Your attention please
Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life.
James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
No article has shaken me this year the way The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society has. Really fucked my shit UP.
We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral.
Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme
As of September 2025, approximately 170 million Americans spend, on average, one hour every day in an app that is designed to maximize psychological grip. While Congress fixates on TikTok’s data collection usages, what hasn’t received enough attention is how the platform has successfully industrialized human attention itself.
TikTok Won. Now Everything Is 60 Seconds.
Everything on TikTok is just kind of mediocre, because nobody watches anything for very long, so there’s no reason to make anything very good. And increasingly, this endless, relentless feed of bland mediocrity is eating every other type of cultural consumption in America.
A few cultural thoughts
Being bored is not just a pause in the dopamine drip, but the void into which thought, desire, and distraction rush to take shape. It is not merely the opposite of stimulation— it is the state from which all stimulation is an escape. There is boredom, and from it, everything else grows.
Bored
We’ve grown so intolerant of delay that we can’t sit through a full microwave countdown before intervening— preferring to eat it lukewarm than wait for zero.
Bored
From Bored
