We rarely talk about the cost of producing the infinite scroll. For every viral dance trend, there are thousands of exhausted content creators.
Entertainment content and popular media have never been more powerful or more pervasive. They are the primary storytellers of our age. The question is no longer whether we enjoy the content, but what the content is doing to our souls.
The problem is not that media exists. The problem is the passivity . We have been trained to consume rather than create, to scroll rather than engage, to react rather than think.
: Universities like Carnegie Mellon and Notre Dame offer tip sheets on entering these sectors.
In its place is the era of . Netflix doesn’t want 100% of people to sort-of like a show; it wants 5% of people to obsess over it. The result is a landscape of algorithmic niches: hyper-specific Korean dating shows, documentary series about medieval tile restoration, and improvised fantasy comedies.
The industry has weaponized this. "Interactive content"—from Bandersnatch (Black Mirror) to dating sims to voting on a YouTuber's next move—gives us the illusion of agency. But agency requires risk. Entertainment removes risk. We are left with a generation that is incredibly fluent in the lore of the Star Wars universe but terrified of ordering a pizza over the phone.