Apropos of something

I was in bed, scrolling through Bluesky, when I saw it. An activist and journalist I follow broke the story, moments after it happened. I told my wife.

"Are you sure? It'd be on the news sites."

"Yeah, probably not. Then again – I've followed her for ages, she reported on Charlotteville, and I've never seen her joke about this sort of thing."

A few minutes later it was on the news sites, too. All of them.

My immediate reaction was revulsion. Not so much at the news as the Takes which I knew were coming, as sure as night follows day. After Christchurch, everyone became a gun violence and counter-terrorism expert; after Whakaari, a surprisingly high percentage of the population turned out to be volcanologists; and during Covid, everyone online suddenly displayed hitherto unsuspected depths of epidemiological knowledge. The same segments of the population, I knew, would turn out to hold unrivalled expertise in the field of this latest Event. The media would play their part, reporting on events as they unfolded without the benefit of accuracy or context: the news version of a race to the comments in order to post "first."

It gave me the ick enough that I put my phone in another room and spent some time installing a new stereo head deck in the car. The original, which displayed most features in 漢字 and placed the car in the middle of the ocean as revenge for having the temerity to drive outside of the geographical confines of Japan, had been some time dying. First it lost the ability to play or eject CDs, then the reversing camera stopped working. Eventually, its last remaining function – to play, without warning, from the previous owner's vast library of Japanese country music – disappeared as mysteriously as the music sometimes arrived. We drove around with a portable speaker filling in for the sound system for, oh, about three years. It did the job but it sounded muddy and was annoyingly unwieldy to deal with.

The new head deck enabled me at last to listen to the radio – should I want to. I found I didn't. When I did, little shots of adrenaline would make their way around my system and give me the jitters. It wasn't good to drive to. Audiobooks and music were better.

I realised that putting my phone elsewhere and just getting stuck into a project for a while had given me a lot more mental clarity than I was used to having.

And then, as is customary, I forgot about that helpful epiphany and slowly began re-absorbing everything I saw on social media and news feeds, like a sponge soaking in the jet from a fire-hose. I wrote most the above as a draft newsletter and forgot about that too.

That Event was back on July 13, 2024. Now, a related Event is rearing its hideous head and I'm here to tell you: you don't have to tune in.

Turn off, tune out

One of my more inconvenient scruples with this newsletter is that I try to only tell you about self-improvement things if I've tried them and found them to work (or, as is more usually the case, the opposite.)

This is one that works. I know because I've done it before and have resumed it for a while now: I don't look at social media or news until my knock-off time, at 5:30 pm. At earliest.

I'm not worried about missing anything. I learned when I did my "dopamine detox" that if I really need to know something, someone will tell me. And a quick check-in tells me pretty much everything I need to know. I don't have to scroll for hours.

It took me a while to get here, but it's stuck pretty well for around a week. I plan to keep it up because it gives me something precious: time, and sanity. Every time I have managed to take serious time off the socials I've just kind of started getting stuff done by default. Useful things, not artifacts of toxic productivity. Long-broken car stereos get fixed. Shelves get built. Things get tidier. More work – often much more work – gets done. Newsletters get writ. My self gets improved.

It's all very well for you to say "walk away," Mr Privilege, but we owe it to those less fortunate to bear witness to their suffering.

Yes! It is important to face the truth that our sociopathic rulers create endless horrors, and to listen to those affected. Not being subjected to horrors is indeed privilege, not to mention the myriad other advantages I get by default, thanks to being a white man in a society created for white men. My aim is to use what I have, to help where I can. Being welded to my phone, gawping at the horrors, isn't helping anyone.

Caveats

This isn't being written to make anyone feel guilty. There's enough of that out there without me adding to it. As often, this is (selfishly) written as the results of an experiment with a sample size of one: me. As always, your mileage can and will vary. Consider the following:

"I'm a creator. My income depends on me posting my work on social media, and engaging so people will see it."

Then carry on, comrade, and post up a storm. We could all use more art in our feeds. Posting isn't my gripe; neither is engaging. My problem is with scrolling. Maybe I'll make it up into a design, riffing on something highly culturally current like Game of Thrones. A Kraken like the sigil of House Greyjoy, tentacles wrapped around a human brain, imposing text declaring: We Do Not Scroll.

"I'm a journalist. My job is to take samples from the firehose, so I can tell others what's important."

You're doing God's work and we thank you for it. Of course, the best journalism is usually engaging sources and trawling through documents and asking questions no-one else is, not duelling brainworms on Twitter, but you knew that anyway. We need people who make sense of madness, and I'll still be reading your stuff. You couldn't stop me if you tried.

"I'm a member of the X #resistance. My job is to find the worst things said by the worst people on earth and make sure as many people see them as possible."

Please stop. If all you're doing is trawling for Bad Shit and signal-boosting it then you're not aiding; you're abetting. The below post sums it up well, and suggests an alternative.

reminder: this is the point of the barrage of batshit appointments if you are a tiny bit freaked out by each of them it will add up to “too freaked out to do anything about anything” pick ONE thing at a time to be upset about, decide what action to take on it, then follow through, repeat

[image or embed]

— Yell In a War (@jelenawoehr.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 4:20 PM

(I found that while taking a quick Bluesky break while writing this article. I am aware of the irony.)

Authoritarians and social media oligarchs have something in common: they want you scrolling. They want you anxious. They want you despairing. They want you paralysed. They want you inactive, while thinking you're doing activism, endlessly thumbing your distraction rectangle in between ads, and it's this behaviour that I believe is a problem, if not The Problem. I am sure there are people for whom lengthy doom-scrolling sparks action, or who genuinely enjoy swimming in the sea of insanity. If you are one of them, good for you. Really. Sadly, I am not. I do better – almost absurdly better – and I do much more when I am not jacked to my eyeballs on digital jenkem. You might too.

So if there is something happening today – and whenever you read this, it will be today, and there will be something horrible happening – and you felt like you needed permission to log off or do something else for a while: this is it.