you don’t have to be there

Charlie Warzel:

To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).

Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.”

The title of Warzel’s article is “Beyond Doomscrolling,” but it’s really about things you can do, useful apps you can download, in addition to doomscrolling.

When Musk started dismantling Twitter, I thought it might be an opportunity for people to discover that “irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information” is not in fact “irresistible” — it can be resisted. (Also, you could delete “in moments of disaster” from that sentence: infoconsumption doesn’t go up all that much in times of crisis because so many people are doing it every day — though, perhaps, redescribing every day as a crisis or a disaster to justify their habit.)

People: you don’t have to “watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem.” Nobody is making you. And it doesn’t do you any good to watch.

But when Twitter became intolerable people decamped first for Mastodon and then Threads and then Bluesky, or went all-in on Instagram. The Twitter habit, it seems, will long survive Twitter.

I know I’ve said this many times before, but once more for the late arrivals:

I read news once a week, mainly when the Economist arrives in my mailbox on Monday. If you live in a bigger city than Waco, Texas you’ll get it earlier, but a day or two one way or the other does not matter in the least.

The sites and writers I want to read more regularly I subscribe to in my RSS reader, and that includes a handful of Bluesky and micro.blog accounts. Except in very rare circumstances, I don’t visit bsky.app or micro.blog directly. I don’t have a Twitter account any more, I haven’t had a Facebook account since 2007, and I only visit Instagram once every couple of weeks to see what some friends are up to. (I devoutly wish they were somewhere other than Instagram, but I’m not the boss of them.)

Likewise, RSS is how I read the reporters and columnists I especially value. I read Ross Douthat and David Brooks and Ruth Graham, but I never visit the NYT home page. Ditto with the Atlantic and several other periodicals: read the people you know you want to read and ignore the rest.

There aren’t many worthwhile things on the internet that I can’t get via RSS, and for those I rely on email newsletters.

So: in the morning I go through my RSS feeds and newsletters, and then when I’ve read everything I want to read I’m done. Maybe I check back later in the day, maybe not — I have things to do.

Now, having established these habits, when I read a piece like Warzel’s I think: Why do people live this way? I’d rather pull out my fingernails with a pair of pliers. And I bet if any of you, dear readers, would ditch the doomscrolling habit for three months you’d never go back — you’d wonder why anyone would ever go back.