After a self-inflicted wound led to Twitter/X stepping on my personal account, I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.
I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing.
Now I think differently. After spending months talking to people in tech, I realize the problem is broader and more unnerving. On top of the political chicanery, sites like Twitter and TikTok don’t want you leaving. They want you scrolling endlessly, so you’ll see ads, ads, and more ads. The scariest speech I heard came from a tech developer describing how TikTok reduced the online experience to a binary mental state: you’re either watching or deciding, Next. That’s it: your brain is just a switch. Forget following links or connecting with other users. Four seconds of cat attacking vet, next, five ticks on Taylor Ferber’s boobs, next, fifteen on the guy who called two Chinese restaurants at once and held the phones up to each other, next, etc.
Generations ago it wasn’t uncommon for educated people to memorize chunks of The Iliad, building up their minds by forcing them to do all the rewarding work associated with real reading: assembling images, keeping track of plot and character structure, juggling themes and challenging ideas even as you carried the story along. Then came mass media. Newspapers shortened attention span, movies arrived and did visual assembly for you, TV mastered mental junk food, MTV replaced story with montages of interesting nonsensical images, then finally the Internet came and made it possible to endlessly follow your own random impulses instead of anyone else’s schedule or plot.
I’m not a believer in “eat your vegetables” media. People who want to reform the press often feel the solution involves convincing people that [they] just should read 6,000-word ProPublica investigations about farm prices instead of visiting porn sites or watching awesome YouTube compilations of crane crashes. It can’t work. The only way is to compete with spirit: make articles interesting or funny enough that audiences will swallow the “important” parts, although even that’s the wrong motive. Rolling Stone taught me that the lad-mag geniuses that company brought in in the nineties, who were convinced Americans wouldn’t read anything longer than 400 words in big type, were wrong. In fact, if you treat people like grownups, they tend to like a challenge, especially if the writer conveys his or her own excitement at discovery. The world is a great and hilarious mystery and if you don’t have confidence you can make the story of it fun, you shouldn’t be in media. But there is one problem.
Inventions like TikTok, which I’m on record saying shouldn’t be banned, are designed to create mentally helpless users, like H addicts. If you stand there scrolling and thinking Next! enough, your head will sooner or later be fully hollowed out. You’ll lose the ability to remember, focus, and decide for yourself. There’s a political benefit in this for leaders, but more importantly there’s a huge commercial boon. The mental jellyfish is more susceptible to advertising (which of course allows firms to charge more) and will show less and less will over time to walk out of the Internet’s various brain-eating chambers.
A cross of Jimmy Page and Akira Kurosawa probably couldn’t invent long-form content to lure away the boobs-and-cat-video addicts these sites are making. The loss of capacity for memory or real experience is what makes people susceptible to the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, who seem really to think nothing good or interesting happened until last week. The profound negativity of these WEF-style technocrats about all human experience until now reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose dystopian characters feared books because “They show the pores of the face of life”.
