The TikTok “For You” feed was a fulfillment of “the Entertainment” in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest: a piece of content so compelling that no one could stop watching. As addictive as it was, Wallace described his fictional Entertainment as “oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement toward a real story”—which is an apt description, too, of TikTok’s drift toward formless vibes and feelings, away from coherent information. Surely bingeing on these technologies wasn’t making me any smarter or able to generate more complex thoughts, which was presumably
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