Consider how you encountered the last significant news event. Not the event itself, but the sequence: where did you first hear about it? In what form? How long before you encountered someone else's interpretation of what it meant?

For most of us, the answer is uncomfortable. We learned about the thing and what to think about the thing almost simultaneously. The information arrived pre-digested. We consumed a conclusion, not evidence that might lead to one.

For most of literate history, the gap between information and interpretation was larger. You read the pamphlet, the speech, the treaty. You formed a view. Later, perhaps, you encountered someone else's analysis. The sequence mattered: raw material first, processing second. Your own cognition did the initial work.

That sequence has inverted. Now interpretation arrives first, faster, louder. The primary source (if it exists at all) comes later, for the unusually curious. Most people never reach it. They don't need to. Someone has already told them what it means and what to think.

Neil Postman saw this coming. In 1985, before the internet, before social media, before the algorithmic feed, he argued that television had transformed American public discourse in ways we hadn't recognized.

His thesis was not about content. It was about form. The medium shapes the message, yes, but more fundamentally: the medium shapes the mind that receives the message. Different communication technologies create different forms of consciousness.

Print culture, Postman argued, builds specific cognitive muscles. Reading requires sequential processing: you follow an argument from premise to conclusion, holding earlier points in mind as you encounter later ones. It tolerates abstraction, because words can represent concepts that have no image. It demands sustained attention, because the payoff comes only if you stay with it. It allows complexity, because you can pause, re-read, cross-reference.

A person raised in print culture develops these capacities not through effort but through immersion. The medium trains the mind.

Television trains a different mind. The image is concrete, immediate, emotional. It does not argue; it shows. It does not require sustained attention; it rewards intermittent attention with a new image every few seconds. It does not build toward conclusions; it offers sensations. The viewer does not process; the viewer receives.

Postman's concern was not that television made people stupid. It was that television made certain forms of thought inaccessible. A population raised on images loses the cognitive infrastructure for deliberation. They can still feel. They can still react. But they cannot reason in the way that print culture enabled, because reasoning is a skill and skills require practice and the practice has been eliminated.

What Postman diagnosed in 1985 has intensified by orders of magnitude.

The progression runs: print to image to video to short-form video. Each step compresses the attention window and amplifies the emotional immediacy. A newspaper article might hold your attention for five minutes. A television segment: ninety seconds. A TikTok or Instagram Reels: fifteen seconds, and if it hasn't grabbed you in a fraction of a second, you've already swiped.

Don’t believe me? Watch others in public. Be the person who does not look at their phone while they queue in line for a coffee. It’s easy to see.

The algorithm learns what holds you. They measure linger time. What holds you is what triggers immediate neurological response: outrage, arousal, fear, laughter. Dopamine. The content that survives is the content optimized for instant emotional payoff. Complexity cannot survive this filter. Nuance is selected against. What remains is sensation.

This is not a moral failing of the people who consume it. The slot machine is designed to be pulled. The feed is engineered by some of the most sophisticated behavioral scientists in history, armed with real-time data on what makes you stay. You are not weak for finding it compelling. You are human, and your responses are being exploited.

But the effect is the same regardless of fault. A mind trained on short-form video is a mind that has not developed the cognitive muscles for sustained reasoning. It's not that such a person cannot think. It's that thinking in the way self-governance requires, holding competing considerations in mind, following chains of implication, tolerating ambiguity and delayed resolution, has become effortful in a way it wasn't for someone raised on print.

The path of least resistance is to let someone else do it.

There's a revealing exception: long-form content still works. Three-hour podcast conversations. Extended documentary series. Even long-form video essays and audiobooks. These still require something like sustained attention, and they still attract substantial audiences. AirPods and their ilk have revolutionized this. It has enabled the consumption of material while doing dishes, while driving, and more, in ways not possible before.

This suggests the damage isn't from screens as such. It's from fragmentation. The fifteen-second clip, the algorithmic feed that rewards constant switching, the notification that interrupts every train of thought: these are the culprits. A person who listens to a three-hour interview is exercising cognitive muscles that a person scrolling TikTok is not, even though both are consuming "media."

The distinction matters because it points toward the mechanism. The issue isn't technology. It's what the technology trains vs the agency the human exercises. Short-form, algorithmically-served content trains a mind that expects constant stimulation, cannot tolerate boredom, and has never practiced the sustained attention that complex reasoning requires.

Now consider what's happened to journalism.

The old model (idealized, but real enough) distinguished between reporting and opinion. The reporter's job was to gather facts and present them. The columnist's job was to interpret and argue. The reader knew which was which. They could encounter the information and form their own view before (or instead of) reading someone else's.

This distinction has collapsed because the economics of attention make it untenable.

Straight reporting doesn't hold attention. It's not optimized for emotional response. A recitation of facts, quotes, context: this is cognitively demanding and emotionally unsatisfying. It requires the reader to do work.

Interpretation is easier to consume. "Here's what this means." "Here's why this matters." "Here's what the experts say you should think." “Here is what I say you should think.” The explainer format presents itself as service: we'll help you understand this complex thing. But the subtext is infantilizing: you can't handle the primary sources, so we'll pre-digest them for you.

Watch what's happened at the prestige outlets. The New York Times increasingly embeds interpretation in what appears to be reporting. Analysis and opinion leak into news sections without clear labeling or caveat. The reader who thinks they're learning what happened is actually learning what to think about what happened, and they can't tell the difference because the distinction isn't marked.

Fox News does the same thing from a different direction. Opinion programming dominates, but it presents as news. The viewer believes they're being informed when they're being instructed and comforted. The format (anchor at desk, graphics, urgent music) signals "news." The content is editorial.

The effect is identical: the audience never encounters unprocessed information. They receive conclusions. The cognitive work of evaluation has been done for them, and they've been trained not to notice.

This is how a population becomes incapable of self-governance.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires citizens who can evaluate competing claims, weigh tradeoffs, tolerate complexity, and reach reasoned judgments. These capacities are not innate. They are developed through practice, and the practice requires a communication environment that supports it.

When that environment degrades, when the forms through which we communicate no longer support sustained reasoning, the capacity for self-governance atrophies. Not in everyone. Not completely. But in enough people, enough of the time, that the political consequences become visible.

What fills the space?

On the left: the technocratic promise. Trust the experts. The administrative state will manage outcomes for citizens who can't be expected to understand complexity. Credential and delegate. The right people will handle it. Your job is to comply and consume.

On the right: the strongman promise. He'll fix it. A decisive leader who cuts through the noise, who doesn't ask you to evaluate competing claims because he's already sorted it out. Delegate your citizenship to a champion. Your job is to support and consume.

Both are escapes from the burden of self-governance. Both are enabled by a population too cognitively depleted to do the work that citizenship requires.

Hayek called it the road to serfdom, and he was thinking about economic planning: the well-intentioned effort to manage complexity from the center, which inevitably produces dependency and unfreedom. The planners don't necessarily mean to create serfs. They mean to solve problems. But the solution requires citizens to stop solving problems for themselves, and that capacity, once lost, does not easily return.

Postman saw the same destination from a different angle. We would not be oppressed into submission. We would be entertained into it. Not Orwell's boot stamping on a human face, but Huxley's soma: the pleasure that makes the cage comfortable.

The synthesis is this: entertainment epistemology is the delivery mechanism for soft serfdom. A population that cannot think cannot self-govern. A population that cannot self-govern will be governed by others. The others may be credentialed experts or charismatic strongmen, but the result is the same: dependency, infantilization, the quiet surrender of the capacities that make free people free.

I don't know how to reverse this. The incentives are structural. The algorithms are profitable. The cognitive damage compounds across generations. Telling people to read more books is not a policy. I only see grassroots efforts. People, one by one, choosing differently. I feel embers of it in my own community and my generation.

I’m here to fan that flame.

I think there's value in seeing the mechanism clearly. Understanding that what feels like a content problem (bad information, misinformation, polarization) is actually a form problem. The container is shaping the contents of our minds, and the shape is one that cannot support self-governance.

Make a choice. You are much more empowered than you believe you are.

The free society requires free individuals, and free individuals require the cognitive capacity for freedom. That capacity is not automatic and cannot be assumed. It is built by certain practices and eroded by others.

Every hour spent in the algorithmic feed is an hour not spent building the muscles that citizenship requires. Every piece of pre-digested interpretation is a rep not taken, an evaluation not practiced, a small abdication that compounds over time.

The serfdom on offer is comfortable. That's what makes it dangerous. No chains. No dungeons. Just a gentle slide into dependency, accompanied by endless entertainment, until we discover we've lost the ability to want anything else.