The spread of the 2x playback button is a sign of brainrot — and I love it

I am a screentime maximalist. I make no apologies and feel no guilt about how much time I spend staring at my phone. I'm a grown adult who pays taxes and makes my own choices about how I spend my precious free time on this blue marble. And what I want is to spend as many of those moments as possible consuming short-form vertical video on my phone.

My need to consume more and more inane content reminds me of the famous photo of the Florida Everglades python whose stomach exploded while trying to eat an alligator. I identify with the insatiable snake; the alligator is the endless scroll I can never get enough of, knowing there's always something more to watch.

My goal is to maximize consumption of video hours, and obviously, I can't add more hours to the day. I'm already shaving the time I waste on sleeping (boring, overrated) by watching TikToks in bed.

So the problem needs to be solved on the supply side: I need those videos to go faster so I can get more in.

Thankfully, TikTok and Instagram Reels both have buttons that make videos play at 2x speed. There have been some bumps along this road. TikTok added the 2x-speed feature in 2023, but only recently added the crucial feature that lets you "lock" 2x speed without having to hold your finger on the screen (press the screen to start 2x speed, then drag your finger down to lock it). Reels was later to the party, adding the 2x speed in 2025.

Just this week, YouTube Shorts is finally adding a 2x speed feature. Thank god, I say! Honestly, I am not a huge Shorts consumer, but I imagine this is huge news for like, 12-year-olds.

The ability to speed up content has probably become one of the most-used features across the apps I use daily. I speed up podcasts and non-fiction audiobooks to at least 1.25x (lately, I've been bumping fiction audiobooks to at least 1.4x). The idea of listening at actual speed is torture to me at this point.

At first, I thought the idea of speeding up a Netflix show was an abomination, but then I realized it's the only decent way to consume reality shows like "Love Is Blind." In the last few weeks, I've found myself annoyed that I can't speed through the six (!!!) episodes per week of "Love Island" on the Peacock app (though apparently there are Chrome extensions that let you do so).

Does it say something sort of sad about our society that we need to speed-watch through a 90-second video? Yes, yes it does. I'm not going to deny that. Our attention spans are so decimated, and our brains so rotted, that we can't listen to someone speaking at normal speed anymore.

And what's to blame for that? The firehose of content itself, of course. Short-form videos have rotted our brains in such a way that we crave more short-form videos. It's almost like toxoplasmosis, the disease from handling cat poop that makes rats obsessed with cats.

I'm sure that there's a way to wean yourself off all this and reset your attention span. Log off, touch grass, dopamine reset, etc… But I have no interest in that. I've made my choices, and I'll be speeding through videos until all the platforms have to add 3x speeds.