This was my speech at a Phil debate where the first speaker was me and the last speaker was, of all people, Isaac H.P.. I was actually a bit starstruck around him, and when he gave me his phone so that I could film him doing a bit with the Phil guestbook, I told him I think of him every time I eat salmon and that I didn’t know how to use an iPhone. He didn’t upload the video I took because I think it was patently clear that the person holding the phone didn’t know how to use an iPhone or film a TikTok.

Hi. I’m not sure how funny I’m going to be tonight. As I’m sure you all well know, I like to use chamber debates as a testbed for experimental self-referential humour, and if it’s well-received I give the same routine at standup comedy gigs across the globe from Shenzhen to Agbogbloshie, and if it’s not well-received, well, it’s only a bit of fun innit. Recently I found out about something on the Internet called ‘irony’, which is where you say something that you don’t mean or understand and then fend off embarrassment by saying it was ‘ironic’. A good example is what I did just there, and what I’m about to do next: turns out there’s this new thing called ‘post-irony’, which is where you say something you actually mean and then follow through with it. A good example is Werner Herzog’s 2009 film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which I haven’t seen. So today I’m going to make a serious point and then follow through with it.

But how to be serious? Well, for starters, to use words like “insidious”. Here’s an example of something that’s “insidious”. How many times would you guess you’ll hear the word “brainrot” tonight? Or “chronically online”? Or even “manmade horrors beyond your comprehension”, said with an uneasy laugh that kind of shakes off the tension? How often has any one of us examined our screentime on a given day, felt a moment of unqualified panic, and laughed it off as “brainrot”, an irony as succulently anaesthetic as hot ribena seeping into a weary endocrine system. Who except the infected points the finger of ‘chronically online’? Who except those with cerebral Cotard’s Syndrome call it ‘brainrot’? It’s not a new phenomenon. It’s the same self-reinventing force that brought ’this but unironically’ into the vernacular; the very same expressive veil the Internet gives people in order for dogwhistling to be a thing, but also an attitude that my boy DFW identified thirty years ago in E Unibus Pluram as being the defining trait of television: stupid ads and reality TV want you to roll your eyes and say “that’s stupid”. So do genre-definingly mind-numbing memes. It doesn’t matter either way if one watches a video of various different forms of LeBron James as discs racing each other down a complicated track singing ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ while a Family Guy clip plays and considers it to be genuine art or calls it ‘brainrot’ and slightly hates oneself for watching it: both attitudes toward watching still drive up TikTok’s quote ’engagement’, and they both chip away at your time to the same extent.

Let me give my operational definition of ‘chipping away at your time’: I saw a Vsauce video once a few years ago – really my only source on anything – and he described a study in which were examined two types of activities: one that feels like it takes a long time when you’re in the middle of it, but when you look back after, it seems as if very little time passed at all, like office work. This is kind of like Type 1 fun. The other is the opposite, obviously, type 2: time flies by, but you look back and it seems like it took ages, like a camping trip or something. But television in particular was identified as a unique activity: it both didn’t feel like time was passing when people watched it, and didn’t feel like any time had passed upon reflection. The time just evaporated. Social media we can imagine is an extension of this. The only indicator at all that any time has passed is the usage stats page in my favourite app, Settings. TikTok it would seem is the apex.

If I weren’t committed to the bit of being serious I might suggest that TikTok should be banned not because TikTok humour isn’t funny but because it’s actually too funny. But of course this is a facetious way of really saying that TikTok and TikTok-like platforms – Instagram reels, YouTube shorts – create an environment humid and damp enough to create what Norm McDonald has termed ’the perfect joke’ - where the setup has become the punchline. The circular monomythical narrative has been shrunk down to an infinitesimal point, the most trivial of its homotopical equivalence class.

Which is fine for the odd joke – saying words that end in -er enough that people automatically think ‘I hardly know her’ is in the blessed equivalence class of your mom jokes, and it can be funny as one of the spices of life – but consider eating a mountain of spice for ten hours a day, and then consider that it isn’t just jokes: it’s world news from primary and secondary sources, it’s specialised meme pages with infortainment about every hobby from music to theology to philosophy to sport to Minecraft, it’s clips of people doing kind of ridiculous horrible things for clout, but it’s also our friends, the people we are and are not so much in love with – also a communication medium, also for many a primary communication medium, also for many a primary, one-way communication medium whose channels are implicitly determined by a third party whose only real motive is profit and who know how addiction works and why – what I mean to say is that it comprises for many of us almost the sum total of our passive sedentary activities and subsumes all others, private and public. Which would be fine if it were merely a convenient way to have everything in one place, but it isn’t.

Why? Well: doesn’t anyone else find the word ‘content’ eery? Even ‘content creator’? Does no one remember this just suddenly changing from YouTube slang to a phrase used by your uncle in like 2014? Does it not sanctify the medium itself and relegate art, news, hard Ronald Reagan edits, and film analysis to being merely the stuff that you throw into the bottomless pit of engagement? Does that image not also evoke the pretty intuitive idea that most of the news is sub-headline-length, that most of the infotainment is not what you might call nuanced, that every hobby is reduced to cool quick tips and tricks. I am not talking about that greatest of all TikTok-related buzzterms, “attention span”. It’s much more limiting than removing the ability to simply concentrate. It is a quick-and-dirty way to hole us into subnetwork upon subnetwork of stuff we already kind of know and or have kind of already laughed at, because it’s fiscally safe, and fast, and, from moment to moment, something very close to fun. It’s a drug that is designed to predict our next thought before we even have to take it. If that thought is “I think this app is bad for me and I should stop using it”, it’s easy to pacify with an ironic brainrot meme.

I think most people probably understand this, is the thing. If I have sounded preachy, know that that is a polemic failure on my part, and that I know I am only preaching to the choir. But these are thoughts that are easy to forget when the machine in question can touch every corner of our minds. When we think we have found a healthy way to interact with it, it reinvents itself to hook back in again. To allow something to exist which is intentionally addictive, and whose vectors of addiction are not only short-term dopamine cycles but also our interpersonal relationships, our need to be liked, our desire to be ‘informed’, is lethal. But unironically.

Afterwards, Jonathan Kelly filled up my glass with red wine and I necked it in one firm swallow. It is very interesting to think that, had I slightly less willpower, I would have laughed at my own bit, choked, and projectile-sprayed red wine into the face of Rachel Galvo (of whom I didn’t previously know but who is a quite interesting comedian who performs under the name The Shite Feminist; she didn’t seem to like my speech very much) sitting across from me.

Isaac’s speech was the best of the night, and I don’t say that just because I am an established fan. It is generally accepted that he gave quite a moving (but still hilarious) speech about his working-class upbringing and the opportunity TikTok gives him and other working-class people to make art and just stick it up on the Internet and be known for it. I spoke to him after and he seemed to agree that TikTok was pretty bad for people – that he finds that most of the stuff that was outlined above has applied even to him at more than one concerning point – but that, ultimately, he wishes that what he had said if he had remembered is that it is not enough to ban TikTok without also pushing for huge public funding into the arts. Too right.

I had a pint with him after and I didn’t get much out of him past that point because he was literally too famous, and everyone in Wetherspoon’s (he thought it would be funny to go to a Spoon’s his first time in Dublin) kept coming up to him and asking for selfies, and then asking me if I was Isaac’s friend, but when I said I was just in a debate with him they sort of just completely lost interest, which raises interesting questions about what people actually consider to be fame or fame-related. If I had lied and said I was his friend, would they have asked for photos with me? Would it have mattered? Would they have looked at the photo years down the line and said “Oh, there’s me with Isaac H.P.’s best friend”? That would’ve been funny, actually. Maybe I should’ve lied.