The noise of the world

I read the following in an article titled The Cost of Engaging With the Miserable, by Charlie Warzel.

Every morning, I wake up and grab my doom machine. My phone is a piece of revolutionary technology that puts the entire world a scroll away, its every pixel an industrial miracle. It’s also a cataclysm-delivery device.

What a great set of words to describe this moment, eh? Warzel goes on:

When journalists and academics talk about the morass of hate and lies online, they tend to focus on tech platforms, rightfully so. [...] But online garbage (whether political and scientific misinformation or racist memes) is also created because there’s an audience for it. [...] When we talk about engagement, we are talking about them. They—or rather, we—are the ones clicking. We are often the ones telling the platforms, “More of this, please.” [Quoting Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine,] “If we’ve found ourselves addicted to social media, in spite or because of its frequent nastiness … then there is something in us that’s waiting to be addicted.”

Again, well said.

There is something that we enjoy about being in the situation we are in. Sure, on the level of the conscious we hate it, and we complain about it because we hate it. But there is an unconscious element in play, an unconscious enjoyment. If we don't implicate ourselves for the enjoyment we get the situation will continue and probably get worse.

However, if we do implicate ourselves... Maybe things could possibly change?