Sign of the Apocalypse: Fred goes swimming

I know each generation of Americans thinks the generation behind them is going to ruin the world. The Greatest Generation thought Baby Boomers were a bunch of sissies. Baby boomers thought Gen Xers were a bunch of thugs.

My generation has Generation Fred to worry about. Fred, for the uninitiated, is consistently rated by respectable publications as the future of comedy. The video above has over 45 million views (Two and a Half Men has 15 million). Fred is getting his own show on Nickelodeon.

But to my generation, watching the plotless, hyper-paced show is like getting punched in the nuts by Justin Bieber. It's insulting, confusing, and shows an ascendant changing of the guard. In short, we're getting old.

Britney is out. Bieber is in. "How I Met Your Mother" is old. Fred is new.

One of the biggest shocks about Fred is how fast paced it is. In the 1950s the average camera shot lasted about 15 seconds. In the early 2000s, camera angles would change on average every 2 seconds in a show. With Fred it's a microsecond.

We're getting faster at processing information. We get bored more easily. But our ability to process that information, to prioritize it, make sense of it, to critically think about that information, is lagging. If it's accepted that the easy access of the Internet is making us dumber, then a nation of Fred's raised on it are likely to be dumber, too, yes?

But perhaps we've finally found a machine to do the thinking for us. My generation can't work a rotary phone quite like the generation before us. Most of my peers can't drive a manual shift car. We build machines to do tasks for us. Maybe we've finally built a machine to take over thinking, too.

If art precedes science, then maybe Fred is an indicator of things to come. His cartoon-like antics are fast-paced, loosely associated, and tend to have no moral so far as I can tell, much like the Internet itself: instantaneous, organized by often disparate keywords, and morally removed.

So is the next generation doomed? Ask Fred.