Chopped Off

The psyop of truncation

Short-form video I get, even when I don’t like it—little dramas, memes, stunts, or jokes that are complete in themselves. Consuming them is like popping mind candy. Sometimes better, sometimes worse than that.

What I don’t get is posting a random clip chopped out of the middle of a song, riff, dance, speech, or poem.

A song, for example, has a form, an arc, which is designed to create tension and then bring it to resolution. If a song sounds at all compelling, I want to hear the whole thing. I am always baffled and frustrated when it randomly cuts off in midphrase. This is more than just mentally annoying, it’s physiologically sadistic. It repeatedly brutalizes and breaks up the expectation of completion and form.

It will be explained away as merely catering to our ever shorter attention spans, which were fractured in the first place by ads, TikTok minivideos, stimulus overload, and multitasking. Who has the patience anymore to sit through a whole three-minute piece of music? Why torture GenZ butterflies by forcing them to do so?

I sense an agenda, conscious or not, to create learned helplessness.

The original experiments on learned helplessness were performed on nursing puppies, who to crawl to their mother’s teats had to cross a grid that gave them an electric shock. The puppies developed behavioral symptoms resembling depression. (Just reporting this makes me want to sob.)

These experiments were performed in the 1960s and ’70s by Martin Seligman, whose name means “Happy/blissful man” in German, and who now directs the Penn Positive Psychology Center.

Consider that training us not to expect form, completion, or resolution is disabling our will.