A little souvenir of a terrible year... something I wrote about doomscrolling for Sasha Frere-Jones's end-of-year writer-buddies round-up, looking back over 2023 and looking ahead to 2024, which has been even more "how can this be reality?!?" than I could have imagined.
Hoping for some hopescrolling come Tuesday night....
update: 4 more years of doomscrolling is it then.... at a bare minimum
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It was a year of doomscrolling. Like the year before. And like next year.
Sometimes, when trying to explain affect theory to my students, I use doomscrolling as an example of a uniquely contemporary affect. It didn’t exist - and then it did.
For sure, there’s always been bad news. But it arrived in defined chunks and at punctual intervals - TV news, radio at the top of the hour. Only a massive crisis like 9/11 or Katrina would result in rolling round the clock coverage - and even then, you could walk away from that.
To get the doomscroll effect in the past, you’d have to take a load of newspapers and chop them up and stick on some kind of homemade carousel rigged up out of chicken wire and spindles. And even then it would not approach the inexhaustible, endless-onwardness of the doomscroll,
The chyron, that Times Square tickertape at the bottom of the news channel screen, was a foretaste, an augury of doomscrolling. But it was easier to ignore, and it didn’t have the personalized, algo-attuned quality of doomscroll, the way it learns what detains your gaze and churns up choice items tailor-made to agitate you.
Think about how this timesuck lifefuck invention affects your breathing rhythms, your posture (hunched, clenched), your endocrinal system - and how that builds up as neurological wear and tear, a stress load.
But think also about how those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from where you sit - on any issue, any conflict currently raging - are also being pumped full of this shit nonstop, forcefed fear and tension. It explains a lot.
For sure, now and then there’ll be a spate of hopescrolling - unexpectedly positive developments, better than expected election results. But mostly the mode is doomscroll - feeding your inexplicable craving for the alarming, the upsetting, the enlargement of feelings of impotence and despair.
Feeding you the illusion of keeping on top of things when actually you’re sinking deeper and deeper.
2023 was the year of doomscrolling. Same as last year. 2024 will be worse - worse beyond the wildest nightmares.
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Follow up on the blog about Bob Dylan as the Original Doomscroller