Temporary verticality

I always love Matt Webb’s gonzo proposals, but/and his Campaign for Ver­tical Television is misguided. Note that I under­stand it’s entirely playful — so is my coun­ter­ar­gu­ment here.

He writes:

The imper­a­tive here is that ver­tical video is get­ting locked in today, and a lot of it is super poisonous.

Story mode is so often engage­ment farming, atten­tion mining cap­i­talist slop. [ … ]

The antidote? Good old fash­ioned con­tent from good old fashion pro­gram makers.

But: ver­tical.

But phones won’t be with us forever. I don’t think they’re going to be with us another twenty years. I mean: they won’t go away. The phone, or mini-tablet, or what­ever it is, will remain available, a known device morphology. But images of public space in which every person is hyp­no­tized by a phone will seem as antique and strange as images do today of smoke-filled rooms, or trains full of men wearing hats. Bet on it!

Widescreen cinema behind us, widescreen cinema ahead. With patience we’ll suffer the ver­tical parenthesis.