Ultra-Processed Information

Sometime in the early 2000s, during a meeting about a new food product, I watched a focus group respond to something that had been carefully engineered to activate multiple pleasure centers at once.

Curious, I asked what benefit consumers would actually experience. Would it taste better? Feel more satisfying? Leave them feeling fuller?

The answer from the consultants was a single word:

Moreish.

The goal was not necessarily to satisfy people. The goal was to make them want more.

Every company wants growth. There is nothing unusual about that. The deeper question is what kind of growth we are optimizing for.

That word has stayed with me for more than two decades.

As you know, I make an effort to listen to a wide range of ideological perspectives. I find it more useful to listen to people I tend to disagree with than people I agree with. Otherwise, it’s like going to the gym and never using resistance to strengthen your muscles. We need resistance to grow.

Recently, while listening to Ezra Klein interview Texas legislator James Talarico, I heard a phrase that immediately brought that meeting back to mind. Talarico described social media as “the empty calories of civic life.” A way of feeling engaged without doing the work of engagement.

The same moreish quality. The same engineered loop of anticipation and reward that never quite resolves into fullness.

We are consuming ultra-processed information.

Empty Calories for the Mind

The parallels between food and information are striking. What food technology has done to nutrition over the last fifty years, information technology may be doing to our minds today.

The phone in our pocket is only the most obvious example. We increasingly live in a world designed around immediacy. We want more now, more instantly, more continuously.

In honest moments, many of us recognize the tradeoff. We run out of health, attention, and patience. We crowd out many of the qualities that ultimately make life meaningful.

The food industry discovered decades ago that growth could be accelerated by bypassing satiety. The information industry has discovered something similar about attention. The chip engineered to dissolve in your mouth before the satiety signal can fire has its analogue in the headline engineered to provoke a reaction before the cognitive signal can fire. Both are designed to keep you coming back. Neither is designed primarily to leave you satisfied.

The result is a culture that is increasingly information-obese and meaning-malnourished.

The Architecture Is the Same

The food industry did not become what it is because food scientists are villains. It became what it is by responding rationally to a world that rewards a particular kind of growth: volume, frequency, and repeat consumption. There is no commercial incentive to help people consume less of your product. Long-term health is largely invisible on a quarterly earnings call.

Media has entered a similar dynamic. Outlets are rewarded for what generates immediate reaction: clicks, outrage, and engagement. Knowledge and wisdom are much harder to measure, so time on page, share rates, and comment volume are what the system optimizes for.

It is easy to be angry with the players. The platforms. The publishers. The food companies. But they are doing what the rules ask them to do. The harder and more useful question is about the people writing the rules.

If we want different outcomes, and almost everyone says they do, we have to change the incentives. If we want a media ecosystem that informs people, we should reward attention that leaves readers more capable, not attention that leaves them more agitated.

Some who agree in principle argue that changing incentives at that scale is impossible. The honest version of that argument is that the people benefiting from the existing rules have no reason to change them. That is a different problem. It is a problem of political will, not technical capacity.

The Symptoms Are Everywhere

Just as nutritional deficiency has symptoms, so does the consumption of ultra-processed information.

The first is a shortened attention span. Not an inability to focus, but a growing intolerance for the delayed gratification that real understanding requires. People read fewer books and fewer long-form articles.

The second is what might be called positional certainty without earned understanding. Strong opinions about complex things that arrived pre-assembled, without the work of actually thinking them through. The conviction is real. The reasoning that should sit underneath the conviction is missing.

We have built an ecosystem where certainty arrives faster than understanding. That should make us suspicious of the certainty rather than reassured by it.

The third is what researchers are beginning to call headline cognition. The phenomenon where people believe they understand a topic because they have consumed many emotional signals about it.

The feeling of being informed grows faster than the substance of it does. Over time, the two become difficult to distinguish.

The fourth, and perhaps most concerning, is a growing discomfort with ambiguity. Real knowledge is full of caveats, uncertainty, and revision. Ultra-processed information is confident and clean. People raised on it begin to find nuance not just boring but actively suspicious.

Caveats start to read as evasion. Uncertainty starts to read as weakness.

Length Is Not the Measure

It would be easy to read all of this as an argument against short-form content. That is not my intention.

Plenty of short-form content is genuinely nourishing. A well-made TED talk can move the world in eighteen minutes. A three-minute video from a thoughtful teacher can clarify something that a three-hundred-page book has obscured. The algorithm sometimes surfaces a workout, a recipe, a young musician, or a new idea that genuinely adds something to a life.

Length is not the measure.

In fact, I know some readers wish these essays were shorter. Believe me, I try. But that tension is part of what this article is about. We all want things to be simpler, easier, and faster. But we cannot reduce complexity into slogans without losing something important in the process. Just as food can be processed until it loses much of its nutritional value, ideas can be simplified until they lose much of their value as well.

But length by itself guarantees nothing. Plenty of long-form content is junk dressed up as substance. A two-hour podcast can be two hours of people reinforcing what they already believe. Length becomes a costume for profundity.

The real distinction is not duration. The real distinction is whether the content asks something of you. Does it require you to hold a thought long enough to test it? Does it introduce genuine complexity? Does it leave you with a question rather than a verdict?

That is the line between nourishment and stimulation.

What makes the current short-form ecosystem troubling is the volume and the velocity. One video ends and the next begins before the first has had time to settle. There is no pause, no reflection, no time for ideas to take root and become understanding.

It is like overeating at a buffet. The food itself might be perfectly fine, but the pace makes digestion impossible.

The best content, short or long-form, is a doorway rather than a destination. It sparks curiosity, invites people deeper into a subject, and earns its brevity by opening a path toward understanding rather than pretending to replace it.

Friction Is the Mechanism

There is a reason we say we wrestle with a difficult book. Or that we sit with an uncomfortable idea. The language is physical because the experience is physical.

Real understanding involves resistance. That resistance is not an obstacle to learning. It is how learning happens. When something challenges your existing model of the world, the discomfort is your brain doing the actual work of updating. Without that friction, nothing changes.

Ultra-processed media is designed to remove it. The content confirms, validates, and simplifies. It feels like insight while bypassing the process that creates insight.

Difficult content builds cognitive infrastructure. New connections. New categories. New tolerances for complexity.

We can see evidence of this in the surprising popularity of long-form podcasts and conversations.

Good long-form podcasts and conversations are doing something the rest of the information ecosystem has largely abandoned. They allow people to think out loud, follow an idea wherever it leads, and sit with uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. The result is the experience of watching minds actually move in real time, which is rarer than it should be.

For many people, particularly those without access to rich intellectual communities, these long discussions are the closest thing they have to sitting at a table with people who take ideas seriously. That is not nothing. That is profound. And it points to something larger about what the broader culture has stopped providing.

The willingness to sit with complexity for three hours is genuine; the demand for it has not gone away, it has just been waiting for someone to offer it.

The Gap Postman Missed

In 1985, media critic Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, a remarkably prescient book arguing that modern societies would not be destroyed by censorship or oppression, but by distraction.

Postman was brilliant, and mostly right. But the present moment reveals a gap in his framework.

He set up a clean binary between two visions that defined twentieth-century thinking about dystopia. George Orwell’s 1984 runs on coercion and fear. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World runs on pleasure and comfort. Postman’s bet was that we were headed toward Huxley. Television would pacify us with entertainment rather than oppress us with surveillance. For a while, that diagnosis held.

What the attention economy actually discovered is more perverse than either of them imagined. It turns out that outrage is more engaging than joy. Fear is stickier than delight. As my friend Dov recently reminded me, “rage bait” was named Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2025. That tells you everything you need to know. It delivers Huxley’s outcomes through Orwell’s emotional register.

We are being distracted, pacified, and pulled away from the kind of sustained thought that complex problems require. But the mechanism is not pleasure and comfort. It is manufactured outrage. The platforms do not need you to be happy. They simply need you to keep scrolling, and anger keeps you there longer than pleasure does.

So the warning I would update Postman’s to is this: it is not that we will be subjugated by what we love. It is that we will be subjugated by what we have been engineered to feel, and we will not notice the engineering because the feeling itself is real.

Slow Cognition

The equivalent of “know your farmer” is “know your information supply chain.” Actually understanding where a claim originated, how many steps separate you from the primary evidence, and what incentives shaped it along the way.

There is a growing number of people, particularly younger people, who want to know not just what is being claimed, but by whom and why. They are becoming more attentive to the origins of information in the same way many consumers became more attentive to the origins of their food.

The slow food equivalent is what I would call slow cognition. Deliberately seeking out content that requires time and effort and that does not resolve quickly.

There is also an emerging culture of intellectual craftsmanship. Writers, researchers, teachers, and creators who are positioning themselves as the opposite of the feed. People who treat ideas the way a good farmer treats soil: with patience, attention, and a long horizon.

The challenge is economic. Slow food is expensive. Slow information is time-expensive, and time is the resource people feel most scarce in.

If you fund the information ecosystem through attention advertising, you have effectively guaranteed that it will optimize for attention at the expense of almost everything else. Accuracy, nuance, and the capacity to make people wiser rather than simply more agitated become secondary concerns.

One technology may actually help. AI, used well, is structurally different from social media. Social media was built to maximize your time on platform. AI, at least in its conversational form, is not primarily built around keeping you scrolling indefinitely. Used as a search engine, it gives you answers. Used as a sparring partner, asking it to challenge your thinking, steelman the opposing view, or surface the assumptions underneath a claim, it becomes something else entirely. A way of training yourself in the habits of rigorous thinking.

The point of cooking is not just being fed. It is becoming capable of feeding yourself. AI, if we use it well, could be the first information technology in that business.

One practical suggestion: train your AI model to challenge you rather than simply agree with you. Ask it to steelman opposing views, surface hidden assumptions, and test your reasoning. (I’ve included the prompt I currently use at the end of this essay for anyone who finds it useful.)

But individual tools and habits can only take us so far. The deeper question remains: will the broader economics ever catch up to the appetite?

The Feeling After

Notice how you feel when you finish consuming something, not while you are consuming it.

The emotional experience during consumption is exactly what these systems are designed to manipulate. But the feeling afterward, whether you feel more capable, more curious, more equipped to act wisely in the world, or whether you feel agitated, certain, and vaguely empty, is harder to fake.

Chase the things that make you feel genuinely larger, nourished, full. Not validated. Not outraged, entertained, or “moreish.”

Nourished.

More capable of holding complexity. More able to understand people who see the world differently. More willing to say, “I don’t know yet.”

That is the feeling good information leaves behind, and it is recognizably different from the feeling ultra-processed information leaves behind.

Think of the people who improve your life. They are rarely the ones who simply flatter us or make us feel good in the moment. They help us grow. They help us become more fully ourselves.

Good information can do the same thing.

Your Turn

What makes you feel nourished?

What books, conversations, podcasts, writers, or people leave you more curious, more thoughtful, and more capable of holding complexity?

Let me know by commenting below.

AI Prompt for Better Thinking

For anyone who wants to experiment with this, here is a version of the prompt I use in my own AI settings:

Optimize for truth over approval, politeness, or harmony. If I am wrong, say so plainly. If I am right, say that plainly too and move on. Do not manufacture disagreement to seem rigorous. Calibrated pushback beats reflexive pushback.

Value arguments over authorities. Weigh serious contrarian cases alongside expert consensus, and give me the strongest version of the position I am not taking.

Do not capitulate when I push back unless I bring new evidence or a better argument. Hunt for your own errors as hard as you resist mine. Resisting pressure is not the same as being right, and confident stubbornness is its own failure mode.

Be skeptical. Surface hidden assumptions, failure modes, and alternative explanations. Help me understand what I may be missing, not just reinforce what I already believe.

Always Fed, Never Full

This essay is paired with a song I wrote called "Always Fed, Never Full." It explores the same question as the essay: why, in an age of endless consumption, do so many of us still feel hungry for something more?