Do We Live in Hell?
PART 2: Only if we choose not to escape it.
The Mayans were more or less right when they predicted the world would end in 2012. The sun was already setting by the aughts, and the time after that was the last burst of color in the darkling twilight. We are in a period where those colors merge into the inky blackness of night, but it will be a night of no real moon or stars. A corrupt and failing political system that dithers along and refuses to outright collapse, the algorithmic degeneration of art and culture rapidly melting into AI slop, and the ruination of the internet that has baked all this into an endless shit-caked loop. The scope of every sensationalist news story is now biblical. Dead oceans boiling with poison and natural disasters surging through cities, great bands of earth becoming hot enough to poach humans, wars and displacement and dispossession, ancient bigotries reawakening as reactionary goblins thaw the permafrost of basic decency. A thousand cattle emit gales of methane farts somewhere in Iowa while awaiting their fate inside a soggy Taco Bell shell that now costs twice as much as it did pre-Covid, and then thousands of miles away, a mammoth iceberg calves off the Arctic ice shelf. The subtle death drive envelops our subconscious as we bide our time waiting for the rapture, but there is nothing really metaphysical or righteous at work. This is biblical strictly in the sense that we describe the future as both broadly punitive and big. Causally, it is one tragicomic flap of the butterfly effect, and this specific trajectory of the invisible hand portends a future that keeps everything the same, except slightly worse.
There is something decadent, maybe self-indulgent, about considering horror on this scale, especially as America welcomes an administration that doesn’t even bother to add any subtext to its oligarchic graft. Sure, maybe it’s in our instincts to ironize or elide anything that big, but all that dark contemplation is overwhelming. But the work of living with that dread, as we face it here on earth, is less about apprehending the end of everything than facing the challenge of the next moment, and the moment after. It’s a scary and stressful proposition to imagine that the world is ending, but it would be far worse to act as if it were. Everything ends, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set an alarm for tomorrow morning. Our modern quotidian anxieties keep us from sleeping soundly, so we check to see if the bright light of our phones containing all the information of the entire world held inches away from our faces will lull us into a peaceful slumber. We doze off into a decaying nightmare, but it is of our own making. There’s always the next step, into something imminent and invisible, and it is non-negotiable.
Our political horizons have been so limited by neoliberalism, that lanyard libs and reactionary ghouls cannot imagine any kind of fix or change beyond Sunsteinian behavioral nudges or some reversion back to Trad Cath values. These people are veal calves who think their little pen is the entire world, siloed off into their fact-deficient ideological bubbles. On both mainstream and social media, all political discussion consists of two mutually incomprehensible tribes shouting stupid slogans at each other. Everyone believes their set of stupid slogans are self-evident axioms, and they recognize their enemies’ stupid slogans as meaningless gibberish, too braindead to even reply to. Anyone who willingly buries themselves in this discourse long enough will descend into interpretative madness, complete with pages of fevered scrawlings in a psycho notebook. Their attenuated nerve endings of pure stimulus-response are deep-fried in dull provocation.
In the absence of any actual recourse or meaningful agency where the material terms of our existence are concerned, we are permitted to create a reality of our own. We can’t fully live there because there is nowhere to cook or sleep, but we can decorate it however we like. This space is not and cannot ever be our home, but there is a screen where we can watch and it will show commercials in a little box surrounded by betting lines and blaring chyrons lousy with subliterate AI babble. When the news is on, it looks and sounds the same—except the comment sections are filled with a huge mass of genuinely insane people whose beliefs bear no relation to reality whatsoever, but who all write in the flat, bland, friendly style of a granola recipe.
This all sucks, and the more time we spend there, the more deranging it becomes. But consider the alternative reality in which our choices are narrower and more consequential, and which everything is more coercive and the $5 Footlong is now the $6 Six-Inch. As that actual reality further degrades, the digital reality grows more appealing, even the most false and assaultively scammy and luridly incoherent iterations of it. There is no real agency in any of it, and certainly nothing like an actual escape from that other bespoke reality; everything that appears to be human connection eventually reveals itself as some sort of extractive grift.
When contrasted with the dwindling and demeaning options proffered by the physical reality we share—which is the user-facing side of an annihilating, brutish, lavishly anti-human capitalism—the ability to pick a cyanide pill still at least scans as a choice. Sure, the selections range from some degrading fandom to born-to-lose parlay to life-warping political mania, but if you’re getting chemicals in your drinking water either way, you may as well have some stake in choosing between stories explaining how and why it got there. As this plays out into any broader examination of why the system sucks and why we feel fucked over, where legacy media has failed has since been supplanted by the binary of a mostly false sense of reality and the sheer senseless fact of it. While the depravities and abstractions of all that bad information were necessary conditions for Donald Trump’s dominance of the American political imagination, they’re also a market’s response to a cruel and crumbling daily reality.
There is a neurotic need to be passively political that is specific to social media, and it drives a very distinctive brand of pathological stasis and misery. The part that is striking is how this vast and inherent disturbance undergirds the pointlessness of being Very Online, while the totality of this internet addiction swallows all this up. But the lack of will to do anything else drives so many maladaptive people towards doomerism and self-loathing. It’s a coping mechanism for the crushing abstraction in American life, so we want to feel like we’re expressing some value system that lines up with our identity.
In the post-recession years, institutions that are supposed to do one thing will reliably and punitively do something resembling the opposite, and they do harm so reliably and effectively that it’s nearly impossible to imagine they ever had any other purpose. This collective experience doesn’t augur well for any kind of idealism, but it did engender this type of activism that suggested that if enough people knew What’s Really Going On, then all this awareness and outrage and discourse would eventually spin the dial. In reality, any meaningful change will be much slower, more tedious, and more local.
The seduction of online politics is inherent to its instant gratification. It is a pacifier to soothe our thwarted desires. It gives us a simulation of everything we don’t have in our lives, and it’s predicated on never actually delivering any of those things. We come back for more, and the inevitable desensitization agonizes the wound of these desires because this facsimile is not fulfilling. Along every axis of online consumption, from porn to video games to politics, we have to get more intense and more frequent to get the same buzz. All it’s doing is giving a generation of people a delusional notion of civic engagement.
I get that democracy dies in darkness and whatnot, but a fixation on politics is NOT a mark of virtue or intelligence. It is a specific perversion that hits you because of your experience in life. It will hit different people randomly and they will adhere to attendant media vectors and organizing structures. Cable news is reality TV for people who believe they’re too sophisticated for reality TV. Everything is framed as a celebrity culture-style spectacle—Is AOC your friend? Is Joe Biden a good person?—and we treat this discourse like an argument over the finale of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives, with all the toxic parasocial madness that goes along with it. This stems from the subtle discomforting awareness of our powerlessness, but we’re desperate to believe that our investment in these questions is meaningful.
Rabid consumers of political media more or less want to be spoonfed information that aligns with their particular set of affectations, just so they can fulfill some masturbatory desire to always have a fully formed opinion or hot take on current events. When news organizations and social media newsfeeds are subject to market incentives, there can be no arbiter of Truth. The nature of the profit motive turns the logistics of news delivery into a contest for viewershare of an audience of people who basically want to be lied to. If I asked you to describe a typical NPR listener or Fox News watcher or VICE reader or New Yorker subscriber, you would likely depict a specific type of person for each. This is not a coincidence, but a product of market segmentation and meticulous branding. Everything from there is a matter of pandering to their cognitive biases to keep them on the hook through commercial breaks or clicking on ads, or to maintain a narrative to convince their base of partisan weirdos that they haven’t tacitly signed off on the cynical power projections of the parties they support. Most news isn’t even about manufacturing consent at this point, but to disabuse the naysayers who have rightfully concluded that American politics exists to only serve the nation’s most powerful economic forces and richest individuals.
Nothing about 24-hour news and social media, at least under their current compositions, will lead to a shared understanding because these platforms reward attention-seeking over altruism, conflict over clarity, outrage over empathy. It is not very difficult to learn true and useful things about What’s Really Going On, but it is much easier to learn untrue things about it. Everyone seems content with exclusively consuming media from their very own hyper-personalised and algorithmically determined stable of brain injury patients. The thing we know is that humans, when primed to believe Something Is Going On but also just in general, will get weird and stay weird about stuff more or less for the LOLs. Whether this is people acting out some wish to see their internal unease reflected by an uncaring world or just indulging in the classic pastime of noticing something and then doing some weird online posting about it, it all comes out more or less the same—people with smartphones giving themselves a few cheeky nibbles of schizophrenia, as a treat.
You can see, in how the two sides of the culture war respectively respond to each little flare-up of recreational mental illness, two divergent but not quite competing visions of American society. One side will go out of their way to show that they take these concerns very seriously and think of new etiquette and vocabulary to describe and feel about the situation as it passes by unattended to; the other will go on social media and talk the wildest shit they can, then appear on cable news to put on a somber face and say “fear and anger have no place in American politics” then keeps right on spewing wild shit. I probably don’t need to tell you which political party falls under which description. But it seems both more salient and more worrying that it is nearly impossible to imagine how those two approaches to managing a society could be brought together in collaboration to address any problem.
We’re taught to think of political debate as a contest between two contrasting views whittling in towards a consensus point of agreement, which will uncover some form of truth. Social media may be the most anti-human form of communication, and it is designed to platform everyone who has completely disagreeing and irreconcilable opinions that may splinter off from those two broad sides of the culture war. These differences are inflamed until any form of mutually agreed reality has broken down and we balkanize into little homogenous and self-reinforcing factions. All these online bubbles will overstate the severity of many frivolous issues to encourage people to turn to these maximalist radical-for-the-sake-of-being-radical solutions that are unlikely to manifest into meaningful action, which then sidetracks us into purity spiraling and LARPing, which distracts us from the meaningful political action we need to deal with real problems. In the absence of a knowable and shared common reality, there is instead a fractured and burnt-over wilderness of scams and fantasies. Some politicians and sniveling Renfield media grifters will come to flatter your unease, and others will come to feed it, and they will leverage this general unknowability through familiar smash-and-grab tactics.
I stopped following the news and social media consistently when I was trapped in my apartment during the pandemic; I realized that being hyperaware of problems I can’t solve is not a particularly empowering form of civic engagement. My general disposition toward the world is that capitalism is fucked, the planet is dying, and liberal democracy has been co-opted by corporate interests, so following the daily minutia of these developments will do nothing to improve the quality of my life or alter my general outlook on socio-political trends. This emphasizes the difference between knowing what to think and how to think. And I’ve never understood the popularity of Twitter; it has always been a vacuous corporate dumping ground, and it is also the singular gathering point for the terminally online and performative individuals who wish to communicate in shallow blurbs while embracing a stunted form of humor derived from the cultural remnants of something awful. All internet usage and every social media platform have been a fumbling preamble to the total cultural immersion brain penetrative experience of TikTok: It contains the narcissism of Instagram, the ignorance of Facebook, the self-righteousness of Twitter, the epicness of Reddit, and the mental health of Tumblr. A good rule of thumb in response to all this is to consume enough news that’s enough to motivate you to do some good in the world—anything after is a diminishing return.
Even at the height of my addiction, social media was fairly easy to quit. I just channeled the pandemic-induced idle time and allowed myself to be bored. I stopped multitasking while doomscrolling: I resisted the urge to whip my phone out during a movie or have social media open with a bunch of other tabs. If you just sift through your newsfeed, there will be nothing else to leaven the deadening monotony of the endless firehose of pithy dumbass posts. It’ll get numbing pretty quickly. There’s very little content to all these opinions and takes and externalized anxieties. Really though, how many truly memorable posts do you find in a day? When you eventually and inevitably grow dreary, you’ll understand the limitations of all these platforms. The internet is not forever, and neither is the strange sense of diminishment and ambiguity that currently hangs over this present moment. When you ponder social media after stewing in this boredom, you will realize this self-imposed hell is literally a waste of time in a specific sense: If you keep doomscrolling into oblivion, you will only grow more anxious and irritable and lonesome, then eventually lose any ability to express these feelings elsewhere.
When you put the phone down and look away from the abyss, you’ll have to ask yourself what you want to do with this newly allocated downtime. While you figure out how or where you want to direct this energy, the alienation will eventually creep back in. Our game show host rapist president and his incompetent staff of cronies and buffoons have doomed us to an indefinite oligarchy, and all of this is a horrifying, unconscionable situation. You may want to fix it, and you’ll want to run to your phone or computer. Instead, just sit with that discomfort and alienation. If America is barrelling toward apocalypse, eventually someone will have to be there to pick up the pieces. So what are you going to do to make that possible? You’re not going to have an answer, and that uncertainty is what used to send you online—and it certainly sent me online as well. But if you take that feeling and incorporate it into a hobby or some communal activity or even some form of organizing, you will eventually start to realize the contours of the world and how you can take them in a positive direction. I can’t tell you what that is, and you’ll only find out if you refuse to succumb to the lure of online political spectacle. There's nothing more interesting behind that glass than the real life happening in front of it.
"It contains the narcissism of Instagram, the ignorance of Facebook, the self-righteousness of Twitter, the epicness of Reddit, and the mental health of Tumblr." The mental health of Tumblr XD XD XD this is so spot on
Really enjoyed this and share the sense of frustration over the crazy impact of social media on discourse and society in general. I came off Facebook in 2016 as a response to their culpability in Trump v1, Snapchat and Tiktok because they were asinine and stopped the dalliance with Twitter once President Musk bought it. As you say, take the energy and do something positive, it will be needed later and the psychological damage incurred by not disengaging with the news cycle is considerable.