Reels are destroying our brains and I hate them

It's time for a new moral panic

Pod! Don’t forget to check out this week’s Abundance Agenda, in which Martin tells me an utterly maddening story about HS2, and we speak to ex-OpenAI policy lead Rosie Campbell about the emerging field of AI welfare. Listen on Apple, Spotify or Substack.

Meet-Up! On June 3rd I’m hosting my second annual Summer Subscribers Meet-Up. It was super fun to meet so many of you last year, so please do come along and hang out with me and the sort of nerds who read my stuff! It’s free to attend, but you’ll need a ticket so I can manage numbers! Hope to see you all there!

Plug! And finally, a quick plug for an event being organised by a friend of mine. Land Talks is going to be a series of YIMBY-aligned lightning talks. I can’t make this first one – but I’m hoping to speak at a future event (er, about postcodes).

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I used to be confident that concerns about the impact of phones on people – especially young people – were wildly overstated. “Don’t be crazy,” I’d think, “We have all of the world’s information in the palms of our hands – that’s obviously a net positive!”.

And besides, doesn’t every generation freak out when something new emerges? From comic books, to video games, to rap music – we can look back and laugh at what were clearly just moral panics. The people complaining were just out-of-touch old farts.

But more recently I’ve started to wonder if this time it is different, as I’m pretty convinced that the latest New Thing is actually, for real, a pernicious thing that is making the world worse.

I’m talking, of course, about short-form video on our phones.

You know what I mean – vertically shot clips, lasting no more than a minute or so, that are selected by an algorithm and shoved in our faces. We call them TikToks, or YouTube Shorts, or Reels.¹ And I hate them.

I realised this last week when I was on holiday in Switzerland. One night, my partner and I stayed at a hotel high in the Alps on the border with Liechtenstein. Here’s a photo showing the view from the hotel balcony:

Left of the river: Switzerland. Right of the river: Liechtenstein.

However, I didn’t actually see all that much of it.

Despite having the majesty of nature right there in front of my eyes, instead of taking in the view and experiencing the sorts of profound, poetic revelations about the nature of existence that better writers than me would have done, I found myself reaching for my phone.

In an instant, I was no longer present in what should have been quite a moment. Instead, I opened up Facebook – and quickly, almost out of habit, found myself flipping through a few Reels. I watched a Gen-Z man talking about software bugs in a Nintendo 64 game I never played. Then a low-res, pirated version of an old comedy sketch. And then a compilation of cats knocking objects from tables, set to jaunty music.

Then I just… continued. A video would finish playing, and with a flick of the thumb, I was on to the next one, like a glutton reaching for another biscuit, or a cocaine addict sniffing up one more line.

And it was only when a cool mountain breeze reminded me where I was that I realised that I hate myself.

Reels have broken my brain, and I bet they have broken yours too, because this is what the world is now – a buffet of algorithmic sludge, served up so fast that your brain doesn’t have a chance to think about stopping.

I genuinely think this is a specific new technology that is making life worse. And I think we should worry more about it.

What makes Reels worse

I don’t think I’m just being an old man when I complain about Reels.