A capital Doomscrolling from the Internet (2023)

miJohnny Sayles wakes up early in the morning and flips through the news about thefall of human civilization.

Sayles, a former medical assistant in a Washington state surgical department, was fired in early April when the pandemic hit. Confined to his home by house arrest, he began to spend more timea reddit social speech, and collided/r/collapse, a part of the site where users discuss what many see as the inevitable collapse of globalized society.

Sayles says that /r/collapse has become part of his morning routine. "I just go on this subreddit and compare how the world was last week to this week," she says. “And every week there is something worse. It's depressing, but collapse is inevitable. It could be tomorrow, it could be 10 years from now. But our ecosystem is exhausted and there is still a lot of time."

One week in early October, the top posts on /r/collapse said the ice sheet in the Siberian Arctic was at its lowest point in recorded history, whichThe pandemic has killed more than 1 million people worldwide, and that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made more money in a second than the average person in a month. Someone below suggested thatThe United States is heading for a post-election civil war🇧🇷 "To be honest, it's only a matter of time," says the top comment. "Every empire falls. It can be fast or slow."

That sums up the world view of the subreddit, which has more than tripled in size in the last two years and now has more than 239,000 subscribers. (Like Reddit as a whole, which has about twice as many male users as female users, most of whom appear to be male.) Its content: a combination ofnewspaper headlines, memes and complaints: it is clearly addictive, at least for some people. It is full of hints of existential truth: that progress is a myth, thatCapitalism is already in decline, and theenvironmental disasterit can come much sooner than most people expect. Of course, this content can be very depressing. A suicide hotline will be prominently displayed on the front page along with a notice. "Overdoing this [reddit] sub can be detrimental to your mental health," she says. "Anxiety and depression are common responses when studying collapse."

For more information, see:Fear of climate change? You may have ecological anxiety

Before losing his job, Sayles supported thepresident trumpwho accepted the president's "Make America Great Again" message. But spending time on /r/collapse, combined with watching the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic, has led him to switch allegiances. WhenWildfires rage along the West Coast of the United StatesIn summer the smoke was so strong that he had to stay indoors for a week and a half. Homeless his age, in their twenties, they now sleep in the park next to his house. The price of bacon at your local store has doubled. She already voted by mail, not Trump.

For Sayles, the subreddit's warning about depression rings true. "I agree that it's bad for people's mental health," she says. "But I also think people need to wake up to the world around them. These dangers are real. It's impossible to deny these things anymore."

If Sayles' story sounds familiar to you, it's because it sounds familiar to so many of us. As the pandemic confined billions of people to their homes in 2020,the word "Doomscrolling" entered the lexicon, which refers to the temptation to compulsively scroll through social media platforms filled with apocalyptic news, and the difficulty of quitting despite feelings of fear and anxiety. There is no shortage of reasons to fear this year, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the US presidential election and protests against racial injustice. butSocial media platforms also play a crucial role, as they are designed to keep you scrolling and engaged for as long as possible. "As a species, we are programmed by nature to act first on threatening information," says Patrick Kennedy-Williams, a psychologist who treats the patients.Weather related fears🇧🇷 These evolving traits mean that the scariest content is often the most profitable for social platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. "Behind the screen are immobile algorithms designed to ensure that the most scandalous information gets our attention first," writes academic Julia Bell in her new book.radical attention."Because when we're angry, we get involved, and the more we get involved, the more money the platform can make from us."

In the last decade,Social media has changed the way we live our lives. Bypassing the traditional gatekeepers, these platforms have given ordinary people new ways to talk, from the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s to the Swedish teenager's climate activism.Greta Thunbergat the end of the decade.

But psychologists who study the burgeoning field of social media addiction are also pointing to a darker side. Constantly facing evidence of systemic threats can foster negativity that can cause you anxiety or depression, and reduce your sense of individual agency. "There is something inherently harmful about a person's ability to respond to something when confronted via social media, because it is inherently global," Kennedy-Williams says. "There's not necessarily any way they can interact with the problem." That sense of paralysis is at the heart of the Doomsday Scroll. And she raises an important question: what good is raising awareness if the medium you use to do so inspires lethargy instead of action?

Burned homes and buildings in Santa Rosa, California, after a wildfire, photographed on September 28, 2020.

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

(Video) What is Doom Scrolling? (Evil s3e02)

Both users and /r/collapse moderators have spent a lot of time pondering this question. Some are already practicing the solution that Kennedy-Williams often suggests to its clients: opt out and work to resolve the issue locally. But for many it is not so easy. "The subreddit definitely triggered my anxiety at times," says Waleed_Compound, a regular user of the subreddit who lives in Santa Rosa, California, and who, like many users TIME spoke to, asked to be addressed only by his username. Username. He says he finds it easy to step away from his screen and has found solace in spending more time with his family and helping the homeless.

But the increasing frequency of severe wildfires in which it lives makes acceptance of climate breakdown inevitable. In 2018, the bonfire in and around the Northern California town of Paradise killed at least 85 people and emitted so much smoke that Waleed_Compound, who lives 100 miles away, had to stay indoors for two weeks. . Days before he spoke to TIME, embers from a wildfire northeast of Santa Rosa partially burned a store near his home. "The whole thing of breaking down and thinking about what might happen in the future doesn't make me too sad, apart from a little anxiety here and there," she says. “It's the things in the real world that really move me. Doom's scrolling is a sure thing. But it's nothing compared to what I actually saw."

While the subreddit has tripled in size in the past two years, moderators have noticed that its content has changed as well. With a bigger audience comes a bigger advertising opportunity. But where the subreddit used to be primarily a forum for discussing facts and news, today memes, alarming headlines, and polemics are the most popular topics. These are more appealing to a large audience, who accordingly "upvote" the posts to the top of the subreddit.

But the risk is that this content becomes so compelling that it causes fatal paralysis. "Any online forum that reaches a certain size encounters quality barriers and moderation difficulties because the nature of online discussion is such that content wants to rise to the top with little effort," says Mike Rezl, one of the subreddit's moderators. whose username is Lets TalkUFOs. That doesn't necessarily mean content that can be produced with little effort, he says. A funny meme can take a long time to create, but it only takes seconds to consume. In other words, as the subreddit got bigger, Doom scrolling got easier, which could make the subreddit more depressing.to reduceActing capacity of its most active users.

"I think the subreddit almost lost the battle," says one of /r/collapse's longest-serving moderators, who goes by the username Babbles. "Reddit, and the way people handle it, is not really conducive to productive conversations. And that goes for social media in general."

Babbles says that a few years agoWhen the subreddit was smaller, there was a joke about how new users tend to go through it.Five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It is not a linear or pleasant process. Babbles jokes that many users, including himself, still seem to be going through the last three stages.

But as the subreddit grows, /r/collapse regulars must grapple with an important question: What does it mean to present such emotionally impactful ideas to large numbers of people in an environment as impersonal as Reddit? "It's helpful to have this information available to anyone looking for it," says James, a regular user from Australia, who asked to be called by his middle name to protect his online identity. “But is Reddit the best platform for this? Absolutely not. You can read something that completely shakes your view of the world and there is nothing that can bring you back.

For more information, see:Does social media make me unhappy?

Meanwhile, the moderators feel very responsible. In 2017, some users created their own sister subreddit to help people deal with anxiety related to meltdown, to which moderators often direct suicidal or self-deprecating comments. Still, the question weighs heavily on them. “We have to assume that there are countless people who are still lost, who we don't see, who fall into a deep depression, who don't come back because they couldn't handle the burden of this information,” he says. .

Like thisCoping with the loss of a loved oneit is a painful but ultimately necessary experience, which is why, many of the older users of /r/collapse believe, it is necessary for large numbers of people to come to terms with the idea that they may experience a civilizational collapse in their lifetime. But in a way, Doomscrolling is an obstacle to achieving that goal: users may find it easier to accept these ideas if they aren't paralyzed by algorithms that keep delivering more Doom. And as more people find the subreddit, the risk of doomsday scrolling increases. "The subreddit will continue to grow as systemic outages occur," says moderator Rezl. “So at any scale, we have to find a way to solve this. But there is no definitive solution. You can't have a million people talking in a room at the same time."

The subculture of collapseuses a term for what comes after grief: resilience. This is the idea that even if collapse is inevitable, there are ways, both individually and societally, to be prepared, both mentally and physically, for what lies ahead.

"We save this stuff, we study it, then we freak out and try to tell all our friends about it, and our friends don't want to know because it's depressing," says Babbles. "But then you move on and things open up for you. Many people are thinking about making fundamental changes to their lives: how they live, how they measure their own resilience in the face of whatever comes their way, and in some cases, even how they hope to navigate spiritually and existentially by this new reality. Knowledge."

For many of the subreddit's most active users, that means spending timediscord, a chat service similar to Slack, where it's easier to make human connections and where alarming content doesn't dominate the conversation as often. The official Discord server crash has around 880 users, many of whom are also active members of the subreddit. "I chose Discord because it's much more sensible," says James, the Australian user. "The problem I have with Reddit is the fact that it's based on a points system and the fact that you can see your score. There's a tremendous drive to generate content that gets upvotes, and that doesn't necessarily result in content that really useful."

It also prompted many users to make changes in their lives. James, who began reading the subreddit regularly thereafter.Devastating bushfires rage in AustraliaHe recently moved from Melbourne in 2019 and started experimenting with freelancing. He says that engaging with a community of like-minded people through Discord didn't get him down anymore, it was an affirming experience. Santa Rosa user Waleed_Compound says the same thing about helping the homeless in his community.

For more information, see:2020 is our last, best chance to save the planet

But while finding ways to protect their mental health, many users are also preparing to protect themselves and their loved ones from the worst. Waleed_Compound stored supplies of beans and rice, as well as weapons and ammunition. Sayles, the former Trump supporter, has been stocking up on groceries as the election approaches.

This behavior is known asprepare- Abbreviation of "preparation". Prep posts for /r/collapse are discouraged, and moderators redirect users with practical questions to the /r/preppers subreddit, which has 203,000 subscribers. But there is significant overlap between the two groups, who have similar approaches to dealing with what they see as an inevitable disaster in their own lives. Bradley Garrett, an ethnographer who studies the subculture, visited dozens of prep communities while doing research for his new book.Bunker: Buildings for the end times🇧🇷 While these communities are often portrayed as crazy in the media, Garrett says many of their arguments won him over. "If you accept the inevitability of the climate crisis, there are only two answers," he says. “Either you succumb to despair or you work to deal with it in some way. And if you feel you don't have the skills or ability to change our trajectory, then the only option is to build your resilience and adapt to those changes as they occur."

Garrett spent time preparing and came away with a Doomscrolling attitude similar to many of the more regular /r/collapse users. "I think there's some value in going offline, even if it just gives you more time to make local connections and build local resilience, because there will inevitably come a time when we need to trust each other," he says. "It is much more important than knowing that there is a catastrophe on the other side of the world."

But for Bell, the author ofradical attentionDisconnecting from social media just to focus on one's own survival is an extension of the core problem with how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are designed: scrolling to the ends of the world isolates us and takes the kind of collective action needed. to avoid the even more unlikely climate catastrophe. "It takes a lot of courage to say no, I'll do something about it," he says. "We forget what that means because we're encouraged to passively consume all of that stuff."

write toRein of Billy Perrigobilly.perrigo@time.com.