Technology
Postman Saw TikTok Coming in 1985
Neil Postman wrote about television in 1985. He was actually writing about every screen you've ever held. What we lost in the transition is bigger than most people admit.
I keep coming back to a book written before I was born.
Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985. He was writing about television. Specifically, the way television had reshaped American public life, politics, education, and journalism. The book is forty years old. Postman is long dead. And yet every time I open it, I have the disorienting sense that he was actually writing about TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and the entire short-form economy. He just didn’t know they would have names.
I’m not the first person to make this connection. There’s a whole genre of “Postman was right” essays floating around. I’m not interested in adding another one. What I want to do here is sit with the specific thing he saw, and ask what it means for those of us who make a living on the platforms he predicted.
The argument, in one paragraph
Postman’s core claim was that the medium of public discourse shapes what can be said in it. Print rewards argument, evidence, sequence, and patience. Television rewards image, emotion, novelty, and pace. As public conversation moved from print to television, the structure of conversation itself changed. Politics became performance. News became spectacle. Education turned into entertainment. He didn’t think this was a matter of bad content on good TV. He thought the medium itself made certain kinds of seriousness impossible.
That last move is the one most people miss. Postman wasn’t a grumpy critic complaining about quality. He was arguing that the form of the medium determines the ceiling of what can be communicated through it. You cannot make a long, careful, contradictory argument in fifteen seconds. The format doesn’t allow it. So if fifteen seconds becomes your dominant format, that kind of argument quietly stops being part of public life.
What changes when 90 seconds is the unit
Apply that frame to the world we now actually live in.
The unit of the modern creator economy is the short-form video. Sixty seconds. Thirty seconds. Sometimes ninety, if you’re being indulgent. Inside that unit, certain things are possible and certain things aren’t.
What’s possible: a strong opinion, a clean punchline, a relatable confession, a striking image, a sharp contrast. These things travel beautifully.
What’s not possible: a developed argument, a contradiction the creator can’t resolve, a finding that requires three steps of reasoning, an idea that gets better the longer you sit with it. These things just don’t make it past the algorithm. Not because the algorithm hates them. Because the format can’t carry them. Even if you tried, no one would finish watching.
So over time, the kind of thinking the medium rewards becomes the kind of thinking people produce. And the kind of thinking people produce slowly becomes the kind of thinking people can do. Not because we got dumber. Because we trained on a different shape.
This is the part Postman saw, just with a different screen in mind.
What we lost is harder to see than what we gained
The gains are obvious. Anyone can publish. Voices that print would never have allowed now reach millions. Information moves faster. Communities form across continents. I have nothing nostalgic to say about a world where three white guys in New York decided what counted as the news.
What we lost is harder to point to, because absence is invisible. But here’s where I keep landing.
We lost patience with developed thought. I notice it in myself first. I read fewer long essays than I used to. I find my attention pinging away from anything that doesn’t promise a payoff inside two paragraphs. The skill of staying with an idea while it slowly turns into something else has gotten weaker. Not gone. Weaker. I have to consciously rebuild it the way I’d rebuild a muscle after an injury.
We lost the assumption that public conversation should be hard. Television, Postman argued, retrained public discourse around the idea that everything serious should also be entertaining. Short-form video has finished that job. Now even the framing of difficulty is suspect. “Why are you making this so complicated?” is a real critique now, where once “you’re oversimplifying” carried equal weight. The pendulum has swung all the way to “if it can’t fit in a Reel, it’s not worth saying.”
And we lost, this is the one I think about most, the line between consuming information and being entertained. They’ve fully merged. Watching the news, watching analysis, watching a friend’s day, watching a joke, watching a sales pitch. All the same UI, all the same feed, all the same dopamine pattern. Your brain stops tagging information as a different category than amusement. Which means it stops treating either as particularly important.
What this means if you make stuff for the internet
Here’s where the post turns useful, because complaining about the medium accomplishes nothing.
If you create content, you live inside this dynamic whether you like it or not. The question isn’t whether to use short-form. It’s how to use it without letting it eat your entire intellectual life.
The version of this I’ve landed on, which I’m still refining: short-form is a hook, not a body. It’s the moment you grab someone’s attention. It is not the place where your actual thinking lives. If your thinking lives entirely in 60-second clips, you’ll eventually stop being able to think in any other format, because you’ll stop practicing.
The body of your work. The place where ideas develop, where contradictions get held, where you say something you couldn’t say in a clip. Has to live somewhere with more breathing room. A newsletter. A long blog post. A podcast you actually edit. A book, if you’ve got one in you. You need at least one home for the longer form, even if it’s smaller than your short-form numbers.
This is roughly the argument behind why your personal brand feels fake, although that post comes at it from a different angle. The brand feels fake partly because the short-form medium can’t carry a person. It can carry a posture. The longer-form is where you actually become someone.
The other shift worth making: read books that the algorithm would never recommend. Not as an act of nostalgia, but as a deliberate counterweight. The brain that only reads what surfaces in a feed is being trained by the feed. The brain that also reads things worth thinking in systems about has a second source of shape. The same goes for decision-making books for high-stakes moments. They teach a structure of thought that no short-form format will ever model for you.
What Postman would say now
I don’t know. He’d probably be more depressed than vindicated, which is the lot of people who turn out to be right about cultural decline.
But I think his actual argument, that the medium quietly sets the ceiling on what can be said, is more useful than the “Postman warned us” framing makes it sound. It isn’t a doom prediction. It’s a tool. You can use it to ask, of any new platform: what does this format make easy, and what does it quietly make impossible? Then you can choose what you build your work on with that answer in mind.
That’s it. That’s the whole take.
We’re not going back to print. The feed is going to keep getting faster. The unit is going to keep getting shorter. The question isn’t whether to participate. The question is whether you still know how to think outside the unit when you close the app.
I’m not sure I always do. But I’m trying to keep the door open.