The other morning, barely awake as I waited for my first coffee of the day to brew, I stood in my kitchen and scrolled through Instagram on my phone. It’s hard to imagine – short of, say, knocking back a double brandy or laying out a lavish line of cocaine on the kitchen counter – a worse way I could have spent the first moments of my day.
In the minutes it took for the coffee to make its way from filter to pot, I witnessed a terrible and lurid array of aggravating things. I saw a scuffle between two middle-aged German men, one of them an Alternative for Germany representative trying to lay a wreath at a memorial for the failed assassination of Adolf Hitler. I saw the British journalist Lewis Goodall cornering a conservative influencer about her description of gay men as “degenerates”. I saw a Reuters video of police in New Delhi caning protesters demanding the resignation of India’s education minister. I saw the Australian politician Barnaby Joyce briefly interrupting a television interview to roar “SIT DOWN!!” at his dog. I saw a standup comedian humiliate a heckler in a not especially funny way. I saw a clip of the tennis player Kamil Majchrzak signing a hat for a young fan at the 2025 US Open only for the child to have the signed hat snatched from him by a grown man standing beside him.
These weren’t the only things I scrolled through in those minutes, of course. There were also bits of live performances from summer festivals, snippets of old comedy sketches I have seen a hundred times, and people giving different kinds of dubious fitness and diet advice. But what really made an impression was the sheer proliferation of scenes of conflict and aggression I was watching on the screen in my hand. And as each such scene materialised and dissipated, like fleeting images in a violent fever dream, I could feel my mood being altered by the experience of watching them. I could feel my stress level increasing, along with my overall apprehension of the world as a place filled with mean and violent and crazy people.
In one sense, this is in keeping with old verities of the information environment: good news is no news; if it bleeds, it leads. It’s not like tuning into the nine o’clock news or Prime Time was ever likely to give a person a sense that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. But what I’m talking about here, this largely social media phenomenon, is not so much about imparting important – and for the most part necessarily grim – information about current affairs. What I am talking about is a relentless tide of largely user-generated flotsam, the overwhelming tenor of which is one of aggression and conflict, of people being miscellaneously horrible to one another, in ways that both do and do not directly flow from significant world events.
And this is not, generally, my experience of the world. (I am, it is true, privileged here by certain circumstances of situation and station, but not, I think, spectacularly so.) The overwhelming majority of people I encounter in my everyday dealings are not bigots, or psychopaths. They are, overwhelmingly, polite and friendly and accommodating; they are very often funny, and weird in ways far more often charming and fascinating than repellent. But as soon as I turn on my phone and open a social media app, all of a sudden hell is empty and all the devils are here, jockeying for position on my hand-held screen.
[ There are few things more life-affirming than a dancing robot going haywireOpens in new window ]
X, of course, is in a league of its own when it comes to this stuff: God forbid you should watch a video and then let another one autoplay right after, because chances are that video will be some or other scene of violence or aggression, or a decontextualised snippet of someone getting the better of someone else in a debate, or some piece of possibly AI-generated content precision-tooled to make you more angrily racist than you already are.
We know the reasons for this, more or less. Our economic value as users of social media and smartphones is in the extent to which our use of them generates data for collection and monetisation. Content that provokes strong emotions, in particular anger and anxiety, is especially prioritised because it generates more engagement, and more behavioural data. From the point of view of Instagram (or its parent company Meta), the real point of all that conflict I was seeing on my phone the other morning was not the fragmented and mostly decontextualised information I was receiving, but the ads that I was forced to pause and watch for a moment before I kept scrolling.
All of this puts me in mind of William Davies’ brilliant essay The Reaction Economy, published in the London Review of Books in 2023. Davies draws on the 20th-century field of cybernetics, the study of how complex systems – organisms, machines, institutions – regulate themselves through feedback, constantly adjusting their behaviour based on information about their own output. Over the past 15 years or so, as digital devices have become ever more central to our lives, the concept of “engagement” has become central to the way the media frames significant events.
Under this model, Davies suggests, the self is no longer understood as it was in the liberal philosophical tradition, as an autonomous agent possessed of reason and interests, or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as unconsciously shaped by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, he writes, each of us becomes “a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. Information and emotions bounce between these junctions, mutating as they travel, as instantiated in the memes and jokes that spread virally via social media platforms. In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.” The political and media figures who have come to define the era are those most capable of thriving in this economy of reaction.
[ Fewer people are having babies. Could smartphones be the reason?Opens in new window ]
The way we consume information about our world – what was once referred to, with what now seems a charming complacency, as “the news” – is not really about the imparting of information at all, so much as a series of provocations to an emotional response, organised around the general theme of current affairs. There is a sense of being swept up in an avalanche of cultural wreckage, in the shards and fragments of a broken information environment. Feeling the stress rising through me the other morning, the general and multifarious conflict emanating from the screen in my hand, I had some apprehension of myself not as a person gaining useful knowledge about the world, but as a junction in a network, an element in a vast feedback mechanism of emotion and information, data and manipulation.
