TikTok’s sludge content isn’t just for short attention spans

polygon.com:

Someone is chopping kinetic sand into neat, even cubes next to a clip from Family Guy. The jumping, coin-collecting gameplay of Subway Surfers plays alongside a segment of a Twitch stream. Slime is being coiled and stretched next to a reupload of someone else’s POV sketch.

These kinds of collaged videos — sometimes called “sludge content” — that play completely different footage side by side are proliferating on TikTok. But they’ve also been shared on other platforms, where they’ve become a meme in and of themselves. Often, that attention is negative, particularly about the perceived attention spans of younger internet users.

“Am I old or is something very wrong here,” reads one tweet, showing a video split three ways between Subway Surfers gameplay, an episode of Family Guy, and someone scooping and cutting sensory sand. “This is what your little cousin watches 14 hours a day,” says another, captioning a video that splices another Family Guy clip with footage from what appears to be Jump Girl, a silly endless runner game that sees the protagonist bouncing off various items, including men and giant eggplants. The audio clip for this video is borderline unlistenable, layering a robot reading a (potentially fake) Reddit post with multiple sound effects and “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin.

Am I old or is something very wrong here pic.twitter.com/6TccyljcFV

But neither video in these tweets is quite as straightforward as it appears. The latter is perhaps a more obvious parody of the trend. But the former was posted by the official Subway Surfers TikTok account, capitalizing on the 10-year-old endless runner mobile game’s sudden surge in popularity by posting a TikTok collage that exaggerated the style to include three