I’m quite an old-school internet user, as best illustrated by the fact I’m still writing blog posts like this one, almost 20 years after everyone else got dragged off to the social media gardens, walled or otherwise.

Getting older by its very nature involves being baffled by what the kids are doing, while also shouting at clouds, tilting at windmills, choosing hills to die on, and sticking one’s finger pointlessly in the dyke of things that you will never understand and weren’t for you in the first place.

All these caveats aside: I fucking hate short videos on the internet.

Which puts me in the minority, I suspect. Or at least, the minority of people who are willing to admit this.

The internet, especially the social media bits of it, seems to be increasingly dominated by grabby little clips of algorithmic dopamine madness.

I realise this has been the case for some time, and that this is not a new or particularly cutting edge observation. Old, remember?

But up til now I’ve largely avoided it. TikTok never got its claws into me. Its entire interface screams, to this forty-something, “you are too old for this. Go back to Facebook and argue about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods with the neighbours you are secretly afraid of”.

Which I can’t do either, because I deleted Facebook 17 years ago.

So why am I suddenly noticing video? Well, I’ve been a bit ill the past week. Nothing too serious, but in a way that’s impacted my sleeping patterns, and made me be awake in the early hours feeling ill and sorry for myself. Something we can all relate to.

Usually I’d read, or listen to podcasts and doze.

But instead, finding myself on my iPad’s version on instagram, I succumbed to the doom-scroll.

For some reason – I have no idea why – the iPad version of the app defaults to serving me videos.

Random videos, not from anyone I follow, and nothing I would choose, normally, to watch. [1]

This feed I stumbled upon is called “Reels”. And yes, I am aware 97% of the people reading this will know what those are, and will view me putting them in inverted commas as jarringly archaic as the phrase “electronic mail”.

These, as far as I can tell, are Instagram’s version of TikTok. Short, addictive videos designed to titillate, frighten, surprise, or mildly amuse in the darkness.

And in the early hours of this morning, tired and alone, the algorithms got their hooks into me, and the hours began to pass.

Years ago, I broke the algorithm of pre-Spotify music streaming service Last.fm by only liking bluegrass and 1970s Welsh-language psychedelia, and skipping everything else. Very quickly, these were the only genres it would serve me. I delighted over my power over the machine, and giggled at the musical dead ends it promised me. I learned nothing, in the best possible way.

The algorithms have become subtler and more cunning in the years that have passed since. I was on there for an hour before I even realised what was happening.

Clips of idiots from far right marches saying or doing idiotic things. Grainy VHS footage of 1970s anime or kung fu adventures, or terrible 1980s action films. Peaceful protesters being arrested. Charlie Kirk being confronted with facts at Oxford Union debates. And endless clips of comedians being heckled, the one phenomenon I had come across before, as I write a lot about comedy and was aware that this had become a way for comedians to promote their work. [2]

I never had any interest, but I was watching anyway. It was 2am, and I was flicking, flicking, flicking, ever downwards. My thumb satisfying my brain’s demand for ever-more content, ever more novelty, ever more little pinball ding of dopamine and eroded joy.

Soon, the videos being served to me got stuck in a bit of a loop of topics, the algorithm gulping down my choices and judging what to serve me by which I watched to the end, which I watched for a few seconds, and which I skipped entirely. The algorithm seemed particularly keen for me to watch videos of a well-dressed Muslim man “owning” all-comers at Speaker’s Corner, mainly drunk lunkheads wanting to say something horrible about Islam, but instead being confronted by a man who knows a lot more about the bible than they ever will.

Down, down, down I went. Now it was getting darker and scarier. Footage of racist Karens challenging nonplussed young asian lads sat in cars. A man challenging a racist thug who called an Asian woman a “raghead” on some provincial high street. Endless bus and tube arguments, with brave people challenging drunk and aggressive Nazis. Everyone filming everyone else, all the time, trying to get the final word and the perfect clip.

And lots and lots of LBC, who are a past master at this sort of stuff. Leading Britain’s Conversation by regurgitating back to us the incoherent mess of many decades of mainstream media narrative over race, class, migration, welfare, and the economy.

I can pretend I was being scientific about this, like I was in the Last.FM days. Pretend that I was playing the algorithm, to see where it would lead me. To see how well it knew me. To see if it knew what I wanted to see better than I knew myself.

But by the end, I was lost. Sleep was a far-flung dream, and instead I needed more. More clips of clean shaven young men tricking Trump supporters. More clips of badly dubbed proton-power rangers. More people deservedly getting their comeuppance, more drunk hecklers being schooled, more, more, more.

I woke up feeling exhausted, dirty, and more scared of the outside world than I’d felt in ages. [3]

And that’s what these clips do. They are designed to reduce empathy, and to enhance anger, fear, paranoia and contempt, because these are the emotions that are most profitable to the social media sites in question.

And I am vowing, here, in writing, never to look at those videos again. I fear for all of us, stuck in this whirlpool of content, being pushed into seeing whatever it is the algorithm thinks it is they should see, with its only purpose keeping people trapped, excited, afraid, and alone.

And then I read about ChatGBT, and realise that’s just like the above, only fifty times worse.

I don’t say any of this from a position of superiority. I am extremely ADHD. I waste time very easily. I’m as trapped on silly things – WhatsApp, board game arena, you name it – as everyone else.

And I also know these people. I used to work for a national newspaper. I remember when Facebook decided to essentially kill our traffic overnight, unless we “pivoted to video” in a very specific way to the detriment of that organisation’s own independence.

They did whatever Facebook said, of course.

And as a journalist I’ve written dumb listicles for clicks.

I’ve interviewed Farage supporters at the London Palladium live on Facebook because they were compellingly awful.

I’m not clean of this. I’ve played my own, small part.

But if what I saw on those few, grim hours on Instagram – and I understand what I’m being served is very much on the milder end – is any representation of what I’m watching everyone else doing, on public transport, on the street, in libraries, everywhere, all the time…

Then it’s genuinely terrifying.

And we all really, really, really need to fight back against it.

And probably go for a drink or a walk in the park more often than we currently are doing.

[1] I’m a weird older user of instagram. I still mainly like it for the photos. I tap past video stories without really even noticing what I’m doing.

[2] I had never had any interest in watching them though – this was just a condensed version of the WATCH JIMMY CARR DESTROY HECKLER YouTube format that so ruined the experience of comedy for so many people, a whole generation taught that the audience is in fact the star.

[3] And I say this as an extremely white, straight-acting, middle class-seeming shambling man whom the world largely leaves alone, unless my hair and beard have got a bit too long and someone shouts “Oi, Ed Sheeran”.

I am extremely aware of and grateful for my privilege in this manner, and try not to take it for granted.