A lot of stuff on the internet is just an appeal to the novelty-craving ego. It is rather obvious with pornography, but what is more subtle is for instance the novelty porn of many "educational" channels, which blast you with cool facts after cool facts, but which never amount to anything: no deep understanding of any principles and how it relates to other aspects of life, no introspecting on what matters, just quips and bits about discrete, isolated aspects of reality.
The systems around us optimize for ease, such as the ease of watching, the ease of playing, the ease of understanding, etc. But ease is very different from what is wholesome, which is apparent with food, though we don't seem to translate that lesson well with information and activity. The stuff you need to hear is not the same as that which you want to hear.
This is also why I am rather skeptical when people say that video games are a form of art, because video games are pretty much always geared towards some type of ease, if not straight up addictiveness. It is not always the case, but the fact that video games respond to a user makes this dynamic far too tempting, especially because video games cost so much to make. We wouldn't call a book or painting that panders to the reader or viewer a masterpiece—though this doesn't mean that deliberate obscurantism is art either—because there is something much more fundamental, and unselfish, that art wishes to get at: beauty, freedom, love, death, truth, and the vividness of life, just to list the most common ones. Pandering means pandering to the ego, whereas art is about pointing to something outside the shell of that ego. 7
4 From Moliere:
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2024-07-22