The Perfect Neighbor: Netflix’s documentary has become a monster hit. Uh

For anyone who grew up in a time when accessing a movie or an album or a book required some kind of effort, the age of instant digital access can seem like a minor miracle—at least, when you stop to think about it, which the algorithmic ecosystem is increasingly designed to discourage. In Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist , a former Spotify editor says that one of the company’s goals is “trying to reduce friction and cognitive work” involved in picking one of the streaming giant’s more than 100 million songs, a goal that, Pelly writes, has produced “a deluge of frictionless music: an ease of use that, in turn, facilitated easy listening.” You don’t have to think about what you’re listening to, even while you’re listening to it. It’