How Lists Became Our Greatest Defense Against Endless Slop
In the early twenty-tens, we distracted ourselves with lists—so many lists!—including a type newly native to the internet: the listicle. It was a type of clickbait published on websites with zany names like BuzzFeed and KnowledgeNuts, under headlines such as “32 Pictures You Need To See Before You Die” and “58 Facts That Will Blow Your Mind In Only One Sentence.” Our brains, fried even then, craved these bulleted bits of information and fragmented nothings; many of us clicked on them one after the other, day after day, without wanting to or even knowing why. Whereas essays and books demanded conceptualization and concentration and analysis, the listicle demanded nothing. It mined the internet for material and enumerated its findings in a pithy, often arbitrarily ordered package. The numbers promised structure, but, crucially, didn’t impose one: item No. 4 was no more important than item No. 8, giving us no hierarchy to evaluate, no argument to assess, nothing to agree with or disagree with. Even newspapers and magazines began, to some extent, listifying their articles, synthesizing their investigative reporting and commentary into numbered units. The listicle was said to mark the death of media, the end of thinking. Did we really believe that it couldn’t get any worse?
Listicles still exist, though their main function now is to manipulate search engines and feed A.I. chatbots. Humans have moved on to a richer mode of entertainment: the short-form video, which we now consume with the same passive compulsion once reserved for listicles such as “20 Things That Will Make You Say NOOOOOOO!” The TikTok “For You” page, and the Reels tab on Instagram, aggregate discrete clips into an arbitrary stream of “content,” organized by virality and personal-viewing history. Both the listicle and the short-form video promise a neatly quantifiable unit of consumption, a quick hit of stimulation that can last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. You get sucked in by the ease and brevity of the form but end up scrolling for an hour or three because it’s thrilling not to know what’s coming next, to live within the constant expectation of novelty. With enough time, this mindless scrolling can acquire a curious, hallucinatory cohesion: the items consumed are united by the fact that you consumed them, and this fact alone provides a perversely satisfying sense of order. (This explains why some people talk about their algorithm as if it were a carefully curated exhibit.) There’s limited research on the effects of short-form videos on cognitive health, but one has only to scroll for a little while to understand their potency. A short-form-video binge feels, in my experience, not dissimilar from doing a batch of bad drugs.
That doesn’t mean we’re done making lists, though. As an archetype, the list is eternal, an indelible “part of the history of art and literature,” as the writer and philosopher Umberto Eco put it, in 2009. Eco, who called lists “the origin of culture,” traced their function to our most basic human desires: “to make infinity comprehensible” and “to create order.” Perhaps one positive consequence of the brain-rot video supplanting the brain-rot listicle is that this shift has made room for other, slightly more refined sorts of list-making to flourish. Rankings, in particular, now seem to be everywhere, all the time—best-of lists are no longer reserved for special anniversaries and annual roundups. There are weekly rankings of new songs and monthly recommendations of books to read, seasonal promotions of anticipated films and retrospective lists of the finest novels and television shows.
In his 1996 essay “I’ve Got a Little List,” the novelist William Gass identified our predilection for rankings as an “obsess[ion] with hierarchies.” But while our capacity to categorize and rank is a basic feature of human cognition—determining favorites and preferences is a standard part of childhood development—the current glut of best-of rankings indicates a specific pathology unique to the internet era. With so much information to wade through, it’s become difficult to discern what’s worthy of attention and what’s slop, what’s meaningful and what’s superfluous, what’s essential and what’s shit. When everything just exists—often on a subscription service that places items alongside one another without any real orientation of human refinement—a desire for hierarchy and order naturally emerges. In 1952, Jorge Luis Borges argued that it was in our nature to outline provisional “human schemes” given “the impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe”; now we are seeking to penetrate the not-so-divine scheme of Netflix or Spotify. More than ever, we turn to rankings to extract a signal, even a disagreeable one, through a torrent of ear-splitting noise.
It’s no wonder that, amid this madness, various cultural institutions and media outlets have tried to stake their claim as the leading list-makers and rankings crafters. So far this year, the Times has published at least two lists that aspire to be definitive: the thirty greatest living American songwriters, in April, and the century’s hundred best television shows, at the end of September. The Times’ quest, as the purported paper of record, to create canonical rankings has rankled those who deemed the lists to contain glaring omissions, overratings, and biases. The lists themselves, however, have proved to be enormous successes for the Times, which recently appointed a “Canon editor” to oversee the publication’s list-making ventures. “Our lists are hardly casual affairs,” the Times wrote in a June press release announcing the position, which is held by Gilbert Cruz, previously the editor of the Times Book Review. “They are based on statistical rigor, data analysis, shoe-leather reporting, in-house expertise and industry voices. They have each sparked conversation, delight and debate while guiding our audience to new favorites.” They have also, presumably, spiked traffic and boosted subscriptions.
The Times’ best-television-shows list was fairly middle-of-the-road in its choices, though it still generated plenty of discourse. (People, as it turns out, have strong opinions about TV shows.) Other outlets that have prioritized list-making in their editorial coverage, such as the music website Pitchfork, have benefitted from more divisive ratings systems, often championing the niche and spurning the mainstream. Sean Fennessey, the senior talk strategist at the Ringer, a podcast network and website partly known for its power rankings, drafts, and lists, has argued that the best ones “provoke” and surprise: “It’s not good editorial strategy if you don’t throw a curveball.” The reader dissatisfaction that follows whenever an established critic or institution publishes a ranked list can often be attributed to these intentionally pitched curveballs. When the Times excluded Billy Joel from its list of best American songwriters but included Young Thug, for instance, some readers were perplexed, even angry. If this list was truly to be the definitive list of American songwriters, how could the paper permit such an offensive oversight? (I am team Thug, for the record.) The vitriol, the engagement, the uproar—it’s every list-maker’s dream.
A key reason that self-canonizing lists tend to be publicly begrudged is that they are not our lists—they belong to the people upstairs, not the ordinary person. Readers are often encouraged to make their own lists on a poll conveniently connected to the publication’s rankings, but this can feel like a ploy given that the real list has already been determined, and published. Luckily, a surfeit of apps and websites allow users to log, sort, rate, and, yes, list whatever they’d like, in any way they see fit. Letterboxd has become the de-facto meeting place for cinephiles and casual moviegoers alike to track what they watch through ratings and reviews, while categorizing films in any number of customizable lists. On other sites, such as Goodreads, Rate Your Music, and IMDb, users can log and rate what they read, listen to, or watch, publishing it for their followers and friends to see. These platforms are not without power; Goodreads can dramatically affect book sales, and IMDb is the closest thing we have to a crowdsourced canon for cinema. With so many ways to rank stuff, it is perhaps easier than ever to dismiss the role of the professional critic, and the outlet that employs them. If the critic’s work is relegated to list-making, or short-form-video reactions, little separates them from anyone else on the internet, because the challenging work of careful aesthetic judgment has been reduced to its crudest form: a number, a blurb, a data point, a thumbs up or down, a shareable asset, an S.E.O. play—an ever-changing, always negotiated spot on a list.
Admittedly, I’ve always loved making lists. As a kid, I religiously updated my rankings of the best shortstops in the American League—no one ever usurped Derek Jeter, not even Miguel Tejada when he was named M.V.P., in 2002—and the best 2Pac albums, despite not yet having listened to his first two. In the fifth grade, I could have effortlessly rattled off my top ten favorite episodes of “Batman: The Animated Series” and inventoried the best verses from the Ja Rule–50 Cent beef. (Dr. Dre’s guest spot on Obie Trice’s “Shit Hits the Fan” was my sneaky No. 1.) On bus rides, my friends and I would debate the best songs and movies of the year, argue about whether Paul Pierce was a better basketball player than Kobe Bryant (I grew up in New Hampshire), and anguish over our top five favorite rappers, dead or alive. Ranking and listing the things I cared about was an easy way to think more deeply about them, to clarify myself to myself, to establish a sense of taste and perspective when I was still figuring out what, exactly, I was drawn to. The list was not the be-all, end-all, and it still isn’t, but it can serve as a portal into a more complex, vast world of contemplation and curiosity. Any good list is written in pencil, able to be revised and reëvaluated when the moment calls for it, with space left at the bottom for the works that we haven’t yet discovered. ♦