The goal of this article is to theorize what I shall refer to as the Stream in its relation to streaming digital media platform technologies. In particular, it is interested in speculating on said platforms’ psychoemotional affectivity in consumers. By 'Stream', I am referring to the confluence of various tributaries of data in digital late capitalism. These include production, dissemination, storage, access, and consumption. By way of extension and continuity, I consider the contemporary digital Stream as a reach – as in reach-of-a-stream in geographic parlance – of previous manifestations of the Stream in human history: the great Ptolemaic/Alexandrine bibliotechnical ages, or the emergence of the then new Informational Commons precipitated by the invention of the printing press, for example. In digital late capital, the Stream has become a fluid and ubiquitous determinant of user-viewers' understanding of past(s), present(s), and possible future(s). Conveyors of the contemporary Informational Commons like digital media streaming platforms are robust tributaries of a more general digital Stream. Using Netflix as a Urexample of one of the most powerful current digital media streaming platforms, this article will develop a sketch of the indexical tension between the psychoemotional costs of data production, storage, and consumption
inextricable from contemporary streaming and digital life sublimated within the spectacle of the Stream itself.