Plasticity
I’ve just returned from Cartoon Next in Marseille, where I was asked to jointly run a new feature of the event, Next Ideas Lab, exploring with a group of animation, games and technology folk the skills we will need to face the future in our industries. One participant offered a single word.
Plasticity.
She meant that we will need to be able to adapt. But the word she chose to express this was specific and highly relevant to the moment we face.
When we hear the word plasticity, we relate it to neuroplasticity - the ability of the brain to create new neural pathways to solve challenges and, yes, adapt to our environment. Most profound in childhood, this capability persists throughout our lives when presented with stimuli to trigger it. Without such stimuli, the brain’s ability to grow new pathways and adapt can fail away.
But consider this. Plasticity is a two way street. If the world around you continuously adapts to you - has plasticity built into its essential nature - then you never have to adapt or change.
Alexandr Wang is 29 years old, a billionaire, founder of Scale AI, and now leading Meta’s ‘superintelligence’ initiatives. He recently announced that he is deliberately delaying having children. His reason? He wants to wait until Neuralink or other brain-computer interfaces are mature enough to be part of early childhood development.
“In your first like seven years of life, your brain is more neuroplastic than at any other point,” Wang explained. “When we get Neuralink and we get these other technologies, kids who are born with them are gonna learn how to use them in crazy, crazy ways. Like it’ll be actually a part of their brain.”
Read that again. One of the most powerful figures in AI is timing fatherhood around the opportunity to have his child neurologically hardwired with artificial intelligence from birth. Not metaphorically integrated. Literally. The boundary between self and technology dissolves before the child independently develops any understanding of our world.
Five years ago, every job advertisement asked for a digital native. Now they ask for an AI native. It sounds like the same kind of shorthand - fluency in the tools of the moment. But we already know how much mobile devices and always on feeds have changed us. Research on attention, cognitive function and impulse control in the generation raised on smartphones tells a consistent story: the media environment we grew up in doesn’t just reflect who we are, it actively shapes who we become. The digital native wasn’t unchanged by the device in their pocket. They were formed by it - attention spans shortened, tolerance for ambiguity reduced, the neurological reward circuitry subtly but measurably restructured by years of notification, scroll and refresh.
Wang’s vision takes this logic and accelerates it by an order of magnitude. If screens rewired us incidentally, what happens when the rewiring is the point?
But here’s what Wang’s framing misses. While he imagines deliberately integrating his future child with AI, something equally profound and potentially insidious is already happening to all of us. We are not being integrated with AI through surgery. We are being integrated through story.
Micro-drama is the fastest growing entertainment format in the world. It was another hot topic at Cartoon Next and every other media conference I’ve attended in the last six months. Vertical video. Sixty to ninety seconds per episode. Dozens of episodes per series. Designed for binge consumption on the phone, consumed in bed, on the bus, in the margins of the day. But beneath that simplicity lies a sophisticated understanding of contemporary viewing habits and monetisation strategies that traditional entertainment has struggled to match.
Micro-dramas first took off in China, where the boom runs on instantly legible tropes - whirlwind romance, ruthless CEOs, betrayed lovers, reincarnated rivals and revenge served in short bursts.
Last year, Chinese micro-drama revenues surpassed the country’s domestic box office for the first time. The global market outside China is forecast to reach $9.5 billion by 2030.
The short narrative format itself is not new - after all, I pioneered serialised short-form storytelling for animation on ‘Liquid Television’ back in the 90s. Telling stories this way does require a concentrated intensity - a stock cube rather than a soup. What is new is the machine behind the narrative process.
Micro-drama is not just short. It is data-driven at every level of production. Algorithms test narrative beats, character designs, pacing, emotional triggers - in real time, across millions of viewers simultaneously. The producers scan comments for trends and run communities for superfans to harvest their sentiment and suggestions. The feedback loop is continuous and invisible. A scene that causes viewers to pause gets noted. A scene that causes them to skip gets cut. An emotional beat that spikes rewatches gets replicated, intensified, reproduced across the next episode and the one after that. Discussion is monitored and absorbed into the evolving narrative.
And now AI video generation is joining the party.
Harvard researchers have described AI as giving “rocket fuel” to this kind of content production. They’re right. But the more precise point is what the rocket is pointed at. Not just retention. But the end of narrative friction.
We may still be telling fiercely original and idiosyncratic stories in the future, but will anyone be engaging with them?
Aldous Huxley saw something like this coming, though he was looking at 1950s television and beach-read paperbacks rather than a TikTok feed. In Brave New World Revisited, he argued that the greater threat to human freedom wasn’t Orwellian oppression but trivialisation - that people would be so comprehensively distracted by pleasure and sensation that they would lose the capacity to distinguish what matters from what doesn’t. They wouldn’t need to be controlled. They would do it to themselves, happily.
His worry wasn’t that books would be banned. It was that nobody would want to read them. Not because reading was forbidden, but because the conditions required for reading - sustained attention, tolerance of ambiguity, willingness to be uncomfortable, capacity to sit with a story that doesn’t immediately reward you - would quietly erode.
Neil Postman extended this in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Television, he argued, wasn’t just changing what we watched. It was changing how we thought. Training us to expect entertainment over substance. Restructuring consciousness toward the immediate, the visual, the emotionally legible.
Neither of them had seen the feedback loop we have now built. Neither of them could have imagined content that doesn’t just entertain you passively, but watches you back - learning your responses, your hesitations, your triggers - and reshapes itself accordingly.
Neuroplasticity is strongest in early childhood - which is why Wang wants to exploit that window. But the micro-drama feedback loop is doing something to plasticity too, at every age, and it’s the opposite of what he imagines.
When content continuously adapts to you - optimising in real time for your existing responses and emotional preferences - you never have to adapt to it. The discomfort of the unfamiliar, the effort of inhabiting an experience unlike your own, the productive confusion of a story that doesn’t resolve cleanly - all of these are signals the algorithm reads as failure and optimises away.
The content acquires plasticity. The viewer loses it.
This is not only a children’s problem. Adults sitting alone at midnight watching their fifteenth episode of an algorithmically optimised vertical drama are in the same loop. The algorithm has learned them. It is serving them a version of narrative smoothed of everything that might cause friction - which is to say, everything that might cause growth.
A story that adapts to you is not the same as a story that changes you.
This is the hinge on which everything turns. Because the entire history of narrative - from the cave painting to the novel to the prestige drama - is the history of stories changing people. Giving them access to lives they haven’t lived, losses they haven’t suffered, joys they haven’t found, perspectives they couldn’t have reached alone. That is what story is for. Yes, you want a story to give you relatable touchstones. Not to reflect you back at yourself like a mirror. But to create moments of epiphany, discovery, understanding about what your life can mean or be.
The feedback loop does the opposite. You feel seen. You feel entertained. And yet your neocortex quietly atrophies.
In 2012, the writer Scott Alexander published a short story called “The Whispering Earring.” In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests a little topaz tetrahedron on a gold wire. When worn, it whispers advice. Its advice is always right. It begins with major life decisions, then what to eat for breakfast, then how to move each individual muscle. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life - rich, beloved, large and happy family. When the priests prepare the body for burial, they find the brain has almost entirely rotted away, except for the parts associated with reflexive action.
The earring’s first whisper is always the same: Better for you if you take me off.
Alexander wrote this as a parable about cognitive autonomy thirteen years ago. It is now circulating widely in AI circles as a description of where personal agents are heading. A recent article in Harper’s magazine used it as the frame for a long essay on rationalism, tech, and - the subtitle is exact - the end of thinking.
The Whispering Earring is a parable about agency. About what happens when something outside you becomes better at running your life than you are, and you let it, and the letting becomes habit, and the habit becomes instinct, and eventually there is no meaningful difference between you and the thing advising you - except that the thing is still there, and you, in any meaningful cognitive sense, are not.
Now apply that to narrative. The personalised feed. The adaptive algorithm. The content that has learned your emotional fingerprint and serves you an endless succession of stories shaped precisely around your existing responses. You are entertained. You are comfortable. You are, in the language of engagement metrics, retained.
But are you changed? Are you expanded? Have you spent an hour inhabiting someone else’s truth and come out the other side different than you were before?
Or has the story simply confirmed what you already felt, in a format optimised to make you feel it more intensely?
I’ve spent years working with AI models on storytelling. They can collaborate on story, but they cannot inhabit one - because authorial voice is the product of a specific life accumulated over decades. And this is precisely what the feedback loop erodes: not just the viewer’s plasticity, but the conditions under which that kind of voice gets formed. A culture that optimises away discomfort in its stories will eventually stop producing storytellers who have sat with discomfort long enough to write from inside it.
So, yes. The greatest skill any of us will need in the years ahead is adaptability. Plasticity.
And the greatest risk we face may also be this: that as everything around us changes at speed, the stories we consume invisibly adapt to us instead - smoothing away the friction, confirming the familiar, optimising for our comfort - and we, lulled and entertained and retained, simply stay the same.
When the content has endless plasticity, do we lose our own?