The Effort to Read

An Instagram story unexpectedly snapped me out of a doom-scrolling trance. That brief moment sparked a broader reflection on how short-form content and AI have conditioned us to bypass the journey in favor of speed and self-affirmation.

An old, low-res short video of Alejandro Dolina’s monologue in Spanish snapped me out of a mindless doom-scroll the other day. I felt a strange sense of liberation around the thirty-second mark. Look at me, watching an Instagram story that goes over a minute. Who knew that was even legal?

In his passionate lecture, Dolina argues that what transforms us through reading isn’t the knowledge a book contains, but the mental and emotional effort we invest in appropriating the words. It’s in the hours we spend debating with ourselves, questioning whether we truly understand what the author is trying to say.

The video auto-replayed while I hesitated, dreading the swipe that would plunge me back into the stream. Headlines bidding for my attention. Short! Fast! Flash! Comical! DOPAMINE! Time to close this senseless app and sit with Dolina’s words for a while.

Whether it’s a book, a movie, an album, an article, or even our work, our attention spans have shrunk alongside the interfaces we consume it on. And in the wake of AI, the interface is shrinking to none¹.

If you’re a software developer, you might’ve heard the term “vibe coding.” It was coined by Andrej Karpathy to describe a new approach to software development. Instead of writing code line by line, you describe the problem to a large language model (LLM), and it generates the solution for you.

Vibing goes beyond coding. It’s a paradigm increasingly seen as a broader shift in how humans perform digital tasks. As AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives, it has become a medium for consuming information, writing content, making plans, communicating, and making decisions.

When we vibe our means to an end, we forfeit the effort that shapes us. Yes, AI is already helping us scale both creation and consumption. AI isn’t just a tool—it’s a new interface of accelerationism2, a tool to help us go faster and do more. It comes with a different kind of friction and effort and a new paradigm in how we learn and grow.

But as the handcrafted becomes synthetic, I can’t help but wonder what we’re trading along the way. Are we truly understanding AI, or are we doomed to make the same mistakes we made with social media and its predatory algorithms?

We were just watching videos.
We were being rewired.

We were just vibing.
We were outsourcing our humanity.

All of this has happened before.
All of this will happen again.
So say we all.

Now playing: All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix.

  1. “The interface is shrinking to none” refers to the ongoing shift toward invisible or ambient computing, where voice, presence, and predictive automation replace traditional screen-based interactions. As explored in The Verge, Apple and others already imagine a post-iPhone future where interfaces fade into the background, and devices anticipate needs without direct user input.
  2. A theory suggesting that technological or capitalist acceleration can be a pathway to systemic transformation or collapse.