So pitted…
Look, I’m gonna start this one off by saying this is all gonna sound like some real old-man-get-off-my-lawn shit. I’ll own up to it 100%, but know that I in no way fault or direct any sort of ire to those younger than me. I’m only in my early thirties, but I’ve definitely been described as a bitter old man going back to, well, as soon as I could talk. It’s a perception that I’ve both leaned into and had to learn to combat. Please know that any ire I have towards what I’m going to talk about is firmly directed at useless technologists whose seemingly only aim is to erode the average human attention span.
Lately, I’ve found it extremely hard to focus on anything for very long. This has been brewing over the past few years, especially in the wake of the pandy and increasing reliance on internet entertainment as traditional media has floundered and faded away. As discoverability of new content has increased, its need to be engaging or even fully engaged with has plummeted. There’s plenty of longform content being created now. One could spend seven hours watching and listening to someone dissect the narrative of Quake, dive deep into any number of podcasts on every conceivable topic at wildly varying levels of quality, or just watch the POV view of a train as it passes the entire length of Norway.
Most of this is noise. It’s meant to be put on in the background while you do something else. Work, study, scroll on your phone, smoke weed, disassociate, replay old conversations in your head, jack off, and so on. I’m guilty of this because I throw shit like this on in the background all the time. I am now unable to have a quiet moment to myself that couldn’t be classified as meditation. What’s worse, is now I spend tons of time finding the perfect piece of trash to fill my ears while I go about the rest of my day. Podcast not doing it for you? Try some AI-generated ambient soundscape slop. That ran its course? Oh well, move on to some video essay about the production of sesame seed buns. That too stimulating for you? Throw on a bike ride down the west side highway. At some point, I’ll find the perfect piece of trash, display it proudly on my other monitor that I’m not paying attention to, and get some work done.
Previous generations would argue that they should be allowed to wear headphones at work, as it was a problem for their superiors that their employees might be distracted at work. How fucking quaint. The sad thing is that those pointy-headed asshats may have actually been right for once.
However, there’s a complete other side of the content spectrum which I’ve yet to touch on in this post: TikToks, Reels, Shorts, and all of the associated other ways with which you can hook your brain up to the endless scrolling shortform video dopamine machine. When you’re done with not finishing 9 different pieces of longform trash, you can plop down on your couch and stare at a smaller rectangle watching shortform trash instead! Sometimes, that rectangle will even be conveniently subdivided for you so that you can watch gameplay of an endless runner in one corner, stitched together with Family Guy clips and rounded out with a livestream of a condor egg that will never hatch. This is convenient for you because you never have to focus on one thing at one time. When you’re done, you can swipe up and get a whole new video of a clip of a classic movie set to some EDM music so that the uploader can claim its transformative and make money for nothing.
It’s all. so. exhausting. It’s meant to be exhausting. It’s meant to break your brain so that you are anxious, self-absorbed and not able to have enough clarity to understand why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling. Don’t use that moment to self-actualize or draw an original conclusion, just consume more slop and don’t stop goddammit! Make sure you spend as much time and attention on my app as humanly possible. Don’t worry that you just noticed 2 hours have gone by and your leg is asleep. That’s not important. Swipe for a few more minutes and then you’ll go to bed. Actually it’s a few more hours. Actually it’s tomorrow. Actually, your whole life went by and now you’re hooked up to a dialysis machine and we cut your left foot off because you couldn’t be bothered to exercise. You had reels to watch and occasionally text your friends about. You had slop to consume that bloated your liver to the point that it grew tumors, and those tumors had tons of subscribers, and those subscribers started their own tumors, and then those tumors spread out and grew and now you don’t have eyebrows and you’re vomiting into a bucket that a nurse is holding next to your bed because you’re too weak to get up and go to the bathroom of your own volition.
Okay, perhaps a bit dramatic, but it’s meant to drive a point home. When I was younger, both in a pre-YouTube world and a world where YouTube was just getting going and used to post cringe, you didn’t have “content”. You had entertainment which you had to commit time and interest to. Books, movies, TV shows, video games, plays, newspapers, magazines, albums, and so on. Go look at the Google Trends for these topics, and you’ll see every single one of them on the decline over the past 20 years as social media has skyrocketed to the top of the interest charts. A person used to have to work hard on their interests. They would have to build up their tastes over time, through trial and error. A person would find out which pieces of media fit vibrated on their specific tone, and that became a part of who they were. Now, we all bow up to the slop trough and feast on whatever comes our way. We bathe in shit because shit is all around us, and washing it off is hard, and what do you want me to do? Find a decent meal to eat? Does that involve doing more than swiping up? Yes? Well fuck all that then, I’ve got my slop trough right here in my pocket, and that’s all I need.
Of course, we still had slop that would rot your brain back in teh day. Slutty dime store romance novels, trash-tier VHS pornography, endless talk radio, hair metal, reality tv shows, the QVC network, a river of multi-camera sitcoms with the same laugh track applied to the same tired old jokes, you get the idea. That’s the point though: there was only a river. Today, we have seven oceans of stuff to wade through, and it’s all available in a microsecond.
No, I haven’t forgotten the namesake of this post, and I’m getting to that. When I was a kid, about the most braindead thing you could do was channel surf. You’d plop down on the couch and turn on your TV, which sprung to life instantaneously after making a characteristic “honk” sound as the phosphor glow lit up your living room. Then, you’d sit there, thumb on the channel up button, hitting it quickly until you found something you wanted to watch. My sister used to get pissed at me because I would go extraordinarily fast. One COULD go extraordinarily fast at that time. You only had 80 or so channels to work with, and they flipped instantaneously. If you had basic cable that came in over coax, it was like flipping a light switch. Eventually, you would land on something you wanted to watch, and then you sat there and watched it. Maybe, MAYBE the phone rang. You didn’t get 40 texts and a bunch of emails and a bunch of social media notifications and an alert that somebody was at your front door. It was a quick way to find something to watch. Brainless as the task of channel surfing was, there was a end goal in mind.
Eventually, it started taking longer to switch channels as we migrated away from analog television signals and introduced cable boxes with digital signal processing into the mix. Suddenly, instead of channel 27 and channel 28, you had a bunch of subdivisions in-between. 27.1 and 27.4 and 27.6.12, and so on. Not only that, it started taking ten fucking seconds to switch between them. Eventually, we all got the Guide button, which also loaded slowly and just told you in text form what was on. You couldn’t acutally see or hear it, you just had to imagine what Boogie Nights on channel 289 might be.
As internet speeds got faster, user experiences improved, and more and more video was made available in this new medium, it’s easy to see why we gravitated towards it. It’s taken some time, but internet video has completely dominated the attention space of modern society, and collectively destroyed people’s ability to sit and be as they are entertained. There must be no fewer than three things entertaining them at any given time, and they must be having side coversations while they do it. If they don’t, then they won’t be caught up on the meta, and they’ll think the world is passing them by.
I hate this mindset, and this inability to sit and be. I hate it for myself as I see it in myself, and I hate it for others. I’m trying not to let it make me resent them, as I can’t change anyone’s behavior but my own, but it gets more and more challenging as our progression down the ever-widening slop trough continues. Lately, I’ve taken it into my own hands to severly limit (and in some cases completely stop), my engagement with this refuse that I refuse to participate in. I’ve replaced it with reading, writing, and engaging with one piece of media at a time with my phone face down or in another room. I’ll be honest, it has been awkward, and at times challenging, but undoing years of driving a metaphorical icepick through my frontal lobe should feel awkward and at times challenging.
I miss channel surfing. I miss riding the wave until its natural conclusion, and then living in that moment, reflecting on what I had just seen, until the next wave inevitably came along. I’m trying to find my way out of the barrel, rather than being endlessly trapped inside it, awash in noise, never to find my way out. In other words: pitted.
So pitted…