This is a record and reflection on my life in April 2023.

🚀 Short Video in the Age of Speed

I keep a Logseq whiteboard for newsletter topic ideas. When a topic has accumulated enough material, I pull it out and write it up — one way of closing a loop. Once I publish something, I cross it off the board. The backlog tends to hover around five topics.

Short video has been sitting in the corner of that whiteboard for over half a year. Every time I thought about writing it, the material felt incomplete, the topic too sprawling, and I’d push it off again. What finally motivated me to tackle it now was a confluence of recent news and some changes to Bilibili’s monetization approach that left me with a lot of feelings worth putting into words.

The Fracturing of Attention: Playback Speed, Three-Minute Movies, Earworm Hits

Since the mobile internet era began, we’ve been absorbing new information almost without pause — trending searches, headlines, push notifications clamoring for eyeballs constantly. At the same time, everyone has choices, so information scatters in all directions. This daily barrage has made our attention increasingly restless. Over time, the window in which people can actually focus keeps shrinking. We become less patient with anything slow-paced or carefully structured, and more insistent on getting more fresh stimulation in less time. The product perfectly designed for this impulse: playback speed control.

Personally, I dislike speed controls. Film and television are the result of directors and writers distilling their visions — thoughts about life, imaginings of other worlds — into hours of image and sound. They deserve slow watching. The sound design, the rhythm, the cuts, the emotional arcs — all of it depends on the one thing that crosses the boundary between screen and viewer: the flow of time. Speed it up and you lose the signal.

Take the Miller planet sequence in Interstellar: the ticking of a stopwatch runs beneath the score, signaling that one hour here equals seven years on Earth, creating the urgent pressure of the team’s situation. There are countless examples like it. If a piece of work requires speed-watching to get through, that probably says something about its information density or lack of depth — in which case, it may not be worth watching at all.

But in short video, fast-pacing takes an even more extreme form: the three-minute movie recap.

Three-minute movie recaps are neither movies nor commentary — they’re more like highly concentrated dopamine, injected through your eyes, giving you the high of absorbing more information than humanly possible in a very short time. The cost is a slow loss of the ability to empathize with characters, a loss of patience for appreciating light and music — and eventually, the viewing sensibility you worked so hard to build gets completely dismantled. — “‘Little Handsome’ and ‘Little Pretty’: Three Minutes to Ruin a Film,” iFanr

In those three-minute food-for-the-eyes sessions, exquisite cinematography is stripped out entirely, leaving only shocking images to grab attention; carefully layered soundtracks are swapped for aggressive rave beats to keep the adrenaline spiking; taut narrative arcs are reduced to abrupt curiosity-bait. Everything serves the eyeball. Information density is maximized, runtime minimized, the AI voiceover rushed, as if the next second you might leave. And we’ve apparently decided we love this — it hooks our fragile attention and never lets go, a kind of hypnosis that has us swiping forever. Our time gets stolen along with our attention.

Music isn’t immune either.

By raw play counts, Jay Chou’s songs might actually be trailing some of the earworm hits from Douyin with ten-billion-plus streams. The fundamental difference between today’s pop and yesterday’s is this: music is no longer driven by aesthetic vision — it’s driven by user behavior. The pipeline for manufacturing Douyin hits is now mature: identify trending emotions, compose, produce, release — the whole process in a single day, every beat calculated by data to land precisely where users feel the most pleasure.

A 2017 peer-reviewed paper in Musicae Scientiae analyzed 303 US Top 10 singles from 1986 to 2015 and found that song introductions, which used to run longer than 20 seconds in the 1980s, now come in under 10 seconds. The average song length dropped from about 4:10 to roughly 3:30, and the average among the top 50 US songs of 2021 was just 3:07 — with 38% under three minutes. Attention spans keep shrinking; if a song doesn’t get to something good quickly, listeners leave.

I’ve been loving Cai Jianya’s Darwin lately — 28-second intro, 4:25 total runtime — and the classic Love Before Christ with its intro that, as music producer Chen Jikun says, can stay with you for a lifetime. Today’s productions often open with a wall of sound from the very first note, because holding a listener through an entire song is already an achievement. All you need is a 15-second earworm — something like 105 Degrees — that loops in your head like a virus, relentless while it’s there, and completely forgotten once the season passes, unless you play it again.

What we can do is slow down. Be patient. Pull our attention back from the relentless churn outside, stop chasing the latest thing, and pay more attention to our inner lives — to what we feel each day, to the sensation of doing something with our hands, to the feedback and reflection that comes from thinking things through.

The Cultural Carnival of the Fast Lane: Panda Madness, Zibo BBQ, Toxic Positivity

According to Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival, carnival culture has four defining dimensions:

  • Free and familiar contact between people who would normally be separated
  • Eccentric, clowning behavior
  • Mésalliance — the breakdown of hierarchies
  • Profanation — a democratic, “low” sense of life

Beyond these, carnival has two external characteristics: universality and ritualism. Under Bakhtin’s framework, short video is itself a form of cultural carnival.

A clear example: the recent nationwide obsession with pandas. I personally love panda photos just because they’re ridiculously cute (especially the giant round-necked Huahua). But after the farewell to Xiang Xiang trended, the emotional register of panda coverage shifted into something distinctly off — I won’t get into the details here.

Then there was the sudden explosion of Zibo barbecue. Plenty of media analysis tried to explain what made Zibo catch fire and whether the phenomenon could be replicated. The piece from Quanmeipai — Zibo BBQ Floods Every Feed: Short Video’s Deity-Making Machine, Social Platform Word-of-Mouth, and the “Internet Sensibility” of Internet Cities — highlights two key ideas: short video’s “internet sensibility” and its “sense of presence.”

Short video visibility: presenting vivid, detail-rich footage with visual impact, enhanced by filters and effects. But this kind of high-impact, spectacle-driven visual is hard to sustain — it inevitably enters “deity-making 2.0,” where the emotional, carnivalesque, entertainment-first experience gives way to a process of meaning-production.

On “internet sensibility”:

“Internet sensibility” refers to the cognitive habits and expressive styles built on internet-mediated information flow and connection. It means the thoughts and feelings of ordinary internet users finally get noticed — expressed as fragmented, entertainment-oriented, youth-inflected content with emotional hooks, surprising moments, and strong user participation and experiential engagement.

Short video is both visible and connective, which makes manufacturing “presence” its native strength: “creating immersion, retaining user attention and time. In a fragmented, overabundant media environment, enhancing the audience’s sense of scene is the key to spreading more effectively.” (Same source.)

The viral spread of “toxic positivity” short videos also validates the “presence” theory. From a god’s-eye view, we can easily see that the stories in these videos — daughter-in-law hitting mother-in-law, etc. — are staged fiction. But while we’re actually watching, we get pulled in, we start to believe it, we feel as if we’re there. That’s the “presence” effect.

Compared to text, short video creates a sense of presence more easily, through performance and dramatization. The feeling is almost immersive — as if you’ve joined a family argument, a collapsing friendship — amplified by exaggerated language, theatrical gestures, and hyper-real simulation. More and more users find themselves unable to stop scrolling.

Neil Postman once said: “Modern technology has fundamentally changed people’s relationship to information. In the past, people sought information to solve real problems in their lives. Now they manufacture problems so that useless information has somewhere to go.”

Toxic positivity relentlessly pursues the counterintuitive, even the anti-rational — inventing stranger and stranger “problems” to hook eyeballs. That novelty attracts people, and it also warps their cognition.

As short video producers proliferate and the interaction between creator and audience tightens, these carnival phenomena intensify — and the carnival itself weakens and dissolves people’s capacity to engage with anything serious.

Which brings me to one last thought, on what I see as the dangerous game being played on Bilibili.

The Dangerous Game: Deconstructing the Sacred, Obsessing Over the Surface

Recently I saw the story about Bilibili creators stopping their uploads, and the creator “Wooden Fish Water Heart” posted a response:

“Going forward, we’ll be producing more and more content. Without abandoning long-form deep dives, we’ll expand into more formats, and we’ll explore more commercial possibilities.

‘Work hard, make good content’ — this shouldn’t be a heroic tragedy. It should be the story of standing tall, surviving, and thriving.

I often think: in an era like this, to be able to produce work like this, and interact with viewers like these — isn’t that the luckiest thing imaginable?”

That prompted me to look into Bilibili’s monetization model and short-video strategy. I won’t go into the Huahuo platform issues, ad revenue problems, or user demographic gaps here — I’ve listed references below for anyone interested. What I do want to talk about is the quiet tragedy of creators doing serious long-form work in an era that is slowly phasing them out.

Right now, whether it’s long video, short video, written articles, or viral marketing campaigns — the content that breaks through and generates traffic tends to fall into three buckets:

  • Content that triggers mass anxiety: money, poverty, gender dynamics, education, work — think “new grad unemployment,” “layoff waves,” “how to build a side income,” “quitting the city to farm.”
  • Content that latches onto social flashpoints, stirs outrage, and courts curiosity: like the Yaya and Tofoo incidents.
  • Content that makes the audience feel superior: think NetEase Cloud Music’s various flattering personality quizzes.

Ask yourself honestly: do I actually need this? We don’t acquire knowledge to manufacture traffic and signal superiority, or to trick people into clicking. We acquire knowledge to transmit it.

The more fragmented and attention-deprived the era, the more we need excellent creators to break through with quality, to sink patiently into long-form work with the warmth of sustained companionship. The more “lay-flat culture” spreads, the more we need bright and passionate moments to pierce the grey fog hanging in the atmosphere of the age.

It’s undeniable that modern life has become materially rich and stimulating. Modern people happily marinate in fast-consumption culture. They feel no need to think about essence, because they’ve concluded that essence is just a fiction humans made up anyway. Modern people are too clear-eyed for the Sphinx’s riddle to trouble them — they simply don’t need to think about those kinds of strange questions. Live, and be happy. That’s the modern life-hack.

But is this actually “happiness”?

Short video, games, entertainment — these pleasures require no thought and come very easily, but they can also make you lose yourself. We spend a great deal of energy chasing happiness, and yet happiness starts to feel like fast food — thin, momentary, something always missing.

Short video dunks us briefly into cheap pleasure, lets us forget the version of ourselves that feels purposeless and doesn’t want to try, and it manufactures a feeling of fullness — but in the end, it leaves us emptier and more unsettled than before. The kind of deep, sustained happiness that comes from hard thinking and genuine effort — that’s something none of these substitutes can touch.

Today’s humans are playing a dangerous game: we’ve abandoned everything sacred, everything essential, convinced ourselves nothing is truly elevated. We deconstruct what’s holy, mock what’s deep, and have elevated self-consciousness and present-moment sensation to an almost absolute position. Phenomenology and existentialism are in vogue — cast aside all essence and depth, follow your feelings, live fully in the present.

But here’s what that leads to: when we abandon essence and chase surfaces, when we believe we’ve grown wise, we’ve already begun the journey from human to animal.

References and further reading:

🎬 Books, Films & Shows This Month

  • Reading: Philosophy | Lectures on Western Philosophy (Zhao Lin) | ★★★★★ (5.0)
  • Reading: Philosophy | Philosophy and Life (Fu Peirong) | ★★★★☆ (3.5)
  • Reading: Non-fiction | Sapiens | ★★★★☆ (3.5)
  • Reading: Science | The Selfish Gene | ★★★☆☆ (3.0)
  • Watching: Anime | Demon Slayer: Swordsmith Village Arc | ★★★★★
  • Rewatching: UK Drama | Sherlock | ★★★★★
  • Rewatching: Film | Buried | ★★★★★
  • Watched: Film | The Wandering Earth II | ★★★☆☆
  • Watched: Film | Born to Fly | ★★★☆☆

Light reading month — I’ll make up for it next month. By the way, strongly recommend Zhao Lin’s Lectures on Western Philosophy. It brought back the genuine love for philosophy I felt reading his textbooks (co-authored with Deng Xiaomang) while preparing for graduate school entrance exams. That’s the kind of philosophy worth engaging with. No drama-watching or gaming this month — partly because nothing new caught my eye, partly because the off-day schedule disrupted my rhythm, and the project is at a critical stage with a lot of knowledge to absorb.

This month I took a GPI personality assessment: exceptionally high drive for achievement (9.8/10), emotional regulation also came in at 9.8 as expected (I did manage to stay calm through nine hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic on a holiday weekend — so that tracks). Critical thinking and organization also scored high. But interpersonal and adaptability metrics — sociability, flexibility — came in around 1-something. Something to work on.

April was a tender, fragrant season. Looking forward to finally playing Tears of the Kingdom next month.