“No one does it like Sully!” “Mike Wazowski has done it again!” “Classic Mike!” shatters through my head like a sentient dental drill rebelling against its blue-gloved doctorate master. My 9-year-old Wazowski-beaten eyes slip down under their lids, and recede into my head hoping to escape—at least visually—the hell of this media connection.

Consuming short-form content is a process of self-harm. Drawn-out long-form suicide, via short-form bursts of unfeelable pain. The most shameful form of suicide. It is the slow death of your attention span, a slow descent into mental/emotional subordination, the process of losing a temporal grasp of your life. Waving a dilapidated goodbye to your newly disfigured consciousness as you surrender fully to The Entertainment.

Every month I am greeted by a new, increasingly worse UI. Everything degrades, everything rots. But iTunes’s clunkiness and customizability felt more physical if that makes sense. It was pleasantly cumbersome in its depth of options, a right click would lead to 20 different selection bars, each with their own drop-down menus of possible query. Spotify on the other hand, feels like an attack on the intelligence of anyone who uses it.

We’re just pigs at a trough, slopping and having our snouts doused in industrial brown liquid that we not just consume, but find the meaning of alienated life through. And now in the age of fandomization, we pigs can use the internet to tell TV writers and content creators what WE want our slop to taste like! Happily mixing our pigshit in with the slop already fed to us.

Online entertainment media has created a want for novelty only if it is within the relations of trust, the insane level of intimacy they have built with their pre-existing objects of consumption. It’s a form of engagement with already consumed media that thumbnails function to. A thumbnail’s role is in complete relation to trust.