Ultra-Processed Speech: The Political Junk Food Making Us Sick

Photo courtesy of Chot Studio.

I just finished reading Ultra-Processed People, which explains why modern food leaves us anxious, inflamed, and disconnected from our bodies and one another. Then during a period of doom scrolling one night, I stumbled upon an interview with Jon Steward commenting on the impact of social media and thought how apropos. What we’re consuming daily through social media isn’t conversation, it's ultra-processed speech. 

Ultra-processed speech is language engineered for scale, speed, and our immediate attention. It’s flattened into slogans, weaponized into memes, and pumped full of emotional additives: fear, moral superiority, outrage, certainty. Like ultra-processed food, it’s cheap, omnipresent, wildly profitable, and available, and like junk food, it hijacks our nervous systems while pretending to nourish us with legit info.

In today’s political climate, this kind of speech thrives. Algorithms don’t reward accuracy or wisdom; they reward escalation and attention. The loudest, angriest, most absolutist voices rise to the top, while nuance is buried. Everything becomes a binary: good vs. evil, us vs. them, agree or get canceled. There’s no room for ambivalence, grief, or honest uncertainty - only allegiance.
The result is a population that’s emotionally dysregulated and chronically overstimulated, convinced we’re “informed” while feeling increasingly hopeless and hostile. We’re not talking with one another, we’re consuming pre-chewed ideological products designed to keep us reactive and divided. That’s not civic engagement. That’s political fast food.
​
Whole speech - slow, relational, imperfect - doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t fit neatly into a reel or a tweet. But democracy, like digestion, depends on the ability to tolerate complexity without immediately attacking it. If we want less overwhelm and less hatred, we may need to radically change our media diet. Not everything that’s loud is nutritious. And not everything worth saying can be swallowed in one bite.

---