In his renowned novel “Brave New World,” author Aldous Huxley describes a futuristic London society functioning on pleasure. Babies are made in a lab, and citizens have as much sex as they want, as women wear belts carrying contraceptives.

Citizens also rely heavily on a substance called “soma,” which they take in “grammes.” This soma takes them to alternate forms of reality, functioning as a high-quality drug.

While manufactured in assembly lines, babies listen to a loudspeaker repeating certain phrases for hours — a process called hypnopaedia. This continues throughout childhood, as young kids sleep in rows of beds with the loudspeaker booming out hypnopaedic phrases.

Only the phrases aren’t the same for everyone. The babies are created in different groups. Some are designed to be Alphas and Betas and be intellectual members of society; others are designed to be Deltas and Gammas and do the grunt work.

Here’s an example of a hypnopaedic phrase fed to Betas: “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid … I’m so glad I’m a Beta.”

As they grow up, citizens in “Brave New World” repeat the hypnopaedic phrases as obvious morals, such as “A gramme (of soma) is better than a damn,” and “Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

Does any of this sound familiar? How about “chopped” or “cooked” or “Nobody does it like Sig Nu?”

Short-form content, like TikTok videos and Instagram Reels, is the modern-day version of hypnopaedia and soma, combined. It is being used to create a society of dumbed-down uniformity through the use of repeated phrases and opinions. It is also hauntingly addictive. 

Except, unlike hypnopaedia, short-form content is not being fed to us while we sleep. 

What do you do when you get in the elevator with strangers? Or when you sit down in the waiting room at the doctor’s office?

Most of us, by habit, reach for our right pocket and pull out the blue-light beauty pageant machine. When you’re scrolling through videos reducing actresses to “hotness” or replays of your favorite anime, you are being programmed with opinions that over one billion worldwide users are absorbing, as well.  

“When people are uncertain about a topic, social media can convincingly influence a particular position,” the founder of the e-commerce company Iuncta writes. “But if a level of certainty exists, social media can provide all the affirmation needed to validate that belief.”

For those exposed to brand-new topics, their opinions can be molded. And for those already dead-set on their opinions on a topic, they aren’t exposed to new, diverse perspectives. Instead, they are hooked into a dopamine-reinforcement loop of thumb-scrolling confirmation bias. 

Hypnopaedia induces different phrases based on citizens’ predestined place in society — just like TikTok and Instagram use formulated algorithms to suggest certain videos and posts to the user. If you “like” a lot of “I Think You Should Leave” clips on Reels, you’ll continually see more of these clips as you scroll.

Short-form videos are infecting our vocabulary with vernacular words like “chopped” and “cooked.” 

One of these words describing the effects of “doomscrolling” was recently named the Oxford Word of the Year: Brain rot. 

Brain rot is “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Just like hypnopaedia, kids and young adults will use phrases like “brain rot” to proudly describe their activities. They are proud of their addiction, saying things like: “I’m so cooked bro, I just laid around and rotted all night instead of studying.”

Just like how citizens of Huxley’s futuristic London are proud to say, “A gramme is better than a damn.”

Because, as marketing professor Adam Alter describes in his book, “Irresistible,” we don’t see it as an addiction: “The term ‘addiction’ can’t possibly apply to a majority of the population.” 

Addictions are often seen as an issue for a minute population. If everybody else is doing it, it must not be an addiction. After all, “Everybody’s happy nowadays!”

Kids and young adults will also quote trending phrases like “Nobody does it like Sig Nu,” which comes from a viral video of a student at a college party.

This college student is not any sort of reputable person, nor is the phrase attributed to any meaningful context or themes. It is sarcastically popular. Kids and young adults are socially pressured into consuming content like this in order to understand and make these references; in order to “fit in.” 

Short-form content can be used as a tool for public service announcements, marketing and quick access to information and civic engagement. It can also function as a platform for minority voices and cultural diversity, with PrideMonth, BLM and body positivity movements prominently represented on apps like TikTok.

However, short-form content does not require historical references, conflict set-ups or powerful themes of morality and identity to become popular.

All it requires is to be recommended and repeated. There is no need for well-developed scripts or political opinions supported by educated arguments. Short-form content is an algorithmic assembly line. It promotes manufactured trends and opinions that spread like wildfire precisely because they do not require much of anything from their audience. 

Or, as Huxley puts it, “God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.” 

Users quoting trends like this are making fun of their own intellect and sense of humor, and they don’t even realize it. They are caught up in a cyclical loop of sarcasm. Users act like they know they’re addicted to sarcastic humor with meta-phrases like “brain rot.” 

They fail to recognize that their addiction is predicated on this very acknowledgment. They also don’t realize how it impacts their opinions. 

The mere-exposure effect is “a cognitive bias where individuals show a preference for things they’re more familiar with … even without conscious recognition.”

For example, content creators will reference Donald Trump dancing to the YMCA song.

While users may laugh at memes like this while scrolling, they again don’t realize that this is the same cyclical, sarcastic humor hypnotising them. 

As the mere-exposure effect suggests, familiarity with short-form content is likely to ingrain a cognitive bias in the user’s perspective towards issues. 

Whether we like to admit it or not, humans are “creatures of emotion.” If a voter is continually exposed to videos of one candidate bloodied and pumping their fist and another candidate being compared to annoying Star Wars characters, which will they believe to have more “energy in the executive?”   

Short-form content is making people accept implanted opinions as their own. It disguises this by making users think they are aware of their crippling addiction through sarcastic humor, repetition and social pressure. 

We need to combat short-form content in order to prevent our opinions from becoming the result of mindless humor and fear-mongering propaganda. Not only are we suffering the consequences of consuming pleasure-based content, but we are also suffering the consequences of what we aren’t doing. 

While scrolling through TikToks and Reels, we are not talking to that stranger in the elevator or reading a book before we go to bed. Instead of walking to class in silence with our thoughts, we have an AirPod in our ear feeding us morals and ethics — the booming hypnopaedic loudspeaker. 

Short-form content also reduces attention span, which impairs our ability to develop our own opinions through research or to read a 1300-word article. We choose to spend our free time in-between classes or at night scrolling through pleasurable content rather than educating and improving ourselves — the hypnopaedic principle of “Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day.”

Nobody does it like TikTok and Instagram when it comes to “making people like their unescapable social destiny.” We must wake up from this sleepwalking hypnopaedic nightmare and stop letting short-form content dance its way to totalitarian control. 

Or else we all may very well be “cooked.” 

Alex is a freshman in Business. 

[email protected]