brendan halpin

I recently read this excellent piece about the doomscroll industrial complex.

In short, it’s a reminder that people who are ostensibly on the right side of things depend on making you anxious in order to drive engagement and build their brand. (I blocked Sarah Kendzior during the first Trump administration because her brand is Relentless Gloom and Doom, and I didn’t need that in my life.)

I would just add that there are also the peddlers of both outrage and false hope to beware of. There’s a whole liberal infrastructure—MSNBC, yes, but also youtubers like the Meidas Touch Network and Brian Tyler Cohen, who have built their brand on cataloging every outrage coming from the right and leading you to believe that help is coming from the legal and political system.

Help, when it comes, will be from your fellow citizens in the streets. It is never coming from the political or legal system, as we’ve seen. So though it does feel good to see someone else pointing at things that are outrageous and reminding you that yes, that’s outrageous, you’re not stupid to think so, I’m opting out of this kind of content.

The outrage/false hope people are especially dangerous because they make you feel like engaging with their content is doing something to counter fascism. But it’s not. If you’re on the couch watching Rachel Maddow, you’re manifestly not doing anything to help anybody except for MSNBC and its advertisers. So if you sate your urge to do something by engaging with that content, you’re really being counterproductive.

So in addition to avoiding people manipulating my emotions in order to drive engagement and make money, I will also be shrinking the number of things I pay attention to.

I know there’s a school of thought that staying hyper-informed is a form of resistance. That seeing and paying attention to and possibly posting about everything is a way to fight back. And while I do think it’s important to document actual atrocities, I guess I’d ask you who it helps for you to be outraged when, for example, Trump talks to a car dealer at Mar-a-Lago and then says something disparaging about lemon laws.

Again, we should be plugged in enough to know when people are actively being harmed, but if you spend your days being outraged about every dumb and hateful thing a man in the early stages of dementia says, you’re going to be miserable. And your misery will have absolutely zero effect on him or his followers.

My advice—save the energy you might spend on keeping up with the minutiae of the fascist government for actually taking to the streets to oppose it when that becomes necessary.