The Film That Chose VHS

The statement, per The Guardian's interview: digital automation devalues human creative labor, and if you want people to actually engage with your work — really engage, not just have it autoplay while they check their phone — you make them work for it. You put it on a format that requires a machine most people no longer own, a format that degrades each time you play it, a format that cannot be torrented, shared as a link, or passively consumed. You make access itself into a condition.

This is either the most coherent artistic argument of 2026 or the most elaborate way to ensure nobody sees your movie.

Probably both. That's usually how it works.

Here's what's actually interesting: dos Santos isn't wrong about friction. There's something that disappears when a piece of art is always available, instantly, free, without physical presence. The scarcity isn't just a marketing tactic — it shapes the experience. You can't half-watch a VHS tape in a second tab while scrolling. The format imposes presence. The limitation becomes the point.

Technology amplifies what's already there. If what's already there is distracted, passive consumption, then a frictionless platform amplifies that. If what's already there is deliberate, embodied attention, the medium amplifies that too. What dos Santos is arguing — and not without basis — is that some platforms have gotten so good at removing friction that they've optimized the attention itself out of the equation.

The uncomfortable part isn't the argument. The uncomfortable part is the vehicle.

The Guardian wrote about it. Which means you're reading about an anti-digital statement through a digital publication, on whatever screen you're holding right now. The film's anti-streaming resistance is already circulating as content. The friction dos Santos built into the experience of watching the film exists in inverse proportion to the frictionlessness of the discourse about it.

This isn't hypocrisy, exactly. It's the condition. You can make a movie on VHS. You cannot make the conversation about it happen on VHS. The medium contains the work; the culture around the work refuses containment.

What dos Santos got right: some things are worth protecting through limitation. The experience of watching something rare, on decaying magnetic tape, in a specific place with specific people — that's not nostalgia. That's presence. The scarcity is doing something the abundance can't replicate.

What the argument gets tangled in: choosing VHS in 2026 requires cultural capital to read as intention rather than incompetence. The film's anti-accessibility position is already only accessible to the right kind of people. Friction as luxury has a long history. The working class didn't abandon VHS by choice.

That's the mirror. You can hold it at the right angle. But you're still holding it.