Comment by sunrunner

Somehow I've never made the connection before until your comment, but perhaps DFW imagined the contents of the video tape as essentially the combination of YouTube Shorts and TikTok, an endless stream of tiny dopamine-spiking sensory inputs.

I always imagined it as a single media item with one theme that itself was so ridiculously compelling that viewers couldn't look away (more like a film, perhaps something analogous with the size of IJ itself), but now imagining that it was a practically-infinite stream of short-form content that you didn't even find truly valuable but were compelled to keep watching anyway makes it seem much scarier.