It’s not just the impact the format has on the content, and, subsequently, how on we imbibe information and experience entertainment, but yes on attention spans, but this isn’t just about the effects on education or average cognitive ability (or cognitive development in kids). The erosion of people’s capacity for sustained concentration has much wider effects: on any serious social and cultural commentary, yes, but also less appreciated on moral judgment, forming social bonds, empathy. I’ve met people who seem incapable of starting or maintaining romantic relationships and it took me a long time to realise that they don’t have the necessary attention, expect instant gratification, and become extremely shallow in their tastes and judgment without realising. Relatedly, I’ve also met three senior London journalists who have all said, almost in passing: ‘Oh, I can’t watch movies, at all, ever. I only do it with the FF button on 2.0x.’ A bit alarming imo.

I rarely agree with Rahman but this is consistent with what many people have pointed out about LFI and its internal culture: no serious interest in governing, despotic, personalist and centred around JLM, happy to mislead the public about policy, entirely theatrical, self-serving, cynical charlatanry, and, yeah, likely willing to fan unrest even in the knowledge that it might fuel support for the far-right, if it puts them in a better position to grandstand. Not that they are to blame for the escalation, but I resent the credulity of the anglophone left that has thrown in their lot with them, just because JLM babbles something about 'the creativity of the youth' and Guetté is 'slaying' holding a cigarette. Just a total surrender to the worst bourgeois radical impulses which have kept the left irrelevant and obsolete: a focus on the rhetoric, theatre and aesthetics of activism and street politics, married to arcane theorising and academic solipsism.