Endless Doom Scroller
endlessdoomscroller.com
endlessdoomscroller.com
It seems to me sort of like the 'three-wise-monkeys', just think happy thoughts and the world gets better or something. It seems infantile. I don't see how you can fix problems if you aren't willing to in the first place look at them, as we've seen in this pandemic the virus doesn't care how optimistic you are.
The prevailing opinion these days seems to be that people are too negative, honestly looking at the world in sober fashion I think most people are probably not scared enough.
This is about as negative as news can get, and it's been happening ever since there have been people and doctor's offices.
This is a horrible thing to have to bear, and many commit suicide or have a terrible time with the news. By and large, however, people go on with their lives, finding hope, arranging their affairs, and getting ready to both fight and enjoy the time they have left.
What they don't do, by and large, is have a continuous public meltdown, even though their life might look as bleak as is possible.
Negative news is great. What's needed and not provided is context. In a world of billions of people, with millions of people able to imagine and prove to various degrees that some horrible thing is about to happen, the amount of negatively-tainted news is for all intents and purposes infinite. It always has been. We've just had shitty communication systems.
People love to consume and share negative news. They love to slow down at the car wrecks to see if they can see bodies. They love to socially-gossip about how bad something might be and how so-and-so might be taking it or not. That's wired into our systems, probably as a survival behavior. Hominids who worry about lions tend not to get eaten by them, whether or not they live near any lions or not.
In this environment and evolutionary configuration, then, some sort of filtering mechanism is required so that the things we're hard-wired to do don't take over most of our life. To admit that isn't to want to live in a pollyannish world, it's simply to grow up and start consuming a media diet instead of a shitstorm firehose. There are real problems, yes. There always have been. To solve them requires precision, emotion-free discernment and slow progress. Most folks aren't getting any of that today. They're just getting the lizard brain stimulus over and over again. Because money.
I see your comment as the perfect irony. First, you presume that your outlook is sober, but have you considered that the way you perceive the world is just that, the product of your biased (by all the gloom) state of mind? Do you think the world is getting worse? It's been "getting worse" forever.
As for fixing problems, how many problems can you realistically fix from what you're watching? The world has real problems and you could just pick one if you want and focus on it. There's really no need to dwell on negativity days on end. Doom and gloom is just a distraction and contrary to what you may believe, not productive.
My personal advice though, would be to try to retreat for a while and observe that nothing much would have changed when you resurface. It'll be like skipping two seasons of a bad soap opera and picking it up later, without missing a beat and without having wasted hours following circuitous story lines.
Plenty of issues do evolve slowly. The Ogallala Aquifer is rather critical to the Midwest and has serious issues. Sure waiting two years isn’t going to make that much difference, but that just means we wasted another two years before doing anything.
Between 2009 and 2019, US GDP grew from $14.45 trillion to $21.43 trillion - growing 48.3%. In that time, according to those figures, our annual interest payments have grown 49.8%. Those numbers are so close natural variability alone could explain the difference.
Why is that insane? The US is a mature economy.
Treading water in good years only to fall deeper in bad ones means collapse is unavoidable.
Without context, this is meaningless. Most people lack the context to understand what National Debt even is, let alone how it works in an economy; for proof of that, look at all the people who are, to all appearances, utterly convinced that China can "repossess" massive tracts of land because it "owns" some of our debt. The utter confusion of ideas required to hold such convictions is beyond me, but such notions are out there, and quite potent in certain circles.
Further, that was simply a random example. Substitute the global obesity crisis and the point stands.
* "The governor of $not_my_state thinks that COVID is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse."
* "President famously known for making ignorant and inflammatory statements makes ignorant and inflammatory statements."
* "Climate change is going to kill us all and since you're an individual with no political power or academic clout there's nothing you can do to stop it! Try these 17 green virtue signaling rituals to give you the illusion of control!"
* "Actual act of god is terrible for $city/$town! Feel the pain of their lives being destroyed while sipping your morning coffee."
* "Politician makes obviously misleading statements that you would have never known about except for this article. We spend 10 pages fact checking crazy make you feel good even though this article will never reach the people that will believe it."
Like god damn news is just exhausting. I wish it was empowering instead.
Covid-19 surging near you? Make sure you have enough stored food to weather a quarantine, have on hand whatever supplies you think you might need to combat symptoms that are bad but not bad enough to be hospitalized for, and make sure your will is in order if you have a comorbidity. Then go about your business wearing a mask and social distancing and forget about it.
In my opinion, this is the happy medium. Much more positive than constantly being afraid every day scrolling through news stories and much more grounded than just thinking in platitudes.
How can you fix problems by knowing about them? What I mean is: unless you're an expert on the problem, or willing and able to become one as soon as you've learned about it, what difference does it make whether you specifically know how bad something is?
We have institutions to work on things, do we need each individual citizen to be constantly worried about everything that goes wrong, will go wrong, can go wrong or won't go at all?
Does "knowing" about it do anything? Leave aside that you probably don't really know anything if you've read doomsday news, you're just afraid, but the facts are very light and usually styled for effect: everything is always terrible, it's constantly just one minute away from certain destruction etc.
To give an accompanying reply to the sibling commenter saying "that's why we have democracy, so we can delegate": that's why democracy in its current state works so poorly; a disengaged electorate.
The "we have institutions to work on things" line could only be uttered by someone so disconnected from reality that they actually believe those institutions can be effective without oversight.
Or are they, in effect, the amplification apparatus for journalists who, by and large, also know very little about the things they write about?
I understand the point, it feels like a noble and important thing, to be informed, have an opinion and be ready to tackle the problem when the White House calls. But they probably won't call, not me, not you, not anyone getting their information about anything from the daily news. They'll call the people who are giving the information to the news.
The appeal to institutions as trustworthy problem solvers is also disheartening. Institutions are supra-human intelligences. This does not mean they are necessarily more intelligent than any of their members. They're often less so, and in any case they usually have their own incentive structures which are entirely separate from (and often antagonistic to) people's wellbeing.
Understanding what went wrong, how it could've been caught, how to prevent it from happening in the future, options and tradeoffs for how to resolve things now that the damage has been done, etc. - this can be extremely useful and empowering. Even if you have no ability to impact the specific problem being discussed, you can draw parallels from those problems to the problems you do face in your own domains where you can have an impact. There may be no perfect solutions, but there may be better solutions, a better understanding of the problem, and an example of moving forward as one is best able to. This isn't exactly a message of "doom" though.
On the flip side, one can see yet another retelling of beating yet another dead horse - be they unpredictable black swan events with no real useful takeaways for planning, no useful nonobvious changes to policy to propose, or yet another deadlocked political quagmire of shouting heads that even the experts can't untangle - or something where the lessons are obvious and spelled out hundreds of hours of content ago and being applied - isn't terribly useful, encouraging, or empowering. Quite the opposite - if anything, they're depressing and disempowering.
To put it another way - flooding our information channels with low quality low content unactionable unrelatable useless unresearched unvetted "the sky is falling" shallow summaries of our inevitable doom displaces useful content about the problems of our world and more in-depth discussions about what we're experimenting with to try and fix them, what seems to be working, what was tried and failed, etc. Framed in this light, much of the news cycle has negative value: while it may let you "know" "more" about the world, you would've spent your time much more wisely by trying to learn from what other people are trying to do to fix things, or by attempting to fix things yourself.
> People don't need to be experts about everything to become relatively well informed about many things, nor do they need to try to solve every problem at once.
My impression is that people are generally not well informed on anything. They know some factoids, they can repeat some headlines, but they don't understand half of it. And how could they? Even the journalists don't. Read the daily news about a topic you are an expert on and assume that they're as correct about everything else you're not an expert on.
Kony wasn't stopped by people knowing about him and his crimes and everybody spreading Kony 2012 and other Clicktivism. It doesn't change anything, other than your state of mind, which will be in a much, much worse condition.
If you do something, that's great. But it's obviously not connected to watching the news. Almost everybody watches the news, but almost nobody does anything.
I'm saying there are better ways, and their value is not diminished by the firehose of low- or negative-value information most people consume.
What your questions triggered in me was to reject the notion that the institutions set up around me will solve much. I'm sure most people have lost faith in these institutions at this point, on all sides.
But I agree with the part of your comment that implies that we're being lied to in the process of entertained. It's the end goal, right? Fear drives clicks which drives revenue. I'm sure it's one of the foundational blocks of modern journalism.
It's also an interesting thing to watch from outside the US: there's a lot of arguments that it's the US institutions specifically that are broken beyond repair, willfully being destroyed etc. That may well be true, but it has nothing to do with the news being what they are, we see the same kind of news coverage pretty much everywhere, the actual circumstances don't matter. And we have the same sentiment in Europe, it's always this close to the edge. In my opinion, it's emotional manipulation, but it's really hard to get out of it once it has become a habit.
I'm not sure it's a modern thing either. Here is Thomas Jefferson on the same issue, albeit writing about knowledge of facts, not so much the psychological cost of constant fear: https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
It's not like the media is not trying to scare everyone though... But as they keep crying wolf for every random issue like every week, it does not work as well once there's a real issue at hand. How surprising.
But that's not what Doomscrolling does for people. If you already know that X is wrong, reading 500 more instances of how X is going on doesn't add to your knowledge. It doesn't allow you to do anything more about it. It doesn't change anything meaningful.
Gather enough knowledge to be useful. Beyond that point it's just going to make you miserable without adding anything to you or the world.
(You probably want to gather a little more than that, to be sure you're not missing anything key. But learn to spot when you're just pointlessly bathing in horror.)
Given the current state of the world, its become much easier for media outlets to write stories on topics like; how far away a vaccine is, what shape the economic recovery will take or what countries are horribly dropping the ball. I think these stories grab people's attention because people are scared and think learning more will help them feel less scared. Unfortunately, many of these articles are open-ended/non-conclusive and this leaves the reader looking for more. If the reader finds more of these same types of articles, in my mind, they've begun doom-scrolling.
I agree most people are probably not scared enough overall but I also think most people are scared about the wrong things. They're scared about what their media of choice is telling them to be scared about, rather than the issues that'll have the biggest impact on their life/society at large.
Markets become bearish because there are more bears, it is a downward spiral and a self fulfilling prophecy. Just like Black Scholes option pricing model is a self fulfilling prophecy if everyone starts using it.
As for funding startups, investors can always object. When things are going up they say they dont want to invest in a startup as they want to get the high returns in the market. When things going down they say they cant invest because they need to wait until things go back up and their positions stabilize. I have heard both things from some investors while others invested.
Arguably, the best thing to invest money in during a downturn is a startup that will spend it on internal development, which needs to get done anyway, even if no outside money is coming in, good labor is more easily coming in, and on better more reliable terms. Microsoft and Apple were both founded in a recession.
I've tuned it all out minus some pertinent local news.
Give me a US media that shows peaceful protests without an agenda (don't watch news anymore but did in May and all I saw was the ugly protests filled with violence.. didnt see any peaceful protests that were surely happening ...now i hear CNN, etc are showing the peaceful protests like in Oregon which are now peaceful because Trump isnt there and so CNN Im sure is now blasting/banging the peaceful protest drum). As for COVID news i just get it directly from my friends who are doctors, nurses and hospital administrators. Forget the media.. i loathe it!
The virus doesn't care about how optimistic you are, but with suicides rates rising, and known factors of that are anxiety and isolation, which are both abundant right now, it's emotionally facile to say thinking happy thoughts is infantile. You can't do anything if you're depressed and stuck on the couch, and in that state no problems can be fixed.
It doesn't no one any good if you're too scared to work on fixing problems. If that means lying to yourself and believing that the only way out of this mess is a vaccine that will arrive in February, just to be able to put pants on to go grocery shopping, then anyone who judges you harshly (including yourself) for that is being an asshole.
I'm well aware there's a police brutality problem in the US, including brutality against protesters and the US sending Federal troops into cities.
I'm well aware that Biden is the Democrat nominee and there's nothing to be done about it, and that after however much hemming and hawing he's going to make Kamala Harris his VP, and there's not much to be done about that either. That there likely won't be Medicare For All, or a safety net for millions of unemployed people, or any other really popular and obvious change that needs to be needed.
I'm well aware that China, a world away, is trying to stamp out Uyghurs through apartheid and likely soon genocide.
Scrolling Facebook, Twitter, etc just reminds us of these terrible things that are constantly happening, that we have little control over day to day. And yes, we should volunteer, donate, protest, prepare to respond. But day to day, there's not much we can do to fix it. We're instead stressing ourselves to death over things we can't control, at least right now. Don't forget they're problems, help where you can, but don't spend your life hyperfixated on them.
The artist, one Benjamin Grosser, describes it as follows:
> "Doomscrolling" refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly—and in some cases, almost involuntarily—scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. Certainly the realities of the pandemic necessitate a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety. But doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. Yes, it may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, The Endless Doomscroller acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. By stripping away the specifics wrapped up in each headline and minimizing the mechanics behind most interface patterns, The Endless Doomscroller offers up an opportunity for mindfulness about how we’re spending our time online and about who most benefits from our late night scroll sessions. And, if one scrolls as endlessly as the work makes possible, The Endless Doomscroller might even enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what these interfaces want from and do to us. In other words, perhaps the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling.
Source: https://bengrosser.com/projects/endless-doomscroller/
I've started to read more long-form essays on current events topics. I find they nicely summarize events in a chronological order with all of the benefit of hindsight to go with it. Opinions are generally more nuanced and the writing style assumes that you read all the way through the article.
TV news and late night talk shows are just the worst.
If you want to be informed, spend the news time reading books/essays about important/interesting topics, and you'll be way more enlightened in a year.
If you go all the way in this, you won't be able to participate in the shared culture of society, so I don't get fanatical with it. I'm human, and some gossip is fun.
Headline: The world is spiraling out of control
Body: X is happening that will impact Y in these specific ways. Z people are working against X and trying tactics A & B...
The Headline is calibrated to maximize your anxiety. The Body is often calibrated to the right level of anxiety and context. I find instead of trying to mentally suppress Headline that freaks me out, and thus subconsciously imagining the worst possible thing, RTFA helps to soften and calibrate the anxiety more appropriately.
We MUST start shaming media organizations that publish bullcrap headlines. This is almost entirely the editors’ fault, BTW. The reporters don’t have control over the headline.
Does anyone know if there are news sources out there that don't have exaggerated, doom- and anger-filled headlines? If they're there, I'd love to drive traffic to them.
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scrollToBottom();“The daily news I find to be a lot of noise. Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, ‘What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?’”
If you know anyone who gets really depressed or anxious when reading the news there are sites like https://happynews.com/ that can really help them though it can be tough to ween people off the regular news. The constant stream of doom and gloom has an addictive quality I don’t quite comprehend.
Particularly jarring is the constant fixation that is going on in the news with Daily COVID-19 data. There is simply too much daily variation that has nothing to do with how the virus is spreading and affecting each location. A huge waste of attention and resources with titles such as "Largest number of new cases in a day since March!"... so what?
So it is completely relevant when he is being treated as authority.
“[…] they think these are aberrations; that underneath all this, the news is worth saving. I simply go one step further: I think none of it is worthwhile.”
> Coronavirus: UN warns of 'catastrophe' over school closures; France says second wave likely
Negative
> US Donald Trump flounders in interview over US Covid-19 death toll
Neutral
> Spain Country speculates over whereabouts of scandal-hit ex-king Juan Carlos
Neutral
> A good sign Sailors stranded on Pacific island saved by giant SOS in sand
Positive
> Climate crisis Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study
Negative
> TikTok China hits out at US 'smash and grab' as tech row deepens China hits out at US 'smash and grab' as tech row deepens
Probably negative
> Thailand Country orders new investigation into Red Bull heir's alleged hit and run
Probably positive
> Brexit Number of UK citizens emigrating to EU has risen 30% since vote on withdrawal
Neutral
> Thailand Protesters openly criticise monarchy in Harry Potter themed rally
Probably positive
> Mexico Giant dam poised to displace indigenous people and flood graves
Negative
So four negatives and three positives.
Maybe people just focus too much on the negatives?
Basically, yes.
Source: Wikipedia [1], and, also, every newspaper since pretty much forever [2]
What we're experiencing now is part of a broad, generational change. Regardless of your country or the outcome of any one election or news cycle, the far right is emerging as a strong force. It will remain so in most Western countries, maybe for decades.
Understand the broader sweeps and landscape. Understand that you're probably like a drop in the ocean. If you see a part of it that's your duty, do your duty. But do, or do not...
History shows us broad strokes oscillations of political winds, how often things have seemed absolutely terrible, how things swing back often unexpectedly. How even the most influential have little control over affairs...
As a response to the far left. Not that I condone either.
#We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself#.
So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you’ll keep tuning in. The “You don’t actually need to be watching this all day” rule would be true even if news stories were sorted logically and according to social importance. They aren’t:
Taibbi, Matt. Hate Inc. (p. 137). OR Books. Kindle Edition.
It would be interesting to have GPT-3 write a short teaser for each headline.
I am curious to see if society will move towards providing a tick-box setting to give users control over Doom Scrolling. Only time will tell.
Maybe this OP is also looking for a media deal.
The former is fear-mongering, but the latter is true.
“This Is Not the End”
Hope in the endless doom!
I was nonetheless quite amused.
It's Doom, but if it were just a single, linear hallway.