Matt Damon has a new film out, a $100m cop thriller co-starring Ben Affleck called The Rip. It is currently the most watched film on Netflix, because it is a Netflix movie. So how is Damon choosing to promote his new Netflix movie? By kind of laying into Netflix.

During an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, Damon went to great lengths to describe the differences between going to see a film theatrically and watching it on television. Explaining his experience of watching One Battle After Another in an Imax screening, Damon said: “I always say it’s more like going to church – you show up at an appointed time. It doesn’t wait for you.”

Making something that you know will be primarily watched on Netflix, on the other hand, means resigning yourself to a lack of concentration. Maybe the lights are on. Maybe you’re watching it in chunks. Maybe your kids won’t shut up. Damon told Rogan that the streamer asks film-makers to dumb things down a little, adding a big action set piece early on to keep viewers interested, and advising them that: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” Describing this, Damon added: “It’s going to really start to infringe on how we’re telling these stories.”

Now, there are three ways to take this. The first is: well, duh. If you’ve ever watched anything on Netflix, you’ll know that what Damon said is completely true. If the streaming era of film-making has a signature tell, it’s that things quite often have to be slowed down and explained to us over and over again like we’re a bunch of children.

It isn’t a film, but the last season of Stranger Things was a perfect demonstration of that. In fact, I’m convinced that its episodes were so long because, before anything actually happened on the show, some characters had to slowly explain exactly what they were about to do. This arguably reached its nadir in a scene where someone literally used some props to carefully reiterate the plot so far, which is the storytelling equivalent of watching a pub bore demonstrate the offside rule with beermats.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course – typically if Netflix thinks it’s got a sniff of an Oscar, maybe with a Frankenstein or a Train Dreams, then directors are usually allowed to be as oblique as they want. But aside from that we should all sit down, shut up and wait to be spoonfed.

The second takeaway is that maybe, just maybe, Netflix knows what it’s talking about. Obviously it’s very depressing to think that the owner-elect of Warner Bros thinks that anyone who watches anything is a distracted, attentionless idiot. Had this always been the case, then there is an enormous possibility that 2001: A Space Odyssey would have had a wacky sidekick who kept asking David Bowman what all the whizzy colours mean.

However, Netflix is also in possession of a colossal amount of granular viewing data. It knows what we watch, why we watch it and how long we watch it for. And this is plain, concrete data that doesn’t deign to flatter us with highbrow assumptions. It has looked into its crystal ball and seen that we’re all just a bunch of slack-jawed apes who watch things with one hand gripping our phones and the other shoved down the front of our trousers. In other words, if Netflix says that we need to have the plot explained to us over and over again, it’s because it has run the numbers and knows that we do.

But obviously we shouldn’t ignore the third takeaway here, which is that Damon is a few months away from the biggest hit of his entire career. As the star of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Damon knows that he’s about to feature in a huge, theatrical-first spectacular that will probably play with the concept of time and (whisper it) in all likelihood be quite hard to follow at times. And he knows that it’s going to make a billion dollars, which gives him quite a strong position to crap on Netflix.

That said, if Netflix had made The Odyssey then Damon would have kept halting the action to explain why so many characters have such similar names. And it probably would have made two billion dollars, because this is what we deserve.