How The Internet Became a Doom Loop

[Celerity]

Online, we are trapped in the recent past. That’s a recipe for feeling powerless.

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/629ec16551acba002091af11/internet-social-media-reactionary-doom-loop/



Do you ever get the feeling that we’re all just…stuck? The notion keeps coming up in conversations I have with friends, relatives, even the occasional stranger. It is the context of most of the news I read. It is the vague vibe that I get when I’m observing conversations online. More children are killed inside their schools. More innocent people are killed by gunfire while trying to buy groceries or while worshipping or even at a hospital. And we are stuck in a doom-loop. You cannot open your phone or turn on the television without experiencing and absorbing untenable levels of grief. Nor can you avoid the hollow offerings of thoughts and prayers, and justifications of inaction from lawmakers.

The stuckness doesn’t just apply to arguments about guns. It applies to our sclerotic politics more broadly: the overlapping crises from climate inaction, the constant bungling of our pandemic response, and the seemingly successful attempt to roll back abortion rights. The stuckness isn’t part of a debate about how to move forward. It is, instead, a tacit acknowledgment that the status quo must change, but will not. We are experiencing the same problems and having the same arguments. It’s all leading to a pervasive feeling, especially among younger people, that our systems in the United States (including our system of government) “are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing.”

When it comes to the internet and our media ecosystems, it is easy to hurl vague, blanket critiques like Social media is making everything feel worse. That is mostly true, by the way—but it’s obvious. Which is why I was drawn to a recent idea from writer and technology theorist L.M. Sacasas: The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless.

Sacasas (go read his post) was interrogating our stuckness, and his simple idea provides a helpful frame. The internet—this connecting and mediating force we use, in part, to relate to each other and make sense of the world—is often described in terms of speed. Those of us who’ve been using it for decades conceive of the internet as a technology that makes everything move faster and more mysteriously. The thinking is that our connections to information and to each other form in real time, which generates magic and volatility. Sacasas asks us to revise the notion of real-time communications online, and to instead view our actions as “inscriptions,” or written and visual records. Like stars in the galaxy, our inscriptions seem to twinkle in the present, but their light is actually many years old. “Because we live in the past when we are online,” Sacasas suggests, “we will find ourselves fighting over the past.”

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[bronxiteforever]

1. Kick & recommend. This is a must read.

Great post and it has caused me to do some deep thinking. I believe this analysis is correct.
The hardest part in modern life is seeing what is right in front of you and developing a conversation.
I found this sentence the description of our growing political problems

“…the rise of shitposter politicians who view content creation and online fan service as the key component of their jobs. As politicians—especially those on the far right—transition into full time influencers, they no longer need to govern even reasonably effectively to gain power. They don’t need to show what they’ve done for their constituents. Simply culture warring—posting—is enough. The worse the post, the more attention it gets, and the more power they accrue.”