Reels are destroying our brains and I hate them
It's time for a new moral panic
POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I look at Zack Polanski’s claims about the price of food, and I make myself popular by defending, er, the Big Supermarket. Then we speak to the excellent Thomas Ableman about how the Swiss would have build HS2 completely differently, and how they would have done better. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!
With the news dominated by discussion of social media bans and other restrictions on social media apps, I thought I’d bring this one back from the archives as I still think it is relevant today – if not more so. So please enjoy this piece, originally published just over a year ago.
(A brand new piece will be arriving tomorrow, on something very exciting!)
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:
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.
Sure, I’m 37 39 and every time I look in the mirror and see my haggard face and lack of hair, I realise I’m not young anymore.
But I do genuinely think that Reels are a uniquely bad form of content.
Like all moral panics, this is partially a snobby aesthetic judgement on my part: If Reels were on average educational,2 or at least contained more intellectual content than a head injury, I would probably be less worried about their ubiquity.
But what makes Reels more of a problem than this is that unlike other new forms of content, they’re always there, and they’re wildly addictive.
This is because we can’t just put Reels down or switch them off. We do not watch them on the screen in the corner of the living room – they’re on the screen that we have in our pockets, and carry with us everywhere, from funeral services to toilet cubicles.
And now because Google and Meta are chasing engagement, they’re not just quarantined on TikTok, they’re unavoidable on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. So whether we like it or not, if we use the internet in 2025, we’re going to encounter Reels.
But this isn’t the worst part.
What scares me most is that they are designed to be almost uniquely addictive. They are arguably the first content format that is truly native to mobile devices - which means our phones are particularly well-optimised to make us compulsive consumers.
This is very different to, ahem, podcasts and email newsletters – both of which are also new ways of consuming content. In those cases, they’re not consumed in a radically different way to how we used to listen to the radio or read newspapers. You might, say, have the former play while doing household chores, or read text-based article on the way to work, just like the old days.
And even ‘traditional’ landscape YouTube isn’t so radically addictive in the same way. Though we might sometimes talk about falling down a YouTube rabbit hole, it’s still an experience analogous to television of old, as videos are more ‘long-form’ – typically ten minutes or more,3 which makes watching a ‘lean back’ experience.
Reels though, are very different.
In all of those above cases, though they also employ algorithms to select stuff they think we might like, they are still mostly ‘opt in’ – we have to be active in our choices of what to consume, whether that’s choosing to play a video or a podcast, or click on an article.
Reels, however, make the decision for us. They are less like the world that existed before, and more like injecting crack directly into the bloodstream.
Each short-form video is only seconds long, is instantly replaced by something else the millisecond we get even slightly bored – and what’s next is not based on who we have chosen to follow. Instead, it is based entirely on our revealed preference – the algorithm selects what’s next based on what we actually like to watch, not what we say we want. And because of how human brains work, this inevitably means lapsing into the video equivalent of junk food.
And sure, I admit that individual Reels may be fun – and that like junk food, they can be safely enjoyed in moderation. But the problem is that Reels are not consumed in moderation – it’s more like digital foie gras, and we’re the shackled geese being force fed garbage.
The benefits of friction
Arguing that Reels are bad does make me a bit uncomfortable.
This is because a significant part of my schtick writing on the internet is that we should make it easier for people to have more stuff, and that broadly speaking new technology improves our lives. So in most cases, I’m very keen to reduce the amount of ‘friction’ in our lives, whether it’s the hoops you have to jump through to build a house or interact with government services.
But what my Reels hate has made me appreciate more is that when there are social ills involved, friction can actually be a good thing.
For example, in some American states when you buy a gun, there is a mandatory waiting period before you can get your hands on it. This is a good thing, because if you’re buying it in anger, you’re more likely to have calmed down before you have the opportunity to pull the trigger.
However, perhaps the best analogy for Reels is gambling, as both can be fun, while also being self-destructive.
That’s why in many contexts, gambling is heavily regulated, to try and navigate this tension. For example, it might make sense to ban or restrict gambling apps, while supporting the existence of physical casinos – the theory being that if it is less convenient, it makes it harder for people to become seriously addicted, while still allowing us to have an enjoyable night out playing poker or whatever.
So I guess I’m wondering… do we need some sort of intervention here?
What do I want to happen?
The logic of my argument at this point suggests some sort of regulatory action by the government against the firms peddling Reels – but honestly, I’m not sure what I actually want to happen here.
Instinctively, it feels pretty crazy to suggest that regulators should limit the pernicious impact of Reels4 (beyond banning TikTok, which I think we should do for geopolitical reasons), but there is some precedent, as several countries and the European Union have passed laws imposing certain conditions on the contents of news feeds.
For example, here in the UK, we have the Online Safety Act, which forces a “duty of care” on platform companies like Facebook and YouTube, and obliges them to disclose how their algorithms select what is seen.
And other countries have laws that regulate the types of content offered by platforms – and not just obviously harmful things like content that promotes suicide. For example, France has passed a law which obliges Netflix to ensure at least 30% of its catalogue is European-made.
So given this, it wouldn’t be totally weird for the government to say “stop forcing super-addictive Reels in our faces and offer us something more intellectually nutritious”.
But on the other hand, this seems absurdly nannying. After all, the platforms haven’t really done anything wrong: They’ve just optimised their products to respond to the revealed preferences of their users. The problem isn’t that Facebook wants us to watch Reels. The problem is that we really want to watch Reels.
So perhaps what we ultimately need isn’t a new law, or for regulators to step in. What we need instead is a new cultural norm. We need to train ourselves – and then train others to modify our behaviour, to create a less Reels-addled world.
This means that when we reach for our phones while looking out at the Swiss mountains, we should be shamed by our friends. When we flick through Reels instead of reading a more cerebral email newsletter, we should feel bad about ourselves. And prominent political and cultural figures should speak out and warn people about the evils of Reels.5
In other words, though I think Reels are more than just another moral panic, perhaps a moral panic is, ironically, exactly what we need to make Reels less damaging to society.
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I’ll just refer to them as “Reels” here, for the sake of simplicity.
There are some short-form creators out there trying to do good stuff, like my friend Zion Lights who is teaching the kids about science on TikTok, and if every creator were like her I wouldn’t view it as a problem. The problem is that almost everything else is dreck.
The way YouTube is structured in terms of advertising and algorithm even incentivises this – which is why most ‘creators’ typically produce videos these days that are 15-20 minutes long, like miniature TV shows.
Or at least it would have done until the LibDems proposed a law banning playing music without headphones on public transport.
Perhaps they could do TikToks about it?