idle gaze 053: depressive hedonia
NPC livestreamers, sludge content and enslavement to the pleasure principle.
In his book “capitalist realism”, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher described teaching at a college in east London, where he observed a certain phenomenon among those he taught. He wrote that, whereas normally depression is characterised by anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure – his students seemed unable to do anything except pursue pleasure. He coined this behaviour “depressive hedonia” - the intense but ultimately unfulfilling pursuit of short-term gratification fuelled by their depressive state.
Fisher’s term came to mind when assessing some of the more surreal trends emerging from the depths of social media lately. With increasing frequency, it seems like these formats are optimized to aggressively drill into the deepest layers of the brain’s pleasure center, offering to fill a certain kind of negative mental void.
Fisher argued that the impoverished life of the contemporary worker under late-stage capitalism - defined by a pervading sense of alienation, boredom and powerlessness - was being exploited by corporations to sell them sugary beverages, junk food and entertainment as a means to escape their depressive state. Likewise, the TikTok For You page increasingly feels like a vending machine dispensing digital, saccharine-sweet drinks that deliver instant, but ultimately nutritionless hits of dopamine to the bored and lonely masses.
This is most strikingly illustrated in the rise of “NPC TikTok Live streamers”. You will no doubt have come across Pinkydoll over the past few weeks, with videos depicting a series of TikTok Lives in which the livestreamer repeats the same set of catchphrases and gestures with impressive mechanical efficiency. “Gang gang. Ice cream so good. Ice cream so good. Yes yes yes! Yes yes yes! Gang gang. Ice cream so good” Pinkydoll repeats while she pops individual kernels of popcorn with a hair straightener. However random this appears at first glance, she is responding to ‘gifts’ that viewers are paying to send. Like a slot machine, users insert money into the proverbial one-armed bandit and await for the corresponding act of gratitude. The effect is mesmerizing, addictive and nestled deep within the uncanny valley.
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Many viewers have described a surreal sensation of their brain rewiring with every play of Pinkydoll’s siren song. It’s as if the videos, so intense in visual and auditory stimuli, are somehow reaching deep into previously dormant synaptic connections in our minds and firing them up.
This has increasingly become the defining experience of scrolling through TikTok: a jumbled mess of visual stimulation, bright colours and pleasing sounds, in its purest and most concentrated form.
The rise of “sludge” content falls into this bucket too: clips of cartoons, like Family Guy or Ricky & Morty, stitched together, or shown side-by-side with random footage from video games and ASMR clips. This visual slurry provides a perfect amalgamation of information for our pattern-seeking brains, sensorialy rich yet devoid of any deeper meaning or value.
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As James Greig noted in Dazed: “it feels like we are reaching the logical endpoint of algorithmic entertainment”, where content is designed purely to capture our attention and boost engagement.
And while on the surface this all seems like silly and fun formats designed to hack the algorithm and maximize engagement, what’s interesting is the deeply existential dread rising up in the public consciousness. People describe Family Guy sludge content producing a sensation of “brain rot”. NPC livestreamers are “proof that society is crumbling before our eyes”, "serving men of the world are lost and without control of their own lives, being offered an opportunity to control something mindless”.
We feel like we’re catching a glimpse of a dystopian future where both the viewer and creator are unhealthily tethered to the content. The content viewer - lonely, alienated and bored - is uncontrollably enslaved to the pleasure principle, unable to break away from the incessant flow of dopamine. Equally, the content creator is bound to the metrics of the platform. Like zombies, their onscreen actions are dictated by their desire for reach and engagement.
Psychologists often make the distinction between immediate pleasures, steered by instinctual compulsion, and long-term fulfilment, which requires discipline and hardship, but ultimately leads to a more sustainable form of happiness.
This differentiation helps to explain what’s currently happening in the digital zeitgeist. While we speed towards the logical endpoint of attention-optimized, pleasure-fuelled media, there is also an anti-algorithm rebellion rising across culture (more on this in idle gaze 052). A slower, more playful, more deliberate internet is growing quietly on the fringes, away from the visual overstimulation. An internet designed for more human curation, serendipitous content discovery and thoughtful content consumption (and creation) (more on this in idle gaze 033). One that strives for the long-term fulfilment of mental nutrition over the sugary hits offered by TikTok’s For You page.
I felt my brain rotting looking at those tic tocs.