Rui CarmoIn retrospect, I find it vaguely amusing that “doomscrolling” only really took off during the pandemic, because, well, for me it started a little earlier.
But it’s no surprise that the term is making a very strong comeback:
Back then, I was already feeling the weight of constant news and policy updates from the US, but things were slow at first, so it took me until January to really get how politics (which I never paid attention to, especially in the US) were getting to me, but there is something hauntingly familiar about one paragraph I wrote at the time:
Although it might be argued that we’re on the brink of one of those dystopian futures books like The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 cast upon our collective subconscious, I side with those who point to masterful (if transparent) disinformation of the style that swept up Germany in the late 30s, and fear the echoes of general incompetence and purposeful malice that new apparatchiks leak in their interactions with established institutions […]
I managed to spend most of the next four years largely ignoring what was going on in the US, except for the more ridiculous and unbecoming bits of what was then an inept, fumbling administration that was still being held somewhat in check, and I had no real qualms about popping over to the US at the time.
Brexit was much closer to home, and more of an actual problem, although in retrospect it smelled quite similar.
It took the start of the pandemic for “doomscrolling” to become something that would eventually lead to my shuttering most social media, although I did note, somewhat presciently at the time, that
[…], politics being what it is these days, separatists and isolationists of various kinds are going to have a field day (or year), feeding off the economical downturn that’s also in the works.
I kept on avoiding politics as much as I could, but Twitter started becoming a cesspool, and finding myself increasingly disillusioned with the platform’s toxicity, I jumped on the ActivityPub bandwagon and realized that I don’t need to be on social networks.
I can engage with the world on my own terms right here, and I do post links semi-automatically to a few places, but on the whole I opted out of “doomscrolling” altogether for a long while, starting pretty much around the time when Ukraine happened.
Today, well… The entire tech industry is, for better or for worse, deeply intertwined with US politics, and the current state of affairs is so utterly bonkers that I find myself unable to ignore it.
And, to make things worse, there’s just too much slop on the Internet. It’s overwhelming and exhausting to even search for things (as many people have pointed out over the years), and in between AI-generated content, misinformation, and clickbait articles I eventually became desensitized to things to a point where the fact that the West’s former beacon of economic might is being run like a Mexican soap opera almost doesn’t matter.
So this week I found myself lapsing into a sense of helplessness and frustration about what is going on in the industry that rivals what I felt last Summer, but (fortunately) easier to handle in a more remote, detached way–until you start reading (in reputable sources that are doing some pretty great journalism) about book bans and various kinds of government-sanctioned pogroms.
These events feel so much like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale that I have to wonder how far we truly are from a real life sequel (or mirror timeline) to The Man In The High Castle.
There used to be checks and balances to US democracy. I sincerely hope they’re still in place, because from an European perspective, it looks like they ought to have started to kick in already.
Apologies for the politics, which I’ll try to keep avoiding, but the best thing I can say about the current state of affairs is that they don’t look good.