How far we’ve come. On Saturday night, Alex Honnold was back, but this time the whole world was invited to watch as he climbed not a natural wonder but a man-made one—the Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world—as part of a special Netflix streaming event, “Skyscraper Live.” The name of the broadcast called to mind one of those nineteen-seventies disaster movies, like “The Towering Inferno” or “Airport,” in which a catastrophe befalls a built environment to harrowing effect. But if part of the pleasure of those films is watching their protagonists’ struggle to just barely escape whatever outlandish calamity has been thrust upon them, in Honnold’s case, the calamity, were it to come, would be self-inflicted. It would also be streamed globally, and in real time, to millions of Netflix subscribers.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter