"They're Coming for Every Second of Your Life"
What a decade of mind-destroying social media growth looks like
Ten years ago this week I did a TED Talk on how to find truth amid an insane, and growing volume of content on the internet. Even then, it felt like an insurmountable challenge for journalism. Twitter was exploding and at the heart of the Arab Spring movement. YouTube was coming of age as humanity’s default video platform, and Facebook had just gone public.
In hindsight, we didn’t know how good we had it.
During the talk, I shared a few stats about the volume of uploads at that point in time which seem quaint now. There were:
72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute
58 pics added to Instagram every second
3,500 photos added to Facebook per second
I tried to visualize what 24 hours of uploads would look like at that rate, expressed as palletes of VHS tapes. It seemed huge:
The growth in the decade since then has been almost incomprehensible.
In 2012 there were 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
In 2022 there are 550 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute.
Instagram didn’t have video uploads in 2012, at which point there were 58 photos uploaded to the platform per second. Now, 1,100 pics & videos are uploaded per second.
The consumption numbers are even more staggering.
250 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every single day, with that time spread across roughly 5 billion videos. That means every second, people consume a combined 2,893 hours of YouTube, or 121 days’ worth.
17.6 million hours of Instagram video is consumed per day on Instagram Reels.
But that pales in comparison to the 197.8 million hours per day watched on TikTok, which didn’t even exist in 2012. It was launched in 2017; its growth is unprecedented, fuelled by an algorithm more invasive than anything humanity has ever seen.
Facebook now sees 350 million photos uploaded per day, which is 4,000 per second. Users swipe through 18 billion Snapchat daily video views, or 208,000 videos per second.
The growth will not stop. It has vastly outpaced our ability to cope with it. The available human attention span or capacity to discern & decide has not increased at a similarly exponential rate. Sure, there are a few hundred million more people on the planet, but a day is still 24 hours long. The pace of our cognitive evolution remains the same.
The challenge posed by this enormous surge of content is not limited to journalism, the challenge is one of broad human resistance to the temptation of content, in the face of an onslaught of services and content and creators trying desperately to carve off a slice of your monetizable attention for their benefit.
Bo Burnham, whose virtuoso Netflix special ‘Inside’ comes at this horror show from multiple angles, puts it really well in this interview below. We have run out of land for capitalists to colonize and extract money from. Now, your attention is what they want to to colonize. Media companies want every single waking second of it, they will fight a death match to get it and they - WE - are getting far more muscular in how we do battle for it.
My TED Talk dealt with the fact-finding challenge, and that predicament has obviously worsened with time. Mis- and disinformation has become more widespread, more effective and more toxic. Amid the sheer volume, news is also losing out in the outright competition for attention. There is simply too much else to consume, and news, which has always been the broccoli, doesn’t even get on the plate with the cake any more. It is crowded out by a superabundance of choice. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings famously said the platform is now ‘competing with sleep’ – a basic condition for human survival - for its own survival and growth. And it often wins.
And is it any wonder? Humans have not evolved to resist it. The neural systems which dispense dopamine are no more sophisticated than they were a decade ago. Our decision-making systems are overloaded. Kids, especially, are not equipped to resist or even understand the scale of what they fear missing out on. How can they possibly be expected to tune out, to put down their phones, to select the silence of their own minds over the cacophony of what they know awaits on TikTok?
”What a strange choice to have to make at the end of the night, between all the information in the history of the world, and the back of your eyelids, you know - infinity or oblivion? That’s insane, having to choose, for anybody, let alone a 13-year-old whose brain is growing.”
What is the purpose of this post? Only the hope that stating the problem out loud, with some context over how it has gotten worse, will help remind us, perhaps, that we are like the proverbial frog in the warming pot of water, and that we leap out in time to warn younger frogs in other pots. Awareness is the first step on the path to self-regulation, and self-regulation is the first step on the path to making others aware. Thanks for reading. Now put your phone down.
