I’m a pro wrestling fan because one Saturday morning as a kid, I flipped channels and came across Bret “The Hitman” Hart for the first time.
The Strokes are my favorite band ever. My initial exposure to them was putting on MTV2 in fall 2001 to see their “Last Nite” video for the first time.
I’ve lost track of how many shows, movies, or events that I became obsessed with just because I happened to be bored and was flipping channels.
The great irony is how much I used to hate flipping channels. This was an admission there was nothing on, I had nothing better to do, and I needed to kill time.
Today, no one flips channels because we can’t.
Streamers lock you into a world where you watch what you want to watch. Cable and YouTube tv tells you what’s on at all times. Youtube and social media sites like TikTok guide your experiences through algorithms. We’re either watching exactly what we want to watch, or something technology has decided we’ll like for us.
The joy of being exposed to something unexpectedly awesome has been almost completely removed from our lives.
Those hours spent on the couch flipping channels have been replaced by staring at a smartphone, mindlessly scrolling through social media, in desperate search of something to occupy our minds. Nothing lasts.
That’s the beauty of channel flipping now long gone – the possibility, at any moment, you’d land on something incredible you never knew existed.
I’ve started a new site for pro wrestling, and my first two interviews with pro wrestlers featured a moment where they explained how they unexpectedly came across pro wrestling and fell in love with it.
How do we find new hobbies or interests these days? The myth of a “casual fan” in pro wrestling has ignited countless endless stupid debates because creating new fans in the 1990s meant putting on a show so good that someone flipping channels would stop.
In 2026, that avenue is gone. No matter how good your show is, people need to seek you out, with intention.
Just this past week, a report came out that most people on Netflix are giving up on shows after 1 season. It makes sense. These streamers keep pumping out content to fill up artificial content buckets, without any thought into building connections between an audience and a show. There’s a vapidness that encompasses everything in entertainment that makes it feel like nothing matters.
When people talk about their “echo chambers” online, I always revert back to the notion of flipping channels. There was a time when we were also exposed to so much more by the nature of how entertainment was fed to us. We had 57 channels and nothing was on, so we flipped.
In 2026, people put on the television or log into their favorite streamer with a purpose. I want to watch this show. I want to watch this game. And it locks us in.
Unfortunately, that’s been the plan of media consolidation. They want our attention, and they don’t want to share. They want me to log into Peacock or HBO Max, and never leave. It costs more than cable did, with far less benefits, and the removal of physical media.
When I think about the enshittification of our society, I keep coming back to channel flipping. We used to be people who were eager to see what’s out there, with the never-ending potential to be exposed to something new or exciting.
We’re now too stuck in our content siloes. YouTube knows I like college football and pro wrestling, and they’re going to keep serving me those videos until I stop clicking on them. I probably won’t, and I’ll never leave the loop.
Maybe it’s time to leave the algorithms behind, once and for all.
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