Doomscrolling

 At some point a few years ago, my relationship to the news profoundly changed. What had once been a last-resort maneuver to stave off boredom—checking the headlines—became an engrossing activity that demanded its own significant allocation of time and mental effort. Instead of being a sleep-aid (reading a few articles before bed) it became an obstacle to rest. Opening up a news website meant girding oneself for fear, and what usually greeted one upon peeking inside was indeed a lightning stroke of white-hot terror. And even if this began during the pandemic, it has long outlasted its worst phases. 

The dynamic is often blamed on social media, of course—with its infinite supply of new content that allows one to obsess over a story or event, without ever reaching the bottom of an article or exhausting the supply of instantaneous reactions. But this can't be the whole story. After all, I have found that my new emotional relationship to news has outlasted even my personal boycott of Musk-owned websites and indifference to most other social media platforms. I'm still "doomscrolling," that is to say—even if it's only through the live blog updates on the New York Times home page. 

What I notice most is the news's capacity these days to disrupt one's internal mental agenda. A spate of depressing headlines can mean that, instead of spending the rest of the evening on a book or movie, as I had planned, I end up consuming snippets of updates. A particularly ghastly or salient event can alter the mood of an entire weekend and reshape one's plans for many days to follow—plans for what to read or what to think about. I used to think this was true only because, in my previous job, I was tasked with following public events. But if so, the mental habit has long survived its initial cause. 

The horrific events of this past weekend in the Middle East are the example I have in mind (specifically Hamas's horrific terrorist attacks and massacres of Israeli civilians and the IDF's subsequent horrific bombing and collective punishment of Gazan civilians). Recent days also brought news of a mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from Azerbaijan—sounding historical echoes of the Armenian genocide of a century ago, a catastrophic earthquake in Afghanistan that left thousands dead, and on. The events took over my mind and redirected it from whatever I thought these days were going to be about.  

Obviously any disruptive effect these tragedies had on my plans for the weekend are the very least important thing that can be said about them. My point is not to divert sympathy or interest from where they properly belong—namely, with the innocent people of Israel, Gaza, Armenia, Afghanistan, and on—only to note how intensely personal and immediate the news has become in our present age. It grips us in a visceral way that I don't recall being true years ago—even as humanity lived through and bore witness to events that were no less destructive of innocent life. 

One of the ways these events redirected my inward plans is that I abandoned whatever book I had planned to read on Sunday and turned instead to Don DeLillo's Mao II. I was guided in this choice by only a vague knowledge that the book had something to do with political violence in the Middle East. I thought it might therefore have something to teach us in this moment. I didn't realize how much it would have to say about our society's relationship to the news more generally—and how we consume it in age of terrorism and catastrophe. DeLillo, it can be said, foresaw "doomscrolling" before the term was coined. 

This is only one of several ways in which DeLillo's book seems eerily prescient. It is, after all, a novel about political terrorism set in New York City, in which the Twin Towers literally "loom" over events, recurring as a frequent image in the book—and yet it was published in 1991, two years before the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and a decade before the second and vastly more deadly attack on September 11, 2001. But even if people of the Bush years might have looked back on Mao II as an eerie prognostication of their time, we can say the same for our own era as well. 

Part of what makes DeLillo's book seem so contemporary is a feature that it has in common with many of the author's novels—namely, an atmosphere of dread. "Doom" is a word that comes readily to mind in any discussion of a DeLillo novel, whether it is followed by "-scrolling" or not. DeLillo even lampshades as much in the book. While the novelist character in Mao II, Bill Gray, cannot be seen as a direct stand-in for DeLillo, some of the other characters' comments on Gray's fiction could have been said no less of the real-life author: they contain an "incidental menace," an "undecidable threat in the air."

Gray's fundamental contention in the novel is that in today's society, we relate to the news—specifically news of war, catastrophe, terrorism, mass death—the way we previously related to art. Indeed, he sees art and the news as locked in a kind of zero-sum competition with one another: as art has lost its ability to move us emotionally, violence—the "propaganda of the deed"—comes to fill the void. The result is that sublimation is replaced with destruction. "When the Old God leaves the world," a character queries early in the novel, "what happens to all the unexpended faith?" Perhaps it explodes. 

DeLillo's critique of "doomscrolling" culture obviously predates the rise of social media—or even the widespread use of the internet. Yet already in 1991 the author had somehow intuited from the non-stop supply of flickering images on TV news a dynamic that would only accelerate in the decades since: "News of disaster is the only narrative people need," opines DeLillo's writer protagonist. "The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction." And elsewhere: "Nothing happens until it's consumed." 

Later still, another character quotes him to this effect: "The novel used to feed our search for meaning [...] But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker." The character continues: "So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. [...] We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings." 

Is this not our own age exactly? Is ours not the era of constant reports and warnings—of heat waves, of floods, of wars, of collapse, of disorder, of institutions tottering and norms defied and every aspect of stability we used to trust set on edge? Even if we know intellectually that ours is not truly the worst period humanity has ever endured, or even close to it—and even if we are consuming our dose of horror and despair from a safe distance, behind a computer screen, rather than being victims ourselves—even then it is impossible to escape the sheer "mood of catastrophe" that characterizes our times. 

Is it true, though, that this is related somehow, as DeLillo posits, to a diminishing role of art in our society?—to an absence of traditional forms of catharsis, by which we sublimate and expiate our pity and terror, leaving these emotions hanging miasmatically in our brains? Hard to say—by I do find that there was an odd symmetry in the New York Times home page the last time I checked it this afternoon. On the top of the page, more horrifying news of death and disorder in Israel and Gaza—and on the bottom of the page, in the cultural section, an article arguing that cultural progress has stalled and art today is dead. 

DeLillo/Bill Gray would not be surprised. The news has taken the place of art. The infinite doomscroll of the endlessly self-replenishing social media feed or newspaper live blog has taken the place of the finite tragedy that has, as Aristotle told us, a beginning, a middle, and—crucially—an end. The terrorist has replaced the novelist. And the result will make none of us safer. Without sublimation, we are left to confront the destructive capacity of our species in all its naked violence. The result is civilians kidnapped at gunpoint and massacred at a music festival—or bombed and starved in their homes.