THE SMOOSHENING IS UPON US
I can't stop thinking about how much storytelling is evolving.
Generally speaking, most folks recognize that the way stories are told has changed. What’s wild is that you see it everywhere from streaming to vertical videos, viral dances, and the fact that every platform now seems determined to become some combination of Reddit, TikTok, & Google.
But it’s more than that. It’s the tone of people’s voices, buccal fat removal to our obsessive need to swipe and scroll. Then there’s the increasingly blurry line between telling a story, building a following, selling a product, being sold one, and being the product sold.
New entertainment languages are emerging before we have even figured out what to call them. The number of stories being made has exploded, along with the number of ways we can encounter them: on personal devices, in theaters, through social media, at live events, inside games, and in physical spaces designed to be experienced and recorded at the same time.
It feels like everything is changing because everything is changing.
The World Runs on Stories
Stories make us human. They’re how we make sense of what happened, argue about why it happened, and decide what should happen next. Laws, statistics, politics, technology—all of it reaches us through story.
And every time we invent a new way to tell those stories, we change. Even more importantly, writing gave memories somewhere to live. The printing press sent ideas around the world faster than anyone ever thought possible. The telephone let our voices cross distances. The internet put humanity in conversation with itself and transformed stories into something humanity had never seen before; remixed in ways both new and old.
Then came social media.
Now, something can happen in one small corner of corner of the world. Say, a piece of glacier falls into a body of water and the rest of us can watch as hundreds if not thousands of people are washed away in real time. Live. We have never been this aware of one another. Nor have did we consider how this might cause the world to become overwhelmed by everything there is to witness.
What we’re coming into realizing is that witnessing is not the same as understanding. It is certainly not the same as acting.
Palestinians can wonder how the world witnessed their story yet still allows their suffering to continue. Americans can wonder how a reality television star became the leader of a political cult or how a Muslim man like Zohran Mamdani could capture the hearts of so many New Yorkers.
An Explosion of Possibility
There is something beautiful inside this moment.
Artists can teach themselves in ways that have never been possible before. Someone with an internet connection can study techniques, traditions, and disciplines they may never have been able to access geographically, financially, or institutionally.
Those learners can then tell stories through an ever-expanding highway of vehicles. A creator no longer has to wait for a gate-kept legacy media brand to decide that their voice deserves distribution.
We have never had the ability to reach an audience this large.
It’s even crazier to consider that we have never had such a powerful ability to reach an audience this specific. A story does not have to speak to everyone to travel deeply. It can find the precise community that has been waiting for someone to say it.
Isn’t all of this supposed to present us with a remarkable creative opening? Perhaps.
The Smooshening
The same systems that offer us infinite creative possibilities also push everything toward the same digestible, overprocessed slop.
A personal confession, a political argument, a comedy sketch, a news report, a fan edit, and an advertisement can now arrive in the same dimensions, with the same cadence, accompanied by the same captions, asking for the same engagement.
Culture is abundant, but it is also being flattened. All of these categorized eyeballs are chum for the dominant systems of capitalism and government. Their value is increasingly translated into measurements of views, watch time, clicks, shares, sentiment, demographics, conversions, purchasing behavior, and political influence.
Everything is eventually reduced to something that can be consumed.
AI. Oh, AI! The "intelligence" feeding artificial intelligence is born from humanity itself. Libraries. Films. Music. Television. Family photos. Home videos. Forums. Wikipedia. Every record of what we knew and who we are became The Ocean of Humanity.
Social Media knew exactly what to do. Suddenly we weren't just recording history. We were broadcasting every bit of what makes us human. We filled the ocean with us. Our technology feeds off of it.
Consider Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio. In doing so, they gained a position inside millions of living rooms, with direct access to the every bit of data to those “intellegent” devices are able to collect. Walmart can connect what people watch with what people purchase, and sell advertising within the same ecosystem.
The screen, the distributor, the advertiser, the retailer, the viewer data, and the purchase data are becoming one system. A smooshening.
And then there’s Amazon who represents an even broader version of this convergence: retail, advertising, entertainment, cloud infrastructure, smart-home technology, and vast stores of human data operating within the same corporate world.
The black mirrors through which we watch stories are also watching us.
The Slopening Is Coming
If the Smooshening describes the compression of human expression into content and data, then the Slopening is what happens when our extraordinary creative opening begins to clog from within. AI-generated slop is being firehosed onto the internet.
While TikTokification didn't invent this dynamic, it certtainly perfected it. The feed never reaches the end, so the demand for something to fill it never ends either.
“Nearly 60% of TikTok videos shown to new users are AI slop, study finds.”
TNW Reports: “That is the central finding of a report published by video editing platform Kapwing, which analysed 10,742 TikTok videos across 20 popular categories and separately examined the first 500 videos shown on the For You page of a freshly created account.”
Source: The Next Web
The largest storytelling network humanity has ever built risks becoming full of content but empty of meaningful human presence.
If we don’t make some decisions soon, all that will be left is a dead internet. Bots creating what bots consume.
Let me be abundantly clear here: we should not assume that today’s creative access is permanent. The climate is changing. Oligarchs are consolidating media. A small number of companies and individuals increasingly own the studios, platforms, devices, infrastructure, and methods of distribution through which stories reach us.
I’m not sure we really know where all of this will land us as humans who tell stories.
So Then, What Role Do You Want to Play?
We have access to more accumulated human knowledge than any generation before us. There is enough on this planet to feed, clothe, and house everyone. Every person should have the right to live a life free from war. We possess tools that could help us move toward a more beautiful world.
But tools do not choose the world they create. People do.
Greed can push even our most extraordinary inventions beyond what is sustainable for human life. Technology can help us connect, or it can help someone extract more from us. A story can enlarge our understanding of another person, or it can reduce that person to a category, a consumer, an enemy, or a data point.
This is why I feel both excited and responsible when I think about the future of storytelling.
The future is not simply something that will happen to storytellers. Storytellers are helping to build it.
So, what role do you want to play in the future of storytelling?
What do you want the future of the world to look like?
And are the stories you tell helping us imagine that world?
While we are still allowed to upload and host our own stories, tell as many of them as you can. Tell them in whatever way you can. Learn everything available to you. Experiment with every form that interests you. Find the people who need what only you can make.
We should probably take advantage of this opening while we have it.
The future of storytelling (and perhaps much more than storytelling) is still in our hands.
