It’s well past midnight and I know I need to get some sleep, but I’m caught in a never-ending spiral of bad news on Twitter. Do you know that too? Like a gambling addict who keeps tossing coins into the slots, I try to hit the jackpot of knowledge – in vain. Exhaustion only overcomes the dopamine kick at dawn. There’s a word for it: doom scrolling. Compulsive scrolling through scary and depressing content on social media has been named Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in the 2020 pandemic year.
Since Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the need to assuage my fears by maniacally searching social media for information and answers has exploded again.
And similar to the beginning of the pandemic, there is a great flow of solidarity and a feeling of togetherness that promises consolation and help and can also be reflected in action, such as the ingenious donation idea of booking and paying for accommodation in Ukraine without to use them. In this way, the money reaches those in need quickly and directly, without intermediary organizations. After a few days, around $15 million was raised. In the meantime, Airbnb hosts are also offering their apartments free of charge as accommodation for refugees. As of Sunday, 11,183 people are said to have registered for this, and the trend is rising.
Supposed depth of thought
Unfortunately, the solidarity and the sense of togetherness did not last long during the pandemic. At some point, the spontaneous empathy gave way to a toxic battle between ideological camps that got tangled up in absurd virtual petty wars. Unfortunately, a similar trend is now emerging on Twitter, where high-reach accounts compete for attention and reactions with provocative tweets. I myself deliberately do not follow such accounts, but reactions to their tweets are regularly flushed into my timeline. So I ended up with a tweet from the CDU politician Serap Güler, who in turn responded to a tweet from the author Jasmina Kuhnke alias Quattromilf.
The point of this argument was whether the “white refugees” from Ukraine would now be more openly welcomed in Germany than the Syrians were in 2015. I resisted the impulse to get involved, but made the mistake of falling down that rabbit hole, me clicked my way through all possible reply comments and branches, remotely controlled, until at some point I found myself in a completely twisted and toxic discussion about victim privileges and racism that never came to an end and filled me with a feeling of paralysis, frustration and resignation.
During the pandemic, the online battle over who is right fueled the much-discussed division in society, and even now, after the first week of the war in Ukraine, ideological camps are forming in the struggle for the sovereignty of interpretation. Historical revisionism included.
Surrender to the omnipotence of the algorithm
When Putin started his invasion, I was in New York with my Croatian compatriot, the philosopher Srećko Horvat, we were taking part in the Progressive International organized Belmarsh Tribunal to deal with Guantanamo and the persecution of Julian Assange. Shocked by Putin’s invasion, we spontaneously decided to start with an anti-war message and solidarity with Ukraine. Online, we were then quickly confronted with the most absurd attacks and interpretations of the Balkan war (even claiming that there had been no war on European soil for decades). I didn’t dare to respond, but Srećko couldn’t help but comment on Twitter about how hurtful this “Yugosplaining” was for all of us who actually lived through this war.
For years I tried to protect myself from the phenomenon of the self-made echo chamber, I follow as many and very heterogeneous accounts as possible, with or without many followers, but meanwhile my timeline is hopelessly flooded with the tweets and reactions of the accounts with the greatest reach, those at war start battles to attract attention by making announcements that are as provocative as possible. At first I systematically muted them, but that didn’t help either, I’ve since capitulated to the omnipotence of the algorithm. He already knows my likes and dislikes.
It was a decision made by the creators of algorithms, who appropriated the knowledge of the behavioral conditioning of humans and used it consciously, driven by power and profit maximization. It is an open book that hardly anyone has read. Former internet pioneer Jaron Lanier, who has since become one of the loudest warners and critics of internet corporations, has dubbed the social media giants “behaviour modification empires” because of these toxic dynamics.
We’re brainwashing ourselves now
As a director, I know from practical experience in the theater that negative emotions such as fear and anger can be generated very easily, and they also last longer than positive ones. The viewer regularly falls for this sleight of hand and often confuses negative intensity with depth of thought. That’s why dark plays are taken so seriously, even if they’re nothing more than the bourgeois variant of ghost trains. Anything that brings joy, on the other hand, is considered flat and hollow, even though it is much more difficult to produce. It takes much longer to encourage people or gain their trust.
Provoking anger and resentment is quick, a stress response via a provocative troll tweet occurs in a split second, while recovering from it can take hours.
And that is not just coincidence and side effect, but design, the machinery encourages users to retreat into so-called filter bubbles, where one confirms and lulls one another, this fake harmony is only occasionally challenged by – algorithmically calculated – extreme opinions that every now and then hit the timeline like a bomb that only squeezes the bubble tighter in the face of the enemy camp.
In addition, no dystopian dictatorship like in Orwell’s 1984. We now do the dirty job of brainwashing ourselves with a little help from the algorithms and our friendly bubble.
It is high time to become aware of these mechanisms and to reflect on your own behavior. It would be a first step against the sense of powerlessness that feels particularly overwhelming in these dark days of war.
There is also hope
The good news is that, against all odds, something like human empathy shows up in all of this. It was one simple tweetwho gave me back my faith in humanity within seconds on Sunday: a public plea for forgiveness by cultural scientist Daniel Hornuff, addressed to the image-Reporter Paul Ronzheimer, who is currently reporting from embattled Kyiv.
Hornuff had previously ridiculed Ronzheimer, as are many who think they are on the right side: “For the #Bild reporter, the Ukraine is the ultimate adventure playground that the German lateral thinkers had been looking for for two years: finally being right in the middle , where it’s all about the true, the actual, the real!” He was sure of the applause of his bubble.
And yet he apparently regretted the impulsively tweeted out and, instead of quietly deleting it, he decided to issue a public apology to Ronzheimer, in which he transparently reflects on his behavior. This episode hit me like a ray of human empathy suddenly illuminating the darkness, halting my endless doomscrolling and finally putting me to sleep. There is still hope.
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Editor’s note: A day after completing work on this article, the author decided to take her back on Twitter for a while. She writes there: „Dear Followers, in order to stay sane inside insanity, I will stay off @Twitter for a while. Cannot stand the hatred anymore.“