I know you. You think you’re too good for the algorithmic short-form video apps. You read books and blogs. You’re a literateur. Intelligent. Well-read. You know what you are? Ignorant. Close-minded. And you are missing out.

Everyone loses their mind about how much time people spend scrolling on these apps. Worthless brainrot slop, is it? Let me tell you: if the God-Emperor of il-Qadath commissioned his sorcerers in the creation of a work of art whose greatness would tower over all history, an infinite prism whose facets reflect all spectra of human experience and shift to the eye of each beholder, then flocks of citizens would be right and rational to spend their days gazing into its endless grandeur. Some things are just better at serving the aesthetic experience than others. Just as songwriting subsumed poetry, short-form video is subsuming all else. It’s a reterritorializer par excellence. It’s the apex predator of art.

At cinema’s infancy, the Soviet school film theorists worked day and night in their shadowed laboratories to establish the medium as an independent art form. They realized they had to determine its essentially unique characteristics: just as theater is live, embodied, and suggests much with set constraints; or literature cracks open the skull to reveal the movement of thought — what is uniquely possible through film? Sergei Eisenstein, greatest of all film theorists, answered montage. Editing. The cut and splice. Two shots together create meaning that neither contain alone. This reel is a fantastic example:

Does it not resemble a poem? Either image alone is trivial: the child’s mischief corralling ants; the oppression of borders … but in concert, the suggested metaphor is at once amusing and striking.

That a nine-second video can demonstrate the fundamental technique of film is not surprising; the true agit I offer is that Instagram Reels is the ultimate culmination of cinema as an art. It is montage at its purest. An individual reel may be an object of interest, but stitched together — ah! They drift like icebergs, and calve meaning in their chance collisions. Take the shot and chaser of these two reels:

The first is a classroom recording of elementary school children playing a Radiohead instrumental. The second is a masterful clip demonstrating tension and release. Both are beautiful in isolation, but their chance conjunction creates beauty even greater. After all, the song the children play is “Everything in Its Right Place,” and since we interpret the second clip in light of the first — perhaps we identify the ominous, vaguely fascist tone of the song with the women restraining the balloons, and the ultimate release as the failure of that sinister control. Or the opposite: perhaps we identify in the song a cosmic order, which humans try to resist but ultimately fail, until the balloons burst from our grasp and drift, like everything, to the right place.

Great art is often prism-like. It changes based on the angle: two people will gaze at the same work and draw from it drastically different insights. This is why ambiguity is so powerful, applied correctly — it allows myriad interpretations in simultaneum. For example:

Is this a sarcastic bite at the ugliness of the modern world? A suggestion that we are so trapped by grotesquerie that we can only cope through convincing ourselves that ugliness is beauty? Or simply a mocking glimpse into the mind of someone trashy enough to drink wine with their bluetooth speaker in the parking lot?

Or maybe — maybe it’s about finding joy in even the smallest and meanest situations. Is there something redemptive and joyful about loving the concrete and asphalt just as we do meadow and mountain? Are there, indeed, cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see? A connoisseur might answer that it’s all of the above: neither ironic nor sincere but a sophisticated synthesis … internet humor often demands fluency in the higher ironies.

Polysemy is woven into the structure of the app, too. Reels have hysteresis — they exist not in a vacuum, but framed by the past. The Soviets discovered the Kuleshov Effect: the same clip of a staring man, intercut with footage of a bowl of soup, a coffined child, or a lounging woman, is interpreted by watchers to express hunger, grief, or lust, respectively. Thus with Instagram! The same reel is construed differently depending on preceding images in the impressionistic sequence. Like life in miniature, no two people walk the same path; when their mazings coincide, their histories frame the same moment from different angles.

This stochastic nature reconciles a long schism in the science of aesthetics between the beauty of art and the beauty of nature. Reels are curated by the human eye, and example humanist beauty — perspective, composition, meaning — but their chance conjunctions closer resemble the natural formations which strike us so: the sweeping cliffs, the whorling stream, the arrangements of the stars.

What might the maximal film look like? The purest? Koyaanisqatsi (1982) has no narrative or characters in the traditional sense. It is 90 minutes of documentary footage spliced together. Geological formations, flying bats, and ocean waves; electrical infrastructure, oil drilling, and nuclear testing; sunbathers, skyscrapers, and air-to-ground weaponry.

As an effort to depict the world and its wonder, I suppose it’s adequate. They were working with constraints, of course: it had to fit into a normal movie runtime, provide a uniform experience, comply with copyright law, and so on. But imagine a more ambitious work unfettered by these limits, and what do we see?

First: a film that fits the time of the viewer, that can be watched for half an hour, or twelve, or perhaps even endlessly … a continuous stream to dip in and out of, that lives alongside the watcher, that becomes her companion through life, his tether to something greater. Second: a film that reshapes itself to the watcher, adapting to their attention, responsive to their mood and palette, so that every button pressed, image swiped, or second lingered turns the watcher into the director of their own movie in real-time. Third: a film that disdains the petty tyranny of intellectual property law — a film that truly reflects the world and its host of wonders, assembled from the anonymous mass footage of civilization, the filmography of our species, the human chronicle. Not only our videos, but our music, our photographs, our screenshots of text … what are we reminded of, now?

Instagram Reels is home of the reassemblers, and these auteurs of short-form video are certainly students of Eisenstein, for the prominent form on the apps is named the edit.

That was a straightforward case: a tribute to Golden Age Hollywood black-and-white movie star Jimmy Stewart set to Skee-Lo’s 1995 hit I Wish. But not all are so sincere and legible. After a point, reels become so heavily referential that they enter the grand tradition of Pound, Joyce, and Pynchon. See, for example:

It is simultaneously absurd and transcendentally beautiful. The first character is Denji from Chainsaw Man, whose motion to open the door (originally) is visual metaphor for confronting the subconscious. It opens to reveal enfant terrible Eric Cartman of South Park. His rage and narcissism have been quelled, for he sits in peace upon a lotus throne. He sings “How the Shadow is Clear,” a song by folk musician Vladimir Oiunovich Oidupaa, who was falsely sentenced and spent 33 years in a Russian work camp. (Oidupaa spent his decades’ imprisonment perfecting the art of Tuvan throat singing and eventually released the album Divine Music from a Jail to thank and glorify God.)

What a combination! This is not to say that these footnotes are necessary to enjoy the reel: in fact, its popularity is evidence for the opposite. The zoomer lives awash in cultural detritus, hopelessly so, and only stays sane by rearranging the wreckage into new and beautiful forms. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

Bafflingly, people clutch their pearls at this. Sam Kriss describes:

A friend of mine has never sat through a single episode of the Sopranos, but he’s watched pretty much the entire show through nonlinear YouTube clips; he knows how every major character dies, just not in what order.

If your knuckles are white against your obular opalescents, you miss the point. One of the most celebrated and innovative novels of the Latin American Boom is Hopscotch by Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar. Sometimes named an “anti-novel,” its structure arrives shattered: the “Table of Instructions” recommends starting at chapter 73 and hopping to and fro its 155 sections in a certain sequence. Chapter 55 is skipped entirely and others are visited more than once; for those readers who don’t want to muck about with all that postmodernist bullshit, Cortázar advises just reading chapters 1-56 and skipping the final 99.

The structural experiment is taken further in the 2000s anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. At the end of each episode, two characters give differing advice as to which to watch next: the nonlinear broadcast order or the corrected chronological one. Yet another order was used for the second season re-release, thoroughly confusing the situation, and fans traditionally choose a random sequence each rewatch.

However primitively, these works grasp at a grand ambition: that their component parts are so powerful that any arrangement of them affects meaning. They explore combinatorial possibility. The phenomenal thing about Reels is: not only does it serve more combinations than there are atoms in the universe, but it also turns its disassembling machinery onto others. No longer is The Sopranos a collection of rising and falling plot arcs, but a rhizomatic cloud of clips. Fans might object at this butchering, but the essence of cinema is not narrative. The essence of cinema is not character. The essence of cinema is montage, and Instagram Reels is the ultimate montage cannibalizing the rest.

Forget Infinite Jest. Forget White Noise. You cannot render the postmodern zeitgeist with old forms and old tools. Instagram Reels more than any other work captures the human condition in the age of mass media — because it is a mass medium. It administers the oceanic feeling.

If any artistic movement can be said to champion short-form video, it is “corecore.” Named after the Internet fashion of identifying styles (“cottagecore,” “cluttercore”), it declares itself the aesthetic of aesthetics. A corecore video is an impressionistic collage, often meditative:

Notice how, in its thread of unrelated (yet spiritually related) clips, it resembles the experience of using the app itself. It’s a fractal image, a recreation within the creation. It’s a prayer of thanks.

But these excerpted videos I scatter through the text are but fossil adornments slivered of their lively power: they are not meant to punctuate paragraphs, but to run like pearls on a string. I’ve tried, with clumsy words, to describe to you the beauty and sublimity of algorithmic short-form video content. Words are not equal to the task. Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.