Every time I pick up my phone, I feel like I'm making the conscious decision to enter my own expertly tailored version of hell. Thanks to fingerprinting algorithms, I can now always have access to content designed to arouse people with the same neuroses I have. Not just in a sexual way, but arouse me to anger, to fear, to shame, to envy - to the whole spectrum of human emotions. Social media has always been like this, but I find it increasingly difficult to turn away from in recent years - especially when looking for community in isolation. Social media can often feel like real interaction with other people - and I'd be lying if I said this zero-sugar style of socializing wasn't helpful in distracting me during difficult times.

More and more though, I realize that this doomscrolling is perverse. Not in the Christian/Republican use of the word, but in a way that's so deeply lizard brained, it feels like how zombies eat humans in The Walking Dead. It feels like spiritual waterboarding. It brings to mind the scene of Tony Montana in front of a mountain of cocaine. Doomscrolling is exchanging minutes of your finite time on Earth in exchange for feeling anything. Since eleven years old, this endless content consumption through social media has exposed me to countless traumatic videos of ISIS and cartel beheadings, unarmed Black and brown people being gunned down by racists, school shootings, public assasinations, and more. Thirty years ago, the only people who could say they'd seen similar would've been in the military. This is now the reality of an average American child with internet access. This repeated exposure to trauma followed by enjoyable content creates a flattening effect. In one moment you can see the most heinous graphic violence, and in the next you can see a funny meme, or extreme pornography. Now you're left with the sum of these feelings, and you can either process them or distract yourself again. We are all giving ourselves CTE.

Finding out about the most recent Epstein files via Instagram story felt like the end to this very long sentence: a confirmation that this lifestyle isn't sustainable - and that the culture we exist in is designed to neuter progressive movements and efforts at self/community empowerment before they even have a chance to form. These documents are the most disturbing things I have ever read. They detail atrocities that are too graphic for horror movies, and yet almost instantly, they were broken down and edited into shortform videos with suspenseful music and shocking thumbnails. We now have memes inspired by these emails being shared by mainstream news outlets. We have tiktoks of AI Jeffrey Epstein dancing in rooms where he and other billionaires abused children. And now timelines everywhere have flattened this decades-long psyop into engagement bait.

This is all too fucking much and I am really disturbed. I'd like to do something about this culture we've created, so I started small and put together some takeaways / action items below. I hope you find them useful.

Doomscrolling and constant surveillance is killing progressive thought. Share your ideas and frustrations in person or over encrypted chats like Signal. Write out your ideas in journal entries or articles. Have conversations with your friends outisde of social media. This is really important and sets the stage for change. That's why I made this blog!

Find replacement compulsions for doomscrolling. When you get the urge to scroll, pick up a healthier distraction. I love word games, retro emulators, and ebooks for this reason. If you need help setting up the last two, I'd be more than happy to put you on :)

Enjoy silence when you can. Fascism thrives when we're all overwhelmed with information. When you take time for your own clarity, you make it harder for bad influences to take hold. The medium is the message. "Indeed, it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium" - Marshall McLuhan

Thank you for walking with me. I love you very much and have faith that we will get through this shitty time.

xoxo,
Joey