In January 2023, the world was introduced to a deeply chaotic new content format. On a hyper-stimulating bundle of screens, three videos play simultaneously: a clip from a TV show, a video game recording, and satisfying ASMR footage of sand being scooped, all frankensteined together. This cacophony of image and sound, painful for older viewers to watch, was ‘sludge content’ – and to many younger TikTok natives, it was old news.

Across the internet, moral panic ensued: Millennials felt old, Boomers felt scandalised, and Gens Z and Alpha… presumably didn’t look up from their many, many screens.

Sludge content joined a long cultural arc towards quicker, shorter, shallower content – a phenomenon that's both guiding and guided by shortening attention spans. Desperate to stop users from scrolling right past them, brands and creators are using anything from split-second edits to cliffhangers to aggressively grab attention. Even the most celebrated works of the year can’t hold focus, with box office hits like Barbie and Oppenheimer prompting Gen Z – yawningly ‘bored’ at the prospect of following a single narrative for two hours – fighting for the right to second-screen from the theatre.

But unlike its predecessors in overstimulation – the TikToks chopping feature-length films into snackable clips; the creators using a dizzying number of jump cuts – sludge content marked a perspective shift. As creators, brands, and the general public pondered how to captivate a generation whose viewership style had become totally alien, this triple-screened content put things into stark focus: if holding attention stays a game of one-upmanship, where do we go from here? Tens, hundreds, thousands of screens?

Rather than ramping things up, digital culture is taking a different tack. In an overstimulating content landscape, users, creators, and culture-leading brands are toying with other modes of bringing people in – ones that turn away from hyper-stimulation. From content that’s weirdly absorbing in its focus on grounded, ‘human’ scenes, to that which soothes instead of stimulates, or even entertainment that acts more like a background environment than a central focus, the most emergent entertainment is guiding viewers back to relaxed modes of focus.