Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
As of September 2025, approximately 170 million Americans spend, on average, one hour every day in an app that is designed to maximize psychological grip. While Congress fixates on TikTok’s data collection usages, what hasn’t received enough attention is how the platform has successfully industrialized human attention itself. Where earlier media relied on polished narratives (films with arcs, shows with seasons), TikTok turned culture into a never-ending feedback loop of impulse and machine learning.
TikTok didn’t invent short videos or algorithmic feeds, though. Vine created looping six-second clips in 2013, YouTube has used recommendations for over a decade, Instagram rolled out Stories in 2016, and MTV conditioned audiences to rapid cuts long before any of them. What TikTok did was fuse these scattered experiments into a full-scale system for harvesting attention.
Most platforms’ “For You” pages are far less finely tuned. They adjust slowly, learning from signs like likes, follows, or finished videos. TikTok's algorithm learns instantly from micro-behaviors. You can nuke your feed in minutes just by deliberately watching only one type of video—say, pottery clips or capybara memes. That’s because the algorithm heavily weights engagement signs per video rather than long-term user profiles. Public documentation and leaked papers suggest TikTok may also track micro-behaviors such as how long users hover before swiping away. This results in a recommender system that feels uncannily perceptive.
However, before today, each medium we’ve invented reshaped how we think and consume information. The printing press trained readers in linear, sequential thought, encouraging sustained focus and complex argumentation. Television created visual storytelling and shared cultural moments, with families watching the same shows at the same time and building collective references. The internet introduced hyperlinked thinking, enabling rapid information switching, comparison of perspectives, and knowledge-building through exploration.
Now, the world is picking up on the TikTok model.
News organizations like The Washington Post have invested in and expanded a dedicated TikTok team since 2019, producing short and snappy newsroom videos that regularly go viral. In education, students are struggling with assignments longer than a few minutes and expect information delivered in rapid, visually engaging bursts. In entertainment, traditional stand-up comedy builds tension over minutes before a punchline, but TikTok comedians deliver the absurd immediately — a person discovering their roommate has been using their toothbrush as a cleaning brush — and increasingly structure shows around "clippable moments" designed to go viral. Song introductions have shortened dramatically, with one study finding average intros fell from more than 20 seconds in the 1980s to just five, while movie trailers increasingly resemble TikTok compilations: rapid-fire montages of action sequences and emotional beats rather than traditional narrative setups.
Cultural consumption itself has also become a form of algorithmic training. Instead of browsing Netflix and choosing what to watch, users scroll TikTok to see what the algorithm predicts. This means that you're not consuming culture; you're teaching a machine how to feed you culture more efficiently.
TikTok also rewards hyper-specialization. Entire followings are built on carpet-cleaning videos, paint-mixing shots, or the same dance repeated in new locations. Success comes less from broad talent or universal appeal than from perfecting a narrow niche optimized for the algorithm. In other words, creators who identify and double down on the smallest engagement signals are algorithmically incentivized to specialize, turning micro-content into a precise science of attention capture. This hyper-optimization emerged in markets where dozens of apps competed brutally for user attention. Platforms that kept people engaged survived; the rest died. That evolutionary pressure produced increasingly sophisticated ways to capture attention, and the most successful apps learned to treat human psychology like an engineering problem to be solved through data and iteration.
As American platforms adopt TikTok-style optimization, the format sets expectations for all digital content. Micro-optimization techniques are spreading worldwide, establishing a new standard for how human attention is structured algorithmically. TikTok delivers exactly what we want: immediate satisfaction, personalized content, and endless novelty. But efficiency always involves trade-offs. We gain instant access to exactly the content that triggers our reward systems, but we lose the ability to be bored, to sit with incomplete thoughts, to wrestle with ideas that don't immediately pay off. We lose the serendipity of discovering things we didn't know we wanted.
Are we making this trade consciously? Most users have never considered that their scrolling patterns are training an algorithm, or that their entertainment has been optimized for maximum psychological grip rather than maximum meaning.
The irony, of course, is that if you've read this far, it may mean you’ve already mastered a rare skill: sustained attention in a world of distraction.
Subscribe to get weekly insights on China's tech culture that Western media misses.