Bird’s eye: Why we’re hooked on animal videos

Watching the antics of creatures large and small online is how we escape the internet, while on the internet, says Sam Anderson

THE internet is, famously, terrible. Try it sometime; you’ll see. It is designed to coax all of your neural pathways open and then, while they are in a state of ecstatic receptivity, to dump horrible things into them. You hardly even need to click: These days, much of the badness is automatic. It sprouts at the edges of otherwise innocuous pages. You will be enjoying yourself, and then all of a sudden you’ll be watching a video of a conspiracy monger screaming at people in a fried-chicken restaurant or of a basketball player snapping his leg in half or of a sprinting athlete crashing onto a track, midstride, because his genitals have spilled out of his shorts.