Day 214: The binge mechanism

01:03 and home from work. Got a few hours writing in before my shift, but now I’m left with a lot of disjointed notes, a broad subject to which I want to do justice, and a brain coming apart at the seams. Apologies how rough this will be.

So yesterday I was thinking about the world of blogging a decade ago, and how we went online back then, the way we consumed information on the Internet. How much this has changed. No one blogs anymore. For a time people used Tumblr, but that too is dead now. Medium is a nice idea, popular among the left-leaning, Atlantic-reading intelligentsia, but without a wide enough reach.

The noise, today, is all on Youtube. The frenzy of web-based effort for this generation’s thinkers and creators is channeled through the big red app.

Is this such a bad thing? For me, sure, because I don’t want to get a stylist and create a look for myself and buy a camera and lighting equipment and convert my bedroom into a minimalist studio and write scripts and rehearse them and film and edit and upload them. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an MTV presenter; I wanted to be Kieron Gillen.

But I think it’s a bad thing for all of us as well, for our collective intellectual health - both because writing itself serves a different purpose to video content, one that we desperately need, and because the structure of YouTube, as with the structure of Facebook and Instagram, inherently discourages healthy consumption of informed ideas.

But how did we get here? Why has the world changed?

Two-fold. Firstly the apps have changed with the times, and the ones that remained easy to use were the ones that survived. Everyone is now online on their phones rather than their PCs (over 95% of the traffic to my blog comes from Facebook mobile rather than the desktop site).

It’s fiddly to open multiple tabs on your phone, to switch between them. You don’t have a large screen on which numerous different windows are open. You can’t have a long page of text visible at once.

Thus apps have evolved to present us with small chunks of information - a single image on Instagram that fills the screen, the Facebook Feed that gives you a meme, then a pet video, then an inspirational quote, then a click-bait news article, then an advert, one after the other after the other. And YouTube, which to be honest still isn’t ideal for a phone, but will play a video in fullscreen, then autoplay something similar, and on, for the rest of your life.

Phones are not comfortable to use. They don’t hold themselves up, in place. You have to hunch over them, grapple them up in front of your face. And mostly you’re not doing this for two hours in an office chair in your study after work, you’re doing it for five minutes on the bus, two minutes on your fag break, ten seconds while waiting for your friend to return from the loo.

So partly it’s necessity. Something small and discrete and able to be consumed all at once is more likely to be clicked on by a phone user than something long and thorny that links to many different places and points continually outside of itself. Which is precisely what made blogging such a strong tool for debate. Thus apps have evolved to favour pictures and Vine-like videos, and to disfavour longform writing.

But partly, as well, it is that the apps themselves are predatory, hungry, and benefit financially from their users viewing rubbish rather than worthwhile content.

Put simply, apps today offer us a surplus buffet of snacks that our animal brains instinctively snatch for, rather than the healthier meals that our human brains need. This is in the content curated on the apps, but also in the very structures built into using the apps - the little dings of likes, comments, shares, each a tiny dopamine buzz tricking our deep neural mechanisms into thinking we deserve a reward for doing something that has kept us alive. “I got a like, I’m popular, I will survive another day,” your lizard brain purrs. And it likes that feeling, so it opens the app again, and again, and again, going back for more of that sweet reward.

And the content of the Feeds works in the same way. Of course you can find healthy vegetables on the apps - Ted talks (though even they are short and sexy, pre-cut vegetables sprinkled with sweet sauce), investigations by The Guardian, video-series teaching you how to speak Spanish, links to my blog (cheesy-grinning-emoji) - but surrounding these you will find hundreds of cute cat videos (which by the way never show the cat old and incontinent and the owner cleaning up diarrhea for the fifth time that day and finally deciding it is time the poor creature, their loved companion, was put to death, and the sobbing in the car down to the vets, and more diarrhea in the basket, and an injection, and a cold biting heartache tearing your world in two - cute cat videos are bullshit, I’m saying, they’re saccharine, sugar-coated, lying nonsense - the animals being gorgeous is what you get from your bond with them and your agreement to spend a life with them, to see them through all the awful times, to truly know them, and love them, in all aspects - it shouldn’t be something you decoct from the surrounding pain and bottle and sell online as video clips to give people a quick hit of unearned pleasure. Face fucking life, I’m saying, stop hiding in a social media realm of forced cheer. Though I’m one to talk).

But yes, this is the content on our phones, the information we choose to consume all day every day. Cute cat videos. Memes, in-jokes continuously re-presenting the icons of our culture, designed to arouse a “heh”, and then to be forgotten. Inspirational, misattributed quotes. Videos of people playing videogames you yourself don’t have the energy to play. Not informed critique of games, just dumb people playing, saying things like “Ooh I don’t know why but I’m really enjoying this game right now, it’s, like, really cool, if you think it’s cool too then remember to like, comment and subscribe, by the way immigrants aren’t really people.”

I’ll come back to that.

But my point is that our apps are filled with junk food. And we can’t help but snack.

Our brains have a binging mechanic built into them. When our ancestors stumbled across a fresh kill in the wild, a grove of mango trees, it was important for them to want to chow down and gobble everything up, because who knew when the next good meal would come along? In the wild this binging had natural checks, in that food is generally scarce, there don’t exist unlimited supplies, and physical food physically fills us up - once we eat enough our stomachs become stuffed and our appetites are sated.

Fail compilation videos on YouTube, on the other hand, can never fill us up. There’s always room for one more. And the supply is endless. The Feed falls down and down and down.

So - sorry, I am so repugnantly tired right now, and my eyes are going. Apps provide junk food buffets that flick us into binge mode, and we stay there, rapaciously guzzling, grabbing at whatever we can find, while never filling up, becoming more and more unhappy, more and more dazed, brains melting out of ears, hooked into some mainline, unable to unplug, finger jerking forever on. And for the apps, that is exactly where they want us to be. Because the longer we stay in that zone, the more adverts we can have pumped at us, and the more advertising money the apps can make. It’s simple.

So there’s all that, which certainly existed a decade ago, but is so much worse now.

OK. Last bit. Drrrrr. Come on brain. About YouTubers themselves, how video production for an app that is structured in the way I just laid out encourages its creators to be a certain way.

In the days of blogging you had something you wanted to say and you wrote it down, and made it as strong and compelling an argument as you could, and you posted it up. And people read it, thought about what you’d said, and responded.

That can happen on YouTube. But video production is so time and energy consuming, it’s hard to have much left for thinking through what you actually want to say. And where a decade ago people would happily sit at their desk reading for an hour, today you’re lucky if someone will watch your video for longer than a few minutes. Again, not an incentive for informed, intellectual content.

And then you have YouTube’s algorithm that suggests new videos. The app is unwieldy, as I said, on mobile, and searching out worthwhile videos is a pain. Mostly you’re just watching in fullscreen, and relying on the algorithm to fill that tiny list of what to watch next. And the way that algorithm works means creators are incentivised to post lots of regular - and thus less considered - videos, rather than fewer, more thoughtful ones. Some creators turn away from this, accept that they’ll have an order of magnitude fewer followers, but that they’ll be proud of what they put out. But most simply upload mindless drivel continuously, cleverly packaged to appear professional, with clickbaity thumbnails and descriptions, and reap the rewards.

I could do a whole article on this. But look at Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, one of the most popular creators on YouTube, as an example. He posts all the time, it’s all slick, he’s got a colour palette, a theme, a vibe, he’s always on-brand, he does everything necessary to stay at the top of his game. But what’s he actually saying? Bugger all. Simple reviews of aspirational products, this phone is good, this phone is good, these headphones are good, this phone is good. A few positives, a few negatives, a summary. It’s got all the beats of a review, and none of the thought. Like the way all the food in our supermarkets is ultra processed. Loaves of bread look like bread, we think of them as bread, but they’re full of additives and high-speed mixers, relaxants, tighteners.

And MKBHD is one of the better ones. These kids are all encouraged to put up rushed content, to throw themselves ever forwards saying any old shit, but looking good while saying it.

It’s a system in which ideas have been replaced by ego. And into this sorry landscape, without the white blood cells of critical thought, the tumours of anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and fascism have taken root, and, carried through the veins of unwitting creators, metastasised throughout the body.

I started yesterday talking about gaming, which is the scene I know the best, and I’ll finish tonight with it. In the (huge) corner of YouTube dedicated to videogames, there’s very little room for reasoned debate. The people who care, Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit, Matt Lees, Chris Bratt, put out videos every few months, and despite being industry veterans and putting forward the wisest, most perspicacious ideas, they have relatively few subscribers. The creators with all the followers are the ones blabbering about nothing over footage of them arsing around in Fortnite. Publishers see these follower numbers, and lavish the creators with gifts, send them advance copies of their new games, and the creators dutifully play the games, talk about how much fun they’re having, never consider that they’ve become not critics but cheap advertisers for the products they should be reviewing.

Or maybe they know, and don’t care. Because they’re not journalists, they’re just kids having fun, and they’re getting insanely rich while doing it. They become multi-millionaires, the companies get their games seen by players, and the audience get fun little videos to watch while lounging in bed. Everyone wins.

Except the environment gets filled with junk food, and the landscape pushes the audience towards the junk food, and it becomes way harder for kids to discern the difference between the McDonald’s hamburgers and the joints of beef. And the types of videos propagating fascist views, repulsive views, the kinds of things that would exist in little contained bubbles in the blogosphere, end up spreading into the mainstream.

I would posit - and holy shit it is late - but I would posit that the alt-right on Youtube would get nowhere if they were writing essays. But soundbyte videos, watched by kids with lessened critical abilities, with minds fatigued by mental junk food, catch like wildfire.

OK. I have to stop here. Writing is, I think, the antidote to this evil. Writing does not engage the binge mechanism. Writing must be digested slowly, while paying close attention to every mouthful you eat. Writing improves memory and concentration. It lowers anxiety and stress. It forms and strengthens connections in the brain, engages the imagination, decreases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Scrolling social media and snacking on YouTube in about every regard does the exact opposite of this.

So writing is the antidote. But how do we deliver the dose? How do we get it round the system? How do we bring people back from the edge. After years with endless buffets of McDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell, Baskin Robbins, how do you plonk a cauliflower down in front of someone and expect them to eat it?

I don’t know. But I want to find out.

...... 

Music today is We Come from the Same Place, by Allo Darlin', as suggested by a lovely reader. Bouncy indie-folk-pop, like a less frantic Los Campesinos (maybe? I'm tired), with sumptuous lyrics. "It seems crazy I know, but I've got this feeling we've met before / And we come from the same place." I dig it.