We all doomscroll. Often late at night, we scroll through social media or news feeds for a “minute,” which turns into hours. We seem to be chasing bad news. What are we looking for, if anything? What do we hope to get out of it? Is this a bad habit, or are there good aspects to it? Doomscrolling just might be changing our sense of time, of responsibility, and of witnessing. So put down your phones, stop scrolling, and join us for an investigation into the practice of doomscrolling.
In this episode, we discuss the following ideas, texts, creators, and philosophers:
- Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I
- Doomscrolling as a form of digital self-harm
- The negativity bias in our social and psychological lives
- The Florida concentration camp euphemistically dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz“
- The Ancient Greek concept of time as kairos vs. chronos
- Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of bad faith
- Aristotle, Poetics, especially on pity and fear
- Zeynep Tüfekçi, Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press, 2017)
- Hannah Arendt, “Labor, Work, and Action”
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Meridian 1951)
- The psycho-analytic concept of cathexis
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1944)