• 10 Dec, 2025 *

YouTube has incredible educational content. Kids who discover Kurzgesagt instead of drama channels, who find Khan Academy instead of reaction videos, who choose substance over spectacle - they’ll outperform their parents by orders of magnitude. Parents who teach discernment, who model healthy consumption habits, who help their kids navigate the algorithm’s dopamine traps - their children will inherit a world they actually know how to think about.

There’s reason for hope in that. Not everyone is mainlining the dregs of social media. Quality content exists. It just doesn’t optimise for the engagement metrics that the platform rewards. But there’s something else here.

In twenty years, when someone makes an "I Love the 2010s" nostalgia special, this decade’s social media culture will occupy the same cultural space as ’70s disco excess, ’90s nu-metal angst, and ’00s reality TV narcissism. A source of generational embarrassment. One of those "ugh, what were we thinking?" moments that every generation gets to cringe at in retrospect. How we turned sociopathic narcissists into role models - it’s going to be particularly brutal to watch.

Social media stardom creates a uniquely toxic cocktail that traditional celebrity never quite managed. Actors have publicists. Musicians have handlers. Athletes have agents and contracts and leagues with behavioural standards. These systems exist partly to protect the talent from themselves, partly to protect the brand from the talent.

YouTubers and TikTokers have none of that. They wake up, film themselves, upload directly to millions of viewers, read every comment, bask in immediate adoration or rage, then repeat the cycle. Daily. For years. The driving mythology tells them they’re self-made, that they earned their platform through pure merit, that they owe nothing to corporate machinery or systemic promotion.

It’s a perfect recipe for creating monsters who are aspirational figures to kids.

The algorithm doesn’t care about character development or emotional maturity or the long-term psychological effects of parasocial relationships. It cares about engagement. Driven by drama, outrage, manufactured conflict. The gradual erosion of boundaries between performance and personality until there’s nothing left but the performance.

We’re watching human beings optimise themselves for virality in real-time...

I don’t have solutions for this. Maybe there aren’t any that don’t involve fundamentally restructuring how these platforms work, which isn’t happening anytime soon. Maybe the solution is just time - waiting for enough people to get burned by parasocial relationships and manufactured drama that the culture shifts toward valuing substance over spectacle.

Or maybe this is just what media looks like now. Maybe we’re past the point where gatekeepers and institutional filters served any protective function, and we’re learning to navigate an attention economy that rewards the worst impulses.

The kids absorbing these patterns as normal - they deserve better models of what success and influence can look like.

The good content is still there. It’s just harder to find, and it doesn’t pay as well, and it definitely doesn’t get the clicks.