Low diatribe

I was flipping through a People magazine in a waiting room the other day — something I hadn't done in years — and it hit me: this was the feed before the feed. The glossy pages represented an early algorithm. Quick stories. Familiar faces. Bite-sized connection. It wasn't about depth; it was about access.

People wanted to peek into someone else's life for a moment, to feel part of something larger than their own routines. Sound familiar?

On a road trip with my grandson earlier this year, we pulled into a hotel room after a long day of driving. My first impulse was to turn on the TV. His was to open his iPad and pull up YouTube Shorts. Same need, different window. I was reaching for the connection I grew up with. He was reaching for his.

We like to think of short-form video — TikTok, Reels, Shorts, whatever the platform — as a modern attention disaster, a sign of civilization's decline. But in truth, it's just the next step in a long line of human patterning. The impulse that made us flip through People or tune in to America's Funniest Home Videos or listen to gossip over a backyard fence — it's the same one that makes us scroll today. The medium changed. The curiosity didn't.

That's not to say the machine is harmless. Algorithms are optimized for compulsion, not curiosity. They reward speed, outrage, and mimicry. But underneath all that noise is something older and simpler: the desire to witness other humans being human. A laugh. A story. A moment of shared rhythm. The best content remind us that we're all just improvising — trying to make sense of our days with whatever light or chaos we have.

When I watch a teenager pour their heart into a song, or a parent record their child's first words, or a craftsman restore something with impossible care, I see the same thread that once pulled readers through those magazine spreads: Show me what your life feels like. Help me see mine a little differently through yours.

We've always wanted to look through windows. What's new is that we now hand each other the glass.

But handing someone the glass doesn't mean they'll know how to look through it.

When we flipped through People, the distance between subject and observer was carefully managed. Stories passed through editors, photographers, publicists. The polish was the point.

Short-form video removed that layer entirely. Suddenly, the feed wasn't curated from above — it was shaped from below. Anyone could publish. Everyone could watch. The old gatekeepers lost their monopoly on what counted as "a story worth telling."

That democratization changed storytelling. It also changed us.

We talk about attention spans shrinking, but maybe they're just shifting form. In a 30-second clip, people learn to communicate emotion, humor, rhythm, and narrative arc. There's real craft hiding in that constraint. The best creators have mastered modern haiku: compressed truth delivered fast enough to catch the mind before it wanders.

If you've ever edited a 10-minute talk down to two minutes that still lands, you know the discipline that takes. The cut is the art.

But for every spark of authenticity, there's the algorithm waiting to flatten it. To optimize is to domesticate. Once a form gains traction, it gets templated, replicated, gamed. Dance trends, reaction cuts, stitched outrage — all endlessly recycled until what began as human expression becomes something closer to noise, but shiny and seductive.

I've felt the trap. I've been falling asleep watching a movie on the couch, then gone to bed and checked my phone. Suddenly it's 45 minutes later and I'm watching yet another video of someone refinish an antique pasta roller. The feed found my curiosity and turned it into compulsion.

That's where our responsibility comes in: to scroll mindfully, to curate our own feed the way editors once curated the magazine. The algorithm isn't a villain; it's an amplifier. It gives back what we reward. Every tap trains it — so what we feed it becomes what it feeds us.

We decide whether the feed becomes a mirror or a maze.

As individuals, as teams, as organizations, we build our own algorithms too — rewarding behavior that gets attention rather than behavior that builds value. We promote volume, not resonance. We treat the loudest updates as the most important ones. We mistake reach for impact.

The format is new, but the human pattern is ancient: seek signal, share meaning, feel seen. Maybe our job isn't to dismiss the platform, but to learn from it — to understand how quickly imitation spreads, how resonance outlasts novelty, and how true connection still cuts through, no matter the medium.

If we want better content, we can start by becoming better curators of our own attention. Follow what makes you curious, not what makes you restless. Reward what teaches or delights. Scroll until something slows you down, then stay there a while.

I don't use TikTok. I'm an aging Gen Xer who gets my short-form content through Reels. But the platform doesn't matter. The pace is fast, but the insight is timeless: people want to be seen, and they'll keep finding new tools to do it. Every generation builds its own window. Every generation thinks the new one ruined the view.

I used to dismiss all of it as noise. Now I see it as signal trying to find its shape — chaotic, messy, alive. Like all things human, it contains both the problem and the solution. The problem is our reflex to consume; the solution is our capacity to notice.

The real question isn't whether short-form video is good or bad. It's whether we'll learn to look long enough to tell the difference.