No freedom without attention: TikTok’s darker side

Nick Lucking
ILLUMINATION
Published in
7 min readOct 21, 2023
Illustration by author

Technological advances are rarely free of side effects. To provide a simple example, the combustion engine has enabled vast geographic and economic expansion, which seems quite good on the surface. Until you remember trees. And animals. And the delicate balance of our atmosphere. Similarly, the features of social media which make it such an excellent tool of connection are the same features which make it an excellent tool of division.

TikTok is no exception to this rule of ambiguous gains. For clarity, when referring to TikTok throughout this article, I’m really talking about any short-form visual media where one video slides seamlessly into the next. My personal platform of choice happens to be Youtube Shorts, but they’re identical in the features relevant to this discussion.

My claim is that short-form visual media has become so condensed, so responsive to our individual preferences, and ultimately just so gosh darn entertaining, that it has begun to strip us of our freedom to choose how we devote our attention and, by extension, our freedom to choose who we want to be as people.

When deciding whether or not to go see a movie, there’s a reasonably long list of things you likely consider. Is it worth the cost? Is it worth the effort of driving? Is it worth the time? Will it be funny? Is Ryan Reynolds actually a good actor or just sufficiently handsome that you don’t notice his mediocre acting? When deciding what show to watch with your partner, you talk it over for a few minutes. When deciding whether or not to watch a Youtube video, you look at the thumbnail, read the title, and click.

The point I’m trying to illustrate here is that when we choose whether or not to consume a given piece of media, the decision-making process itself is roughly proportional in duration and involvement to the piece of media we’re thinking about consuming. In this regard we are like hungry wolves. Although a wolf may spend hours if not days carefully stalking a herd of elk, it would rarely devote more than a few minutes to the pursuit of a single rabbit. This tactic serves the wolf well, ensuring that it doesn’t waste precious energy in the pursuit of an unsatisfying meal. Likewise, our tactic of media evaluation preserves us from wasting too much time watching things that do not interest us in some meaningful way.

However, this method of filtering out meaningless media ceases to work when the media is delivered in an unending chain of brief, algorithmically generated zaps. With no gap between one video and the next, there is no room left for consciously evaluating whether what we’re viewing is a worthy subject of our attention. If the current video doesn’t satisfy our desires, the next one surely will. There’s always the promise of something better just over the horizon, and we can crest that horizon with the merest swipe of a thumb. The opportunity cost of each individual swipe is miniscule. All you’re committing to is a few more seconds of viewing. And yet this opportunity cost accumulates over time to quietly damaging consequences.

Soon enough, you’ve spent an hour swiping through TikToks without ever having taken more than a second to examine whether or not this was truly how you wanted to spend that time. This isn’t to say that all TikToks are shallow or vapid — not at all. Short videos can be just as funny, inspirational, or informative as long-form content. In fact, I think there’s a unique species of comedy that requires this form. What I am saying, though, is that regardless of how enriching the media is, the consumption of hundreds and hundreds of bites of media without the opportunity to surface for a breath of consciousness tends to erode one’s agency over time.

After an hour-long binge of Youtube Shorts, I invariably feel a faint (or not so faint) pang of emptiness. Maybe that’s an experience unique to me. If this is ringing no bells, more power to you. But I’ve got a feeling you have at least some sense of what I’m trying to describe.

Perhaps a small part of this emptiness is provoked by the modern imperative to be constantly productive — constantly doing. This imperative is itself dysfunctional, and so the emptiness it provokes needn’t be attributed to any fault in the visual media’s design.

There is, however, a larger part of this empty feeling that is attributable to the media. This part, as I have already alluded to, is the unconscious nature of this kind of media consumption. Rather than having to do the actual work of evaluating our own preferences, our subsurface desires are simply known — silently and implicitly. Whether the content is nourishing or not, it is being fed to us by the pixelated spoonful. This, I posit, is the overwhelming source of the emptiness.

Which brings us to the arch-nemesis of conscious choice in the modern age: The Algorithm. Human brains, though undeniably beautiful and complex, were created glacially and goallessly — driven in their development by nothing more than blind, invisible selective pressures. Encoded within these brains are directives like “find food” and “run from bear” but not (inconveniently) directives like “avoid a deep sense of meaninglessness through the exercise of conscious, well-intentioned agency.” The Algorithm, in contrast, is a painstakingly engineered monster, honed by the collective intelligence of the world’s sharpest minds in order to execute one sole objective: “capture and detain as much attention as possible by any means necessary.” In the best cases, The Algorithm is merely monetizing your interests in gardening, makeup, and lock picking tutorials. In the worst cases, it is taking advantage of our species-wide fascination with the horrific, the sexualized, the controversial, the violent, and the sensational. As many of us have found out in recent times, our often feeble powers of discipline are no match for this mighty beast. It has the backing of Money and Data and Power, while our corner of the ring is populated by humble efforts and intentions.

One of the greatest appeals of short-form visual media is that it relieves us of the responsibility of choosing. It helps us skip the question of what to watch and beams us right into the watching part. However, the phrase “with freedom comes responsibility” is not a unidirectional phrase — with responsibility also comes freedom. By giving up responsibility for choosing how we allocate our attention, we are also giving up our freedom to decide what is worthy of it. Moreover, this decision regarding how we allocate our attention is unavoidably a decision about what kind of person we want to be. We as people are made by and in the image of (or in the case of controversial content, in opposition to) the various subjects of our attention. Freedom is the power to choose who you want to be, and this choice is ultimately defined by the power you have to be discerning with your attention.

Now, is there an appropriate time for passive consumption? Absolutely. So long as it’s initiated from a place of satisfaction with oneself and with the day, it is a pure form of recreation. But so often it’s either too much (in frequency or volume) or initiated from an unhealthy place. The more immediate and accessible a form of entertainment is, the more likely it is to be used to ease stresses, anxieties, and insecurities. Of course, if it was actually effective in remedying these emotional states, it would be a wonder-drug. But it’s not. Just like most other not-so-wonderous-drugs, short-form visual media serves to temporarily mask rather than actually resolve psychological tensions. In most cases, the stress or anxiety that one dives into media to escape is only magnified upon resurfacing.

The media landscape in its present configuration is, for lack of a better word, groping. It is forever poking you on the shoulder, whispering in your ear, and staring up at you seductively from your various screens. It is never satisfied until it is gripping you by the fingers and staring deeply, intrusively into your eyes. If you, like me, struggle to fight the allure of this modern siren, it does not make you weak, but merely human.

For all my reflections, I have no clear notion of how best to navigate the landscape I describe. I often feel guilty, empty, and inert, and these emotions are invariably anchored in some way to my media use: this much I know for sure. My best guess so far as to how I can minimize these emotions is to assert my small allotment of freedom.

This freedom entails repeatedly making decisions about what I want to pay attention to, what I want to care about, and who I want to be. I will never be anything close to perfect in my exercising of this freedom, but it nonetheless seems like one of the better stars to assign as my true north. Will I still end up spending an hour of my Sunday afternoon crumpled on the toilet watching fifteen second clips about boxing and argumentative celebrities? Quite possibly. But that need not negate my broader project of trying to be a decent, thoughtful person. And I suspect I have plenty of company in this project.

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Nick Lucking
ILLUMINATION

My two convictions here are a) that writing is essentially a special form of thinking, and b) that it’s generally good to think about things.