I've written a lot about disconnected information (driven by Twitter/X/FB feeds) and how the agglomeration of factoids that don't cohere into deep knowledge leads to a fragmented, jumpy, weakly focused mind. This is information stuffed into your brain primarily via text and images. But we've got much more potent (multisensory) media in short-form video. The combination of sight ⊕ sound, visual ⊕ auditory has a multiplicative effect on attention and is more deleterious than either alone (auditory algorithmic feeds don't really exist... imagine if X offered a podcast of its infinite scroll... Spaces/Clubhouse are the closest, and the chaos those verbal Twitter commenters create is often too much to follow). The combined effect with A+V is more profound because attention is fully hijacked. We are beholden to our digital firehose pumping quick, engrossing tidbits into the gyri and sulci of our brains. We cannot pause to reflect or critically appraise what we see... the content moves too quickly from beat to beat for our slower, more rational minds. Do you wonder why the successful videos all follow the same formula? Do you wonder why the next video plays instantly? Do you feel the vortex after a few minutes of TikTok/Reels vs. even Twitter/FB? Infinite scroll is corrosive enough to focus, but short-form video is absolute annihilation.

Rapidly changing images, scripted voice-overs or hyperfast beats, superimposed visual "words," and background music synergize to control your mind. You think you're learning a new dance, learning about the Ukraine conflict, or watching a workout to try... but really, this is content and we ignore the process of receiving it. Fundamentally, the medium is the message (not the content). And the medium (short-form video) is saying: do not actually think. Just think you are thinking. Do not process this information or learn (that would require wresting attention off the platform --> the greatest sin to attention platforms) and integrating the newly acquired "knowledge" into your broader understanding (consolidating the ideas and making them your own). The short-form video algorithms very rarely show content consecutively that relates to the last video. The topics are "of interest" but sequentially disconnected, maximally scrambling to your mind. This isn't nefarious engineering; it was stumbled upon by companies experimenting to maximize time on platform. Being subtly disorienting is a quirk of human minds; fragmentation of focus becomes a byproduct that makes us more docile and craving more content.

It is similar to cigarettes: people start smoking because of the positive burst of focus/clarity on that first hit of nicotine. People keep smoking because they become addicted to nicotine, and withdrawal causes discomfort, irritability, and mental scattering. Nicotine addiction changes the brain's baseline physiology, and we experience that directly when we try to stop. Yes, things will get back to (mostly) normal with time, but those nicotinic pathways have been etched. Cigarette addiction wasn't explicitly engineered; it was a fortunate business by-product. What stock has the highest total return over the past 100 years? Altria Group, previously Philip Morris, up 265 MILLION percent since 1915. The ~25x increase in lung cancers (smokers vs. non-smokers) is a downstream effect that first cigarette doesn't fully portend. That first TikTok trending dance video watched also seems mostly innocuous, but (only moderately hyperbolically) it could lead to the death of deep thought. It could lead to modern societies being incapable of producing great works of art or building world-changing companies. You don't smoke in order to become addicted to nicotine or for that addiction to nicotine to lead to lung cancer. You smoke because, at least at first, it feels good and is fun.

Short-form video is fun too. You can see some cool stuff, stay up on the latest trends, or superficially learn about a wide variety of topics. But just like nicotine changes your brain's baseline physiology, short-form content potently changes your brain's baseline operation. It reduces attention span; it trains your mind to hop from one disconnected topic to another, to constantly be jumping to different novel stimuli, to never fully process or consolidate any information into knowledge. And the downstream 20-year consequences of this superficializing and shallowing cannot be good. Granted, we don't fully know what they will be. TikTok has been available in the US since 2018. What happens when a generation or two have trained their brains to only focus on ultra-processed short-form video length ideas? Can real work ever get done? Can real thought ever be done? No. No one video causes thought-rot. It's about the habitual strengthening of particular circuits in our brain. It's about priming our minds to respond to rapidly shifting, optimized stimuli, to feel physical discomfort sitting still, watching (or, gasp, reading something) for hours at a time that coheres into a deep, meaningful whole, rather than our minds being formed into a shallow, meaningless hole. We dump in a nonstop stream of fragmented content; the interstices of our minds get glutted with random, meaningless snippets, and our capacity to think creatively and originally perishes. We will look back after 20 years of short-form and see only a hollowed-out shell on our shoulders, jammed with trivia but incapable of synthesis.