While it is true that the paragraph as an actual unit of thought has been replaced in much online writing with the paragraph as a display case for a sentence, the reprehensible tendency easily predates AI. Twitter threads, LinkedIn posts, Medium, BuzzFeed, newsletter copy, self-help writing, even certain kinds of late-2010s journalism were already full of it. Once a thought is spread across eight or twelve tweets, each individual unit has an incentive to work almost independently. You don’t get much syntactic subordination across tweets; you get serial declaration:
Here is the problem.
Here is what nobody understands.
Here is the part that matters.
And it gets worse.
Axios later turned the same tendencies into an explicit house philosophy, “Smart Brevity”: put the important thing first, use short sentences, simple structures, bullets, and design for readers who skim and scroll. If any single thing “caused” this style to predominate, it was the shift to mobile-first reading, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones. A smartphone is a booster seat for people who can’t yet reach the table of adult conversation, a playpen for those whose minds cannot be safely trusted to wander unattended. The fact that you excerebrose mutants need your prose to be bite-sized and sugar-coated is why writers and publications have learned to deliver thoughts to you like Mommy steering the spoon-airplane into your open mouth. No wonder ostensible adults now speak in catchphrases like professional wrestlers, only with less self-awareness. But I’m going to say the quiet part out loud: you know what else has become a mindless reflex? Crying “AI” at every stylistic tic you dislike. You’re replacing one lazy shortcut with another: objecting to formulaic prose by using a formulaic explanation for it. Let that sink in.