Hello. My name is Andi and I am an addict. It may sound cliche, but I really am and I’m damn good at being an addict. I have an above expert level of not only understanding , but also maintaining addictions consistently over time. Here is my chemical cv.
44 years on Meth. That is 2 years longer than Elvis’s entire lifespan.
18 years on opiates. I have successfully quit methadone twice, cold turkey, after consistent use of 12-24 months each time.
My longest constant drunken binge lasted just over a year and only in the last month did anyone notice.
None of those issues are causing the problems I am currently experiencing.
For the last 6 months I’ve been trying to figure out why my life was falling apart. I’ve been increasingly alone and secluded. I leave my apartment less than ever before. Hell, on a good week, I might shower twice and I am skinnier than ever.
My ability to function has been noticeably diminished and my production capacity has been non existent. I have accomplished nothing during this time. I have had zero dates, no social activity, been unable to write- music, fiction or non-fiction text and have had an increasingly difficult time paying bills and rent.
In the year prior to these months I wrote 35 songs, 60 Substack articles and kept up with myriad hobbies and social interests. So, this has been a severe period of inactivity. Mentally, I have been losing time. Like hours of each day that are unaccountable in my memory.
I finally snapped to what it was last night. I have been spending ridiculous amounts of time watching video shorts. If you are unfamiliar with this type of media, they are 30 to 120 second excerpts of movies, TV shows, news broadcasts etc. and they serve no purpose whatsoever. They are not teaser video clips. Instead they tend to spoil plotlines of movies and shows. After watching one, a viewer is no more informed on the subject matter covered than they were before watching. So, why do they exist and why have all of our social media services included them on every page we see?
Marketing? They don’t drive sales. In fact, the ads shown in these streams are simply skipped by the same process as the clips are progressed.
Conveying information? As I mentioned, they don’t contain usable information. They are simply excerpts with no hook or value, progressed from one to the next via a user generated button click at the end of each video… and that is an interesting and incredibly important detail.
Streaming services are built around autoplay, but these shorts do not autoplay. They repeat infinitely, so if you do not click the button, you are simply looped back into the same video over and over again, which triggers a compulsive click response in the viewer. It is similar to one stopping the microwave 1 second before it finishes in order to avoid the beep.
The other similar activity would be a video poker machine. We feed them money and are driven to push the button, view the results, and then repeat until we run out of money, but with these shorts, one does not run out of money… Well, not in the same way.
Last night I went downstairs to clean the kitchen and do some laundry. I was planning on going to bed before midnight. I turned on the computer downstairs to play some music, and 6 hours later realized that I was still standing in the exact same spot in a really uncomfortable position. I was also freezing, because I had turned the heater off earlier in the day.
I came to, literally, shaking due to the cold and the strained muscles from holding the same position for all those hours. To reach the thermostat, all I had to do was let go of the mouse and reach forward. It was inches away the whole time.
What had I been doing? Watching shorts. Why? Addiction or obsession are the only reasons I can think of and I have been spending a lot of time on this new addiction. I work online and most, if not all of my human contact happens through a screen.
“It’s funny we live in a world of billions, your only friend is your phone.” -Dave Wyndorf
I’ve found it progressively harder while working or socializing online to avoid clicking the deceptive click bait shorts when they pop up on the screen. I had watched from afar as the video short phenomena evolved from vines and gifs into the media type they are today, but never had any interest in them until 6 months ago. Actually, I still have zero interest in them. The only thing that has changed is my diminished capacity to not engage in them and the increasing difficulty in avoiding them when going online.
When one goes onto Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, X, etc. They are pushed right to the forefront of each web page’s prime real estate and the topics are algorithmically set to click bait you. They look like they will be videos you would find interesting on topics you like, but they are not.
They appear to be randomly (read as poorly) edited and curated clips from different media types, genres and sources such as: 30 seconds of flooding somewhere with no explanation, followed by part of a scene from a sci fi show, then a a cut from a news broadcast, then a few seconds of concert footage, then some shady and unappealing product ad, etc etc. They carry no context or cohesive message.
They don’t appear to have any purpose beyond their entertainment value and they are completely lacking in entertainment value. So, why are they everywhere and how the fuck does one lose hours of a day watching them with no real idea of what they have watched?
To put that into context, I have been struggling to figure out why my life has been rapidly falling apart for the last 6 months. It has been a constant concern. My rent was due 4 days ago. I don’t have it or any solid plan on how to get it, yet. I have had plenty of work leads, but have followed up on none of them. Instead I have been losing swaths of time each day to these viewing experiences and it took me 6 months to notice it and recall the behavior when not engaged in it. I could not tell you anything about the content of what I have seen in these shorts. I know there are a bunch of shows, but I don’t even know the names of any of them.
This activity has been a fully qualified destructive obsession of mine for the last 6 months, yet I have barely thought about what I was doing and can’t remember anything about what I saw while doing it. That really strikes me as insane and I doubt I am the only person experiencing this.
Think about your own activities over the last 6 months. Have you found yourself watching video shorts? If so, how much of your time has been spent doing that?
Over the next few months, am going to deep dive into these phenomena and figure out the answers to some really important questions such as, “Who is creating, editing, and presenting this media and why are they doing it.”
These are completely dissimilar in every way from the longer videos on these same platforms. Videos (mis/dis/mal) inform, entertain, or sell you stuff. Shorts do none of those things.
The 1st steps are realizing and admitting that you have a problem. The solution comes from learning all that can be learned about the problem.
My next step, however will be having an estate sale at my place to sell off everything I own in order to pay my overdue rent and bills , but so long as I still have a computer and internet left when that is done, the rest will be published here regularly. This is the new topic of concern and focus for Blasted Reality, because I am honestly scared and totally freaked out that something could have this drastic of and destructive effect on my life without my either enjoying it or even noticing I was doing it.
Blue light tech. It burns out your dopamine centers. And creates addiction all computer has it. Called optigenetics. DARPA has weaponized it. They also have the leds which blink. Sets the brain to delta. Which is sleep state. All patents of weapon tech. Get rid of the led blue lights.