The Problem of Algorithmic Immediacy

The other, hidden problem in the world of digital algorithms

Artwork: “Big Tech Madness” by the author

There is something quietly sinister about the way the internet subtly demands that we feel. Not to feel deeply, or wisely, or even well—but instantly. A video flashes across your feed: a weeping child in a war-torn street. Scroll again: a stranger’s righteous rage over a workplace injustice. And don’t even get me started on the fights, cops shooting people, and unruly passengers causing a ruckus on airlines that have all unquestionably become mainstays of our daily experiences. Scroll again: a clip designed to spark laughter, or lust, or fear, or whatever. Then another. Then another.

You know the drill.

Each piece of content arrives—not as an invitation to thoughtfully, carefully, deliberately consider, to ponder, to examine and explore—but as a demand to react—right now, this very moment, before it slips away, lost in the ever-swirling whirlwind of everything else. What began as the promise of abundance has now become a prison of ever-constant noise. In a sense, everything has become pornographized, designed for maximum stimulation with minimal understanding.

There’s a name for this problem—Immediacy—and it haunts much more than just the Internet. The hypothesis of Immediacy has been spelled out in the insanely intelligent book Immediacy: or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh. Personally, I think it’s the single most important read of the twenty-first century, and it’s not even close.¹

To explain it in simple terms, Immediacy is the idea that everything we see, read, or experience today is expected to hit us fast and hard. We don’t just watch a video—we’re supposed to feel something right away. Sadness, anger, shock, laughter, etc.

It’s basically a truism at this point that the internet—especially social media—is designed to deliver emotional hits in quick bursts, like tiny electric jolts.² But it cuts much deeper than that. Instead of giving us time to think, reflect, or understand, it pushes us to react—instantly. That’s what keeps us scrolling: each new piece of content demands a quick emotional response before we even know what it really means or what the creator is actually trying to say.³

In a world where the next piece of information is just a thumb-flick away, there’s no time to sit and analyze everything. We’re quietly overwhelmed. We’re overwhelmed despite the fact that, because tech companies are so successful at making their products frictionless, we don’t feel overwhelmed.

Instead, we get this slow, gnawing, haunting feeling that something just isn’t right—something we can’t quite name or put our fingers on—because, after all, we’re choosing our own destinies as we surf across the Internet, right? Right? No, no, we’re not, even if it feels like we are. Most of the content we encounter is given to us, not chosen, even on search engines. We’ll return to digital immediacy in a minute, but first, let’s rewind to see how we got here.

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The Internet 1.0

Let me just say, it’s genuinely saddening to me that there’s an entire up-and-coming generation who will never remember that the Internet was once a pretty fun place to be. You logged on, decided where you wanted to go, and explored the wide-open fields of wonder that awaited you. Nothing was served up to you via algorithm. It was sort of a paradise, where universities ran much of the Internet, not profit-hungry corporations constantly trying to steer you in one direction or the other.

It’s tough to know exactly where things went wrong. I’ve written extensively about Facebook’s transformations, particularly the addition of the News Feed, which was the first colossal change in how things operate online.

It’s hard to believe that until then, on Facebook, there was no algorithmic distribution—it was a site you went to and sought out your friends’ profiles to see what they had posted (beach pictures, plans for the evening, etc.). There were no memes; there were no hucksters trying to sell you stuff at every turn; there was no disinformation crisis clogging up our feeds; and there certainly wasn’t any AI slop.

While social media sites often get most of the blame for being the catalysts of the current iteration of the Internet we now inhabit, music-streaming service Pandora was one of the first major sites to serve things up algorithmically, dishing out songs that sounded like whichever song or artist you chose. It was neat, but not exactly groundbreaking.

Still, Pandora helped shape the world that was to come by taking units of media (in this case, songs) and assigning them labels so they could be linked with other, similar songs to make the recommendation engine work. From there, it was only a matter of time before companies started doing the same thing with people, and the users themselves would become the units of information that were labeled and sorted.

We all know what happened from there. Today, the Internet isn’t a place you go to find things; it’s a place you go where things are brought to you, and those who are doing the bringing aren’t at all concerned with your wellbeing—the information they bring you, served up on an algorithmic platter, isn’t chosen because it’s good, true, or useful. It’s chosen because it’s likely to make you feel something intense but not profound—outrage, desire, fear, awe—anything that will keep you clicking, scrolling, sharing.

And that returns us to the trap of immediacy.

The Problem of Immediacy

The platforms don’t care if you’re learning or thinking or growing; they care if you’re engaged—which really just means: are you still here, scrolling your life away? Are you still giving us your attention, your data, your reactions? In this system, depth is inefficient. Nuance is friction. The point is to provoke you as fast as possible and as often as possible. The goal isn’t to inform you; it’s to capture you like a predator captures a wounded animal.

It’s almost like the Matrix, where humans are being farmed by the machines, except in this dystopian, real-world version, there are humans on the other side of the machines pulling the strings.

To understand Kornbluh’s thesis, it helps to zoom in on the digital media landscape we now inhabit—what she calls “the cultural dominant of too late capitalism.” Here, immediacy isn't just a matter of speed. It's a structural condition. Algorithms serve us not just any content, but content engineered to provoke. A video of a crying child, a tweet about political betrayal, a clip of a police shooting, an influencer’s confession, a new war, bombing, etc.

These are not just things happening in the world; they’re emotional triggers, and their function is not to inform or contextualize but to cause the viewer to feel as intensely as possible. And to feel right now. And, in a world where digital products follow us around all day, everything’s always right now and that nowness never, ever stops.

Our devices are like emotional slot machines that constantly serve up various random pieces of brief and ultimately meaningless feelings to us. It’s like a rollercoaster of rapid, vapid emotions that we cycle through constantly.

And the emotions are delivered immediately—there’s no waiting, thinking, considering, before you go, “Ahh, now I finally get it.”

This way of experiencing the world sort of trains us to skip over deeper thinking and thoughtful analysis. We don’t spend much time sitting with a story, a piece of music, or a painting anymore. We want the point, the meaning, and the feeling right now, and, on a societal level, we have little patience for anything else. And because everyone online is competing for attention, they’ve learned to make things more dramatic, more emotional, and more in-your-face to get noticed. The result? A culture where everything feels intense and urgent, all the time—but also shallow and wholly forgettable.

High culture—the important stuff imbued with meaning that holds our social structures together—is the great tragedy of the commons of the world of immediacy, because nothing is made to endure; nor are the systems that facilitate the commercial trade of culture designed, anymore, to account for longevity—everything’s immediate.

When was the last time you truly took in a piece of art? When was the last time you listened to an album all the way through…and then listened to it again within the next few days to see if there was anything you missed in the first spin? When was the last time you stared at a piece of art in a museum rather than taking a photo of it for Instagram? When was the last time you read a complete book?

The fact is, we rarely take the time to figure out if something is actually true, meaningful, or worth our energy. Books and albums are released with their immediate lifecycles in mind, usually very short lifecycles. Few authors are creating the timeless works of yestercentury, and virtually none are getting signed to record or publishing deals.

Immediacy doesn’t just affect what we look at on our phones—it changes how we live. We start to expect quick answers in conversations, quick progress in relationships, and quick success in life. We get uncomfortable with anything that takes time: learning, growing, understanding.

The big, massive, colossal problem with this is that real meaning—the kind that sticks with you, the kind you remember forever, the kind that bestows on us the narratives we use to navigate our lives—comes slowly. It comes from sitting with things, returning to them, questioning them. Immediacy robs us of that. It makes everything feel like it's happening right now, even when what we really need is time to take a breath and let things unfold.

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter (now X) have constructed ecosystems that reward immediacy on every level. The faster you respond, the more you are seen. The more you are seen, the more you are rewarded. Creators are thus locked into a perpetual arms race to generate content that cuts through the noise—content that elicits maximum emotional impact in minimum time. The algorithm doesn’t prioritize accuracy, complexity, or depth. It prioritizes affect.

Just react. Don’t understand.

On the surface, immediacy can feel democratic—more access, more voices, more emotion, fewer gatekeepers, etc. But underneath that facade is a system finely tuned for exploitation. The modern attention economy isn’t just chaotic; it is algorithmically calibrated to reward immediacy and immediacy alone—the right now. This has a profoundly distorting effect on how we process the world. News becomes trauma porn. Political engagement becomes identity performance. Art becomes content. Analysis becomes vibes. The very idea of thinking—as something slow, dialectical, and mediated—is flattened into feeling, which is fast, visceral, and mostly unexamined.⁴

Just look at how the world of literature has fared in this climate. A novel that takes time to unfold, one that challenges the reader with ambiguity or nonlinearity—one that doesn’t announce, “This is how you need to feel about this piece of art right this moment”—is disadvantaged in a culture that rewards hot takes and first impressions.⁵ That’s why, I believe, the very act of reading—silent, slow, undistracted—becomes a kind of resistance. The same goes for other arts: music that asks for repeated listens, films that require patience, and paintings that don’t scream at you but whisper and hint.

It makes me think of the Renaissance artists who used to go to great lengths to etch subtle, hidden meanings in their paintings, meanings you wouldn’t get at face value. We’ve replaced mediation—the space between subject and object, between art and audience, between self and world—with a fantasy of direct access. We want to "just feel it," to get the truth "straight from the source," to "say our truth" without having to filter or refine it. But mediation is not the enemy of authenticity; it is the condition of understanding. Without form, there is no content. Without structure, there is only noise.

This is where context collapse comes in, which is a phenomenon where everything around us appears to us in decontextualized form. Here’s an example. You’re scrolling online, and you see someone’s post whom you don’t know. It’s outrageous and makes you feel more than a tinge of anger. You might crack your knuckles and give them a distant verbal licking so hard you rise from your seat and do a dance after dunking on them so hard.

But were they being sarcastic? Were there threads of meaning in the post you didn’t understand? And if there were, can you really be expected to analyze all their old posts to decipher the meaning of what they’re saying with better context? If we did that with each piece of content we encountered, we would spend literally all of our lives hunting for the context, because the algorithms serve stuff up so fast, it’s impossible to hunt down every bit of background meaning for every piece of media we encounter.

A Constant, Void of Emergency

Even our sense of self is increasingly shaped by immediacy. We curate identities that are “authentic” in the most superficial sense—immediate, expressive, emotional, raw. We prize transparency over discretion, exposure over reflection. To pause, to wait, to revise, is to risk being irrelevant. The internet never sleeps, and it never forgets. It only scrolls and, like a hungry, insatiable beast, demands to perpetually be fed.

Thus, we now live in a world where everything feels like a constant, perpetual emergency—where you’re always being nudged to feel strongly and react now. We’ve slowly metamorphosed into lab rats, enlisted in the world’s largest science experiment without our consent.

The question is, what are we going to do about it? I have my ideas. I’m going to use my platform to exit the rat race, to continue creating more thoughtful, well-researched content, art, and poetry—stuff that isn’t rapidly assembled for the algorithmic lottery. And I think we’d all do well to back away for a while, to refuse and even block accounts that are just shelling out content for the sake of content, that are striving to push our emotional buttons for the sake of engagement. The thing is, we can each do our part to make this problem go away. We can just not watch the hundredth Marvel sequel or pay to see movies that aren’t thoughtful and intelligent. We can eschew media that doesn’t mediate, which, after all, is kind of the whole point of media.

Media is something you’re supposed to step into and out of—not something you’re supposed to live inside twenty-four seven, and we seem to have forgotten that. It’s the lifeblood of culture, and we should be giving it much more thought than Instagramming it or using it as fodder for online content.

Perhaps the answer here is a conscious return to intentional, thoughtful engagement with the world around us, with slow living as a way to make the algorithms and machines that have come to make us feel like we’re living in a constant state of emergency totally irrelevant—things we can take or leave.

Is it likely? Probably not. But we have to at least begin the process of doing something, because I think we can all agree that most people aren’t happy with all of this. I just know that I stepped away from engaging with this kind of content 99% of the time a few years ago, and my life has been immeasurably better ever since. Maybe the same will be true for you, too.

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1. In Immediacy, literary theorist Anna Kornbluh sets her sights on one of the most pervasive and under-examined pathologies of our digital era: the worship of the now. The title of the book is a nod to 1970s-1980s philosopher and critic Frederick Jameson, who I’ve talked about elsewhere.

Disclaimer: It’s not for everyone and will likely prove a challenging read for anyone who hasn’t done a ton of reading in the history of philosophy. If you decide to get it, it’ll be helpful to have a background in Hegel, Marx, and Jameson.

2. This is entirely different from the “dopamine hits” nonsense, which is just pseudoscience.

3. This resembles another phenomenon that delivers us a nagging, awful feeling that we can’t quite put our fingers on—context collapse, which we’ll discuss shortly.

4. We tend to think of our political problems as being a byproduct of algorithms pushing the loudest and most extreme voices to the top. This is undoubtedly true insofar as I understand the research and I’ve read a lot of it. Of course that’s part of the problem. But there’s another, deeper, more structural problem that’s harder to see (and thus talk about). As someone who worked in politics for a very, very long time, I can tell you that politics moves slowly, it takes large groups of people working together over a long period of time to achieve certain goals. But how does that happen in a world where everything has become more and more immediate, where life feels like we’re monkeys swinging from tree to tree, only instead of swinging from branch to branch, we’re leap-frogging from one perceived emergency to the other?

Our politics of today have suffered deeply under immediacy. Politics has been increasingly perceived as a game of how we feel in the moment, rather than how we can act over long periods of time to achieve things as a collective. It’s no surprise that ground-zero for the politics of immediacy is the U.S.A., which was not only the birthplace of the very Internet technologies that have ushered in the age of immediacy, but also a country with lax laws thanks to decades of deregulation that have made it a fertile breeding ground for political immediacy to take root. A lot of people in the U.S. felt helpless, like there were no places they could go to make the world a better place before the Internet hit. Now, all U.S. Americans seem to have left is their ability to laugh at the absurd power disparities in their country and the fact that, thanks to immediacy, we all have a shared feeling that nothing makes sense anymore. That’s because immediacy’s forerunner, the standard-bearer for literally thousands of years, mediacy, is dying.

5. And celebrity memoirs