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are the engine of social media and streaming. When you pull down to refresh your feed, you don't know if you’ll see a funny cat video or a tragic piece of news. This uncertainty is neurologically addictive. Similarly, streaming services use "auto-play" to remove the friction of choice, keeping you in a passive state of consumption.

But we—the audience—have followed suit. We treat a 10-hour prestige drama like a 30-second TikTok. If it doesn’t hook us in the first 90 seconds, we bounce. If the ending is ambiguous, we call it "bad writing" instead of "art."

The democratization of technology is perhaps the biggest driver in modern media. High-quality cameras on smartphones and accessible editing software mean that the next big "hit" can come from a bedroom rather than a boardroom.