No backstory dumps. No internal monologue. No descriptions of characters getting from one place to another.
As in life, you have to judge the characters by what they say and do, not by convenient access to their inner thoughts.
Readers have told me they finished it in a day. In a weekend. In one sitting. Not because it’s slight, but because every page is doing something. They never felt the need to skim.
I never bothered querying traditional publishers with The Twitter Crush.
Not because I was afraid of rejection—I’ve been in this industry long enough to have a thick skin. But because I knew exactly how that conversation would go.
First problem: the length. Forty thousand words doesn’t fit the production model. It doesn’t look right on a shelf. It signals “novella,” which signals “not serious,” which signals “we don’t know how to market this.”
Second problem: Jackson.
Jackson is the sympathetic protagonist of The Twitter Crush. He’s also a guy who practices red pill ideology in his dating life. He’s not a villain or a cautionary tale. He’s a man trying to navigate a confusing landscape with an imperfect framework, and the book takes him seriously rather than punishing him for his wrongthink.
Traditional publishing in 2026 would never let that through the door. Not because readers don’t want it—they demonstrably do—but because the gatekeepers have decided certain perspectives are too dangerous to platform.
So I published the book myself, in the format that made sense for the story and the audience, at the length that respected both.
You Can Complain About Your Audience or Meet Them Where They Are
The nostalgia for the old systems is understandable. Those systems conferred legitimacy and created all our shared cultural moments. They gave us a sense that someone, somewhere, was curating quality on our behalf.
But the uncomfortable truth is that most of the people mourning those systems stopped participating in them years ago.
The same person tweeting “why didn’t The Rip go to theaters?!” hasn’t been to a theater since Top Gun: Maverick. The same person lamenting the death of literary fiction buys maybe two books a year and reads neither of them. The nostalgia is for an idea of themselves as cultured consumers, not for actual consumption patterns.
The market moved. The audience moved. The only people who haven’t moved are the gatekeepers, who keep insisting that audiences will come back to them if they just hold the line a little longer.
They won’t. The contract has changed. If you want an audience to invest in your work, here’s what you, creator, need to deliver:
Respect the audience’s time.
Deliver value immediately and continuously.
Meet them where they are: on their phones, in their living rooms, in the fragments of attention they’re willing to give you. Don’t ask them to come to you.
Don’t punish them for having options.
Don’t assume they owe you anything just because you made something.
The Rip does this. It’s a movie that knows you might be half-watching, so it stays relentlessly engaging. It doesn’t waste your evening with twenty minutes of setup before anything happens. It trusts you to follow along without hand-holding, but it also doesn’t punish you for glancing at your phone.
The Twitter Crush does this. It’s a book built for how people actually read in 2026—in snatches, on screens, in formats that mirror the digital communication that structures our lives. It tells a complete, propulsive story without a single wasted page.
Neither work is dumbed down. Both are simply aware of the competition for attention, aware of the conditions under which they’ll be consumed, aware that the audience doesn’t owe them reverence just for existing.
The critics of this shift always frame it as a loss. We’ve lost depth. We’ve lost patience. We’ve lost the ability to sit with difficult art.
I don’t buy it.
What we’ve lost is the captive audience. The audience that had no choice but to sit through your self-indulgent pacing because there was nothing else on. The audience that bought your book because the bookstore only had twelve options and yours had the nicest cover.
That audience is gone. In its place is an audience with infinite options, instant access, and zero patience for being taken for granted.
You can mourn that, or you can rise to meet it.
You can also buy the Twitter Crush NOW in ebook, paperback, or hardback.
Great column, especially the part about books. I love your take on the changing habits and attitudes of the audience and how authors must change the way they write if they expect to attract readers. There is no reason at all why we cannot adapt - the dinosaur trad pubs be damned.
You have a talent for reading the zeitgeist and responding accordingly. You've been doing it awhile, I can tell.
Love the creator/audience bullet points. I hope more creators suck it up and take them to heart. Edwin Schlossberg’s prescient 1998 book, “Interactive Excellence: Defining and Developing New Standards for the Twenty-first Century,” talks about meeting the audience where they are, but with skilled writing, production, etc., audiences can be elevated to have greater expectations of the medium, with the result that "great art is what challenges us to see ourselves and each other more clearly" and stresses there should be interaction to allow the audience to become part of a conversation, which was pre-social media at the time. So, the hook still reigns supreme to get the audience interested, then spoon feed unexpected devices, plot surprises, etc.; but the starting point is always knowing the audience and where you'd like to lead them. What might appear to be a creative manipulative sell-out, is really, as you say, adapting to the times and using your creativity to still be you, telling the story you want to tell, while obtaining a more enlightened audience—one you have elevated, through a few hours of escapism to a better understanding of humanity, and that's a win-win-win for the arts, the audience and the creator.