YouTube Shorts Averages Over 200 Billion Daily Views

So much wasted potential...

Source

“YouTube Shorts is now averaging over 200 billion daily views” translates to: “every YouTube user in the world watches 80 Shorts a day” translates to: “crack dealers bragging about how much crack they've sold” translates to: you have fucking lost your north star. And you wonder why so many people hate technologists.

I have a serious problem. I like to think of technology as the main source of well-being and progress. Then I look at that image—the polished sentence, the guy with the hoodie looking like a dork, the red ink someone decided was a good idea because “look at that big number! Isn’t that good news??”—and all I can think is that, somehow, my happy belief makes me an advocate for what has to be, by virtue of pushing things to the limit, the most hated people on Earth.

From the inside, it’s clear who’s working to make technology a force for good, and who’s using it, at any cost, as a means to an end (which almost always means making more money and sometimes killing people). From the outside, though, it’s easy to lump them all into the same bag. I hate when people do that. And I’d hate to do that myself. It’s genuinely bad luck that some of the most valuable living people today and some of the most trashy people living today are separated by what feels like a line in the sand. (It’s literally a line in the sand because sand is silicon and silicon is chips and chips is software and hardware, and with that you can build smart household robots or remote-controlled tractors that boost crop yields several times over. Or, on the other hand, you could use them to make surveillance cameras, war drones, or the YouTube Short recommender algorithm so optimized that it gets 200 billion views a day out of an 8 billion population.)

Anti-tech and anti-AI sentiments respond to a real truth: there are genuinely bad people, with bad intentions, acting with an indifference that borders on negligence and criminality, irresponsibly wielding the power to cause irreversible harm to the entire world. (Maybe Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil” applies here, but that would strip these people of accountability and they are yet to take any.)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most well-known case. He’s tried to scrub his public image with one outfit overhaul after another, but the signature beneath documents detailing despicable actions against teenagers hasn’t changed. Meta’s social platforms—Instagram and Facebook (reels)—are as toxic or more than YouTube. There’s also TikTok, a Chinese creation. But, who’d blame China for quite successfully using a psychological weapon against the West? The US has repeatedly proved it doesn’t care if young Americans turn numb and dumb, whereas China was already protecting its own in 2021 and keeps doing it in 2025.

Those of you who have seamlessly transferred your wariness toward social media platforms to the AI industry are completely correct. The same people who put small screens and social networks in our hands 20 years ago are now tirelessly working on AI companions that lie to us, charm us, and confuse us (I’d normally qualify this statement by praising the benefits and usefulness of AI, but not this time). Not all of them do this—some are still working on social media, trying to make the YouTube algorithm better still, and others came clean to AI and are interested in stuff other than addicting 13-year-olds—but way too many do.

So I don’t blame regular people for treating Silicon Valley like a homogeneous hive mind whose only contribution to the world is digital heroin. Images like the one above tempt me to cancel my membership to the pro-technology crowd and switch sides, even though I know the criticisms are unfairly sweeping. Who I do blame—with a fury that’s hard to contain—are those in the privileged position to change the world for the better, who are instead dragging it centuries backward, to the dark ages. You are the greatest disgrace in history because you could have done so much good for the world, so much… and instead, you did this. You’re the embodiment of wasted potential, of deadly opportunity cost. Instead of building tools to cultivate our minds and our children’s, you’re creating something you know corrupts and rots them. For what? For some short-term selfish gains in the shape of green paper. How do you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror?

This post is clearly not about AI or algorithms or technology. I’m talking about the people who design those things. Brain rot is manufactured. An intentional, meticulous, precise, indifferent human manufacturing process. Refined through meeting after meeting: careless engineers, product managers, and designers sit down in comfy chairs and cheap t-shirts, the air conditioning humming, a cup of coffee or two still lingering in their esophagus, and they discuss—with as much explicitness as one can manage without vomiting up the whole grain bacon bagel—how to take “as much of our time and conscious attention as possible.” In the past, those who knowingly brought this kind of harm upon the tribe were made into examples.

Am I using too strong language? Is my language the problem because it’s making you uneasy? 200 billion daily views are too many lives lost for me to care.

This kind of concern has been raised as many times as there have been technological breakthroughs: TV, phones, Google, videogames... Does that mean that the concerns were wrong? No. They probably were always right. Since the very beginning, when Socrates said that writing was bad for memory and genuine understanding, they have been right. But is writing net bad? No, because we’re glad to pay the trade-off. But lately, the trade-off has not been worth it. We still pay the price because the designers of the modern world learned to hack our psychological vulnerabilities. You can’t easily defend against that, not systemically, not individually. So we pay the price of a terrible trade-off—perpetual entertainment for brain rot—because we don’t know better.

I don’t intend these words to change anything. Not even to illuminate you in some new way. They have been, in one form or another, repeated to exhaustion. What I want is for them to become a tiny contribution to an echo that refuses to fade; an echo that is, on the contrary, intensifying every day. The future of the world depends on it. We must never stop repeating these words—until they sink so deep into our collective memory that when judgment finally reaches these people, not a trace of empathy stirs in our hearts.

And to you, damned ones, I say: Your time is running out. People have woken up. This isn’t a hopeful prayer I’m casting into the wind. It’s a statement of something I see. Every day. More and more. The most powerful trend in the next decade will be the outright rejection of this destructive way of life: the constant hyperoptimization, the absorbent algorithmic feeds, the dozens of social platforms, and the pervasive digitalization of our lives. We won’t put up with the enablers of this human tragedy—grinning as they claim, with euphemistic rhetoric, that their addictive platform is now swallowing more souls than it did yesterday. Not anymore. People have woken up. And your time is running out.

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