“Only for a redeemed mankind,” Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “has its past become citable in all its moments” (254). Thanks to YouTube, we now know that Benjamin was wrong. All culture is available at all times, the algorithm magically knowing exactly what you feel like watching at exactly the right moment. Yet humanity is, by all accounts, quite far from redemption, trapped in what Anna Kornbluh, in Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, calls the “omnicrisis”: “murdered earth, failed states . . . razed institutions” and the psychological and social distress attendant upon this lack of futurity (17, 15). The world may be on fire, but the fiddles are everywhere. Living, as we do, in the slipstream of just-in-time capitalism, everything is one click away. ATMs have “fast cash” buttons, food delivery services provide real-time updates for your burritos, while buffering puts intolerable seconds between...

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