Social media has made us all OCD
Scrolling...refreshing...We're no different than people who can’t stop disinfecting their doorknobs a million times thinking they can control their world and hold back their fears.
I want to add another thought to my growing list of meditations on the Vampire Castle and the politics of the internet…
For the last few days — like a lot of people — I’ve been glued to social media, watching the next phase of the Israeli-American addiction to death and dominion unfold in Iran. And I have to say the level of psychosis on that platform is off the charts right now. Everyone is posting, everyone is fighting, everyone is on edge. It’s understandable. I guess America is in the process of joining Israel in starting another bloody war, and there is little anyone can do about it. There’s fear, helplessness, and bitterness. But there is also something about the psychosis that is specific to the technology where these convos are taking place — these feelings of fear and powerlessness are being magnified by social media, and they’re trapping people into an endless loop of compulsive scrolling that’s driving people insane.
I’ve been active on political Twitter for more than a decade now. I’ve seen it develop and I’ve seen the culture form. Hell, I’ve been one of the people who’ve participated and helped it form in my own tiny way. I’ve stepped back from it in recent years, enough for me to have some critical distance. And one of the more disturbing parts of the culture that social media technology created is that it gave people an almost OCD need to “know” — to know what’s happening right now, to be plugged in, to be aware. This part of the culture is always there day and day out. People wake up and immediately scroll the feed — synchronizing their brain with everything that took place when they were asleep. But this obsession can be more easily observed when some big thing is happening in the world — a war, a new escalation of hostilities, an invasion. That’s when this OCD need to be constantly aware of what’s happening becomes acute. Most people are just passive. They consume the info as it comes theeir way and maybe make some comments or bicker with others on the fringes. There is also a whole cadre of influencers that has emerged to feed this real-time information obsession — people pumping out analysis, interpretation, and prediction. This influencer set spans all possible political affiliations — from the MAGA right to liberal imperialists to hammer and sickle emoji crew. They’re hyper-online, curating videos and screenshots they pull from other accounts, writing analysis, trading in rumors. It’s a big industry now — some of it can be very useful and interesting, other parts of it are toxic psyops — and there is good money to be made off of it.
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I don’t see many people talk critically about this cultural development. Generally, people see it in a positive light. But being fully, constantly appraised of the global information space is how an informed global citizen is supposed to act today. People just accept that this is how it should be. But to me, this drive to be constantly plugged in, to constantly know what is happening everywhere in the world, seems crazy — and I mean crazy. And I don’t say this with any sort of condescension. I say this as someone who has long been part of this culture. I am one of those people.
If I try to sit back and look objectively at it, it’s looks downright ridiculous. It’s like we have come to imagine ourselves as part of some kind of vast global intelligence network — a decentralized CIA. We’re all scouring the webs for intel, producing daily briefs for each other, making big geopolitical predictions, writing out policy proposals…