The quest for begins with a single decision: to demand more. Turn off the show that lost your interest. Close the app that feeds you garbage. Seek out the strange, the difficult, the beautiful, and the true.
This has led to the "McDonaldization" of media. Just as fast food optimized for salt, fat, and sugar to hit our biological bliss points, algorithms optimize for familiar tropes, cliffhangers, and outrage to hit our psychological triggers. wwwxxxfullvideoscomin better
We spend 25 minutes scrolling through Netflix, unable to choose a title. We abandon novels by page 50. We leave movie theaters feeling hollowed out by yet another CGI-heavy sequel that we will forget by morning. The problem is not a lack of content ; it is a famine of quality . The quest for begins with a single decision: to demand more
This is not a utopian fantasy. We have seen glimpses of it. Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture—a subtitled, class-conscious thriller. The Last of Us proved that video game adaptations can be literary. Oppenheimer was a three-hour, R-rated, dialogue-heavy biopic that grossed nearly a billion dollars. Seek out the strange, the difficult, the beautiful,
The algorithms are powerful, but they are not all-powerful. They react to us. If we choose better, they will learn to make better. And if they don't, we will leave them behind, following the human storytellers who have been moving us for millennia.
Stop settling for the scroll. Go find something great. If you’re ready to find better content today, try swapping one hour of algorithmic streaming for a film by A24, a novel from a small press, or a long-form documentary. Your brain will thank you.