3SD '25: The Choice of a New Generation
(Surreal, Stubborn, Stupid) + (Dangerous, Destructive, Dumb) = 3SD, and its emergence through the psychosis of media and head shred scroll holes of Tik Tok and Temu.com
“Things happen over people’s heads and through them.”
– Adorno, History and Freedom
“The uncertainty of existing, and consequently the obsession of proving our existence, prevail over desire that is strictly sexual. If sexuality is putting our identity on the line (down to the fact of having children) the new are really no longer in a position to devote ourselves to this task, for we are too preoccupied with saving our identity to undertake anything else. What matters above everything else is proving our existence, even if that is its only meaning”.
– Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication
~
Something has shifted, but much is jammed. And jammed hard – into an unfunky place, at ludicrous speed. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve/we’ve entered the strangest moment yet lived through in human culture. 2025, the strained-est moment yet. Welcome to 2025, the new home of prolapsed credulity.
We’ve been drifting toward these zones for a while, perhaps since Gutenberg and Luther, at least since the 2007 launch of the iPhone (tragedy?) and the 2010 iPad (farce!). In this parochial corner of the cosmos, I can date its political inception to 2015, when the Prime Minister broke satire by chomping a raw onion on TV, apropos of nothing. It didn’t seem to bring tears to his eyes, yet, to me at least, the volatile organosulfur compounds seem to have wafted out, generating a global butterfly effect, triggering everything from Brexit to US government-funded gain of function research in the bat caves of Wuhan in the mid-late 2010s. Thus: all that has got us in a flap of collective madness was inaugurated by the crunching of an onion, ten years ago.
In politics, the breaking of satire is actually something that adds danger to the world. Alongside 3S, this breaking – by everything busted and cooked that unfathomably rich and powerful* people do (from the biting of the onion to Musk sieg heil-ing over his skis) – doesn’t just add dumb to the deep stupid, it is also dangerous and destructive.
It is 3D, as well as 3S. 2025’s new concoction is 3SD, the choice of a new generation.
The dangers of 3SD are numerous and unsubtle; 3SD can ruin your life, it’s ruining politics. The danger in chief is that we can’t take politics seriously anymore, can’t take what happens – whatever happens – seriously anymore. How could we? It makes no sense; it is fucking dumb, it is so stupid. We have moved from DFW’s Infinite Jest1 to infinite scroll and infinite lolz. As a consequence, although we are in a certain sense rapt and seduced by the obscene ecstasy of communication, we also look away, we also stop paying attention in a way that could count or make a difference – so they get away with it, and we sigh and shrug, and so it goes. This is deadly. Nothing matters matters.
I don’t think the 3SD of 2025 is just a ruse or an oopsie (though ruses and oopsies doth abound). I do think the destructively dumb surreal stupidity of it all is real and deep and surprisingly bad; worse than many of its designers and beneficiaries even thought it might be (all too late). A metaphysically deep and rich stupidity thrives and prospers in the prolapse of collective credulity; it truly is a deep stupid, and it’s real, and doing very well for itself, and doing real damage. The burn is real, and what burns never returns. And as surreal, stupid, and stubborn, it does set up an almost implacable as well as dangerous dynamic, as one of its integral side effects. The more we ‘take it’, the more obdurately it perdures; the more dangerous it becomes, the more we find it impossible to take anything seriously and pay good attention to anything. Nihilism, cynicism, bad faith, and fetishist disavowal spread and entrench; nothing is possible, everything is a bin fire, we roll our eyes, and keep scrolling. Doomscrolling is dumbscrolling; doomscrolling is dangerous, the style of dangerous that someone fucked from 3SD takes to be a normal pattern of life.
3SD is thus akin to a synthetic analogue comprising New Psychoactive Substances (NPS), made from signs, propagated as images, consumed as content2. These kindasorta compounds, cooked up at industrial scale, have been getting popular over the last decade (since 2015!) because – like cooked content – they’re available-accessible, legal-ish for consumption, available from grey outlets, and are akin to familiar drugs in their ostensible ‘gross’ effects, affecting our favourite neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine, Nora Ephron, GABA, and hardcore.
NPSs are popular because they mimic, they mimic the bodied feelings and mind-altered states people love about cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, LSD, and ketamine. But the mimic is also a pipik. NPSs pipik the ‘old faithfuls’ they mimic, because they are bad copies, evil twins, the iffy doubles of our street-tested friends that leave us cross-eyed and speechless. NPSs do many other gnarly things to our mindbodies and nervous systems, things we don’t know the short or long term effects of really, things which seem subtle on first dose but might be cumulatively neurotic toxic, or induce sudden psychosis and death. This might only happen if you keep hitting ‘em, or hit ‘em a bit too hard, or it might happen if you’re unlucky with a batch you buy. Like the effects of LLMs on global society right now, the fatal, fuck-you-up effects of NPSs are unstudied, unregulated, and freely available – they’re out there for you and me and everyone. In this post regulation world, where the shadows shade into ‘legit’ businesses and offerings and all the cows are grey, it’s left to us to find out if NPSs turn out to be stupid, or deadly, or stupid and deadly.
Stupid can always be deadly; stupid does not diminish deadly in any way. Trench warfare, cavalry charges into machine guns, eating raw onions on TV: very stupid, very popular at the time, very deadly. And yet, where the global media of signs is concerned, we’ve all been hoofing big gulps of 3SD – ever since Tone chomped that onion.
3SD is what you take when you’re not getting shredded quickly enough by creatine, Dodge Ram, Jet Skis and their integral accident …and the shred platforms. In what remains of this post, I want to riff on two prevalent, gangbusters popular ways I notice us dosing ourselves hard, amusing ourselves to death by hoofing 3SD, caution to the wind, planet be damned. My sense is that this is wrecking us in a way we have no way of reckoning with, and no desire to reckon with.
The ordinary psychosis of news media – now ramping up to shred levels
I notice 2025 3SD levels of shred in the ordinary psychosis of news media. A psychotic person senses and experiences things which are not there, not real, not true. We observe them as suffering delusions and hallucinations, but of course, psychosis is an observer-dependent reality, and if the culture or society is all mad, then the sane person is the one who appears crazy (as we know from The Sane Society, Great Apes, and They Live).
Often, we – our groups – take our unreality to be the uniquely real or true reality. Our madness is a Truth, something the rest of them can’t or don’t see – because they’re deluded. Popular psychosis is a madness ‘we’ lives by – a story worth dying for. Many-most religious world views, conspiracy theories, nationalist ideologies, and ordinary cultural practices (Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny) are psychotic. But in the psychosis of contemporary news media ramping its way up to 3SD shred levels since 2015, what’s been especially intense, at least to me, is the flattened juxtapositions of clickable images-and-assertions completely evacuated of context and relationality, co-assembled and put side by side. The following are ‘historical’; what we should notice is that, as phone users, we’re asking our minds to routinely transform these juxtapositions into a world that still coheres and makes sense. Consider the work of making these back into a sensible, sensical whole. Wow, no wonder we’re burnt out.
To the extent we are online – and most of us are so, so very online – we are routinely encountering this kind of arrangement of ‘meanings’. They are the sign language of the background of our online lives; we don’t even notice them, but they are a ubiquitous social fact. Every time we spy the world fed to us in this way, we’ve been getting a tiny hit of 3SD. Every time we click, or will our selves ‘down that rabbit hole’, we take a much bigger hit.
But in terms of dosage, this is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to video-based scroll holes like Tik Tok, Reels, and whatever Tik Tok becomes once it’s bought/ sold/ pipiked by Silicon Valley to ‘Make America Grate – Again’ in the coming days/ weeks/ months. It’s worth clocking the shred Cal Newport noticed, as a millennial who had never been on TT before, then got injured and felt weak and had nothing better to do, and thought he’d better have a look (and write a New Yorker column out of having had a look):
“When I sign in for the first time, TikTok asks me to choose my interests from a long list illustrated by cheerful emojis. I select “Life Hacks,” “Science and Education,” and “Sports.” Then I’m off. The first video shows the Clemson University baseball team playing an exhibition game against the Savannah Bananas, a professional touring squad. The Clemson infield, for some inscrutable reason, starts dancing. I swipe up. A new video begins, showing someone selecting shoes at a store. The video is only ten seconds long; by the time I’ve finished jotting down some notes, it has already started replaying. I hastily swipe again. The next video plays tranquil music while a car slowly drives toward Yosemite National Park. The algorithm must have noticed that I lingered on the wintry scene: the next video shows someone sweeping snow off a porch with some kind of rotating broom contraption. Then the feed takes a darker turn, which makes me want to scroll even faster. I see a news story about a person being pushed onto subway tracks in Manhattan—swipe—a Trump video set to ominous music—swipe—“Top 15 Most Ghetto High Schools in New Jersey”—swipe—and someone making fun of a server’s accent in a restaurant. I shut down the app.”
This is a phenomenologically valuable description, because it shows how an articulate person – with a particular relation to digital media – clocks the shred, immediately, viscerally: swipe, swipe, swipe, GARGH – shut that fucker down.
Newport was also still self-aware enough to notice the following three things. Firstly, he noticed “the velocity of the clips and the rawness of their emotion is breathtaking”. Secondly, he noticed he immediately felt old. Thirdly, and most of all, he noticed “TikTok’s lack of obvious purpose”. There’s futility but no utility here. TT is a head shred scroll hole with no value add, offering only a ‘personally tailored’ seduction by the obscene ecstasy of communication3.
Tik Tok not only drips raw 3SD onto your open eyeballs – this is a shredding scroll hole that… has no real reason to persist, that adds nothing worth saving in a world that needs saving but isn’t being saved… because ‘swipe, swipe, swipe’. Late 2000s Facebook promised to connect the disconnected; early 2010s posting platforms promised to be the “locus of collective conversation”; early 2020s LinkedIn promises… business networking, and with it, the endless janky artificiality of stoking the fire of an online persona, made to seem a certain kind of appealing to a certain network of business contacts. This style of 2010s internet already produced a set of reliable symptoms, aggregating into systemic dynamics well captured by Tolentino in her pean to the 2010s millennial internet, Trick Mirror:
1) the internet is built to distend our sense of identity;
2) it encourages us to overvalue our opinions;
3) it maximizes our sense of opposition;
4) it cheapens our understanding of solidarity;
5) it destroys our sense of scale
But Tik Tok is just one person’s headfuck4: who needs your own Personal Jesus when you have your own personalised head shred? I’ll let you add your own speculative 5), 6, and 7) to Tolentino’s list; these would be the documentable effects of macrodosing 3SD at population scale.
~
To those outside TT and the like, this all seems like a very bad trade, and I would say it is.
To those habituated to it, based on an anecdotal collection of impressions from conversations, some can’t imagine getting off it (30-something colleague), or they’ve tried and it’s very hard to (several undergraduates), or they’ve finally managed to get off it, now wonder what the fuck they were thinking, and don’t miss it at all (one or two undergraduates). At best, TT is digital bobas, Warheads, Fanta, Pringles, or Takis, something we consume for the sensory impact, even though we know it’s ultra-processed junk that might give us the shits and lifelong autoimmune GI wreckage, in exchange for a moment’s mouth fun.
But Fanta and Takis, or even NPSs, (were) never made out like they were how we should engage with local, international and global politics. Junk food has had the decency to stay at the corner shop, and remain junk food5. This is the conspicuous danger of the parts of the political and civic mind – the whole culture of the common good – being shredded by TT’s huge doses of 3SD. TT has become a structurally normal way that huge numbers of people – especially young people – now navigate news.
A counterfactual is important to stop us harping on ‘kids these days’: is it worse than five decades of daily Murdoch tabloids and talkback radio everywhere you drive (when you drive everywhere), or Fox News on in the background all day every day? Is it worse than your rural uncle’s immersion in Q-zones Facebook for the last seven years? All surely have a profound effect on the people attached to each. But with TT, ‘somehow’, perhaps the bare majority of parents have given children as young as ten unfettered access to an unlimited supply of 3SD, and left it up to them to make sense of the high and the comedown, as well as get to know the wide world out there by navigating news, as well as mental health and neurodivergence6, on-and-through it.
The Chindogu-fication of low-res ‘stuff’: temu.com
If I’m browsing on any device, or even checking the weather app I use, another 3SD shread hole-realm that’s impossible to avoid is the ‘endless scroll chindogu’ of temu.com.
Leaving aside the well-documented stories of its horrendous factory conditions, including forced labour7, the insane ecological costs induced by the fact that temu.com is sucking up the price of air freight in order to gobble its way to huge market share (see below), and the fact that, like TT, it perennially leaves unanswered the question – ‘Why?’ – we should pay attention to temu.com’s astonishing popularity. Notice: Temu was the number one most downloaded app in the US last year; it knocked Tik Tok off its perch to achieve this.
We are a society that loves unboxing videos, prefers the largest and most grotesque smartphones and SUVs we can by, and has 0 problem with everything implied by Uber Eats and temu.com, as far as the labour of Others is concerned. This is what we have to look very squarely at: very stupid, very popular, very dangerous.
With the metadata my browsing patterns feed the ad broker, I tend to get images of buxom women in tight clothing, mechanical gadgetry serving some unspecified-hyperspecific purpose, and ‘wifey’ focused t-shirts and posters. My browser is telling temu.com it thinks I’m a middle aged married dude, I guess. Mea culpa. Sometimes though, the algo seems to shit itself, and serve up completely 3S things, like the two pictured, which I’ve deliberately blown up to show the ‘low res’ chindogu nature of a lot of what is on offer here.
Temu.com is a confluence of a number of trends.The first is the trend concretised and crowned by Amazon Prime, the idea that ‘we should’ be able to have whatever we want delivered to our door the next day (for low low prices), with no regard for the massive back end that maintaining such an obsequious front end requires. Let the world burn, and let young Chinese women work in slavery, breathing fumes: whatever and whatever, as long as I can have my stuff conveniently delivered to my door by tomorrow. Luke Heggie’s spot on Deliveroo from 2023 still captures the domination and moral indifference inherent in this very well.
The second trend is China.inc’s unbelievable, world historic ability to pump industrial volumes of anything you can imagine wanting and everything you didn’t yet know you didn’t need. Contemporary China delivers the goods, per Chris’ ‘Pac Man’ theory of dominance through mass manufacturing prowess.
The third trend is concretised by our prevalent uses of smartphones as devices used for shopping-as-entertainment, the way this removes friction from the ‘shopping experience’ while making scrolling and shopping into a seamless seepage of swiping and clicking.
There is huge mass and friction here. As Forbes recently reported, Temu and Schein “ship the equivalent of 88 Boeing 777 freighters of cargo worldwide every day”; the China e-commerce sites are now comparable to Amazon Prime. Notice, this isn’t ‘shipping’, this is air freight: “cargo ships generate approximately 10 to 40 grams of carbon dioxide per metric ton-kilometer traveled, far less than air freight, which emits around 500 grams per metric ton-kilometer”.
But it is all beyond the attentional purview of the consumer: put beyond, kept beyond, or just ‘beyond’ because most people don’t care to know right now. As the world burns, please tell your grandkids: we let this happen, because we were so munted on 3SD that global obsequiousness seemed like a good trade – for the living planet, and all its creatures.
Where ‘The Entertainment’ has the weaponisable decency to kill its viewers in one viewing, through one viewing, because it’s so entertaining the viewer can’t stop viewing.
We could say that 3SD is the NFT of NPSs, but I have NFI how I would make that make sense for the both of us.
TT is only pure 80s Baudrillard (for whom this was dystopian monstrum and satire about the prospective landscape that would befall us in the near future).
So we move from ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’ to ‘one person’s algorithmically personalised headfuck is another person’s algorithmically personalised headfuck’
Notwithstanding that it’s hardly harmless and has wrecked us at population level. We should have stuck to raw onions for the mouth-sensory A-bomb experience.
One of the ambivalent spaces on TT: there are many young people who have improved their awareness of mental health issues, self care, and neurodivergence through the platform. At the same time, it has popularised hyper labelling and identification with diagnoses, and generated its own weird argot, which people then take as more true than evidence-based medical research on X, Y, and Z. It’s not all bad here, but is it a net win, are we ‘ahead on points’?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65990529 , https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-06-15/temu-sells-products-linked-to-forced-labor-in-china , https://time.com/6243738/temu-app-complaints/ As you can see: BBC, LA Times, Time – you can ‘know’ this if you want to know this.