As the end of a year approaches, Sasha Frere-Jones invites writers, musicians, and artists to come up with some words about that year. "Reflections on 2023" went up on his Substack on January 1st and it includes some thoughts from me about doomscrolling. You'll have to - haha - scroll down a ways to find it, though, as he's got a hell of a lot of guests and some of the contributions are quite lengthy.
The gist of my micro-essay is that the doomscroll is a new affect, brought about by a convergence of technologies. To achieve that specific mental-physical sensation in the pre-digital era would have required cobbling together a Professor Branestawm/Rube Goldberg-style construction, a rotational contraption through which would pass at speed a ribbon onto which was glued stories clipped out of the newspapers. But the ribbon would run out... and it's the inexhaustibility, the endlessly renewed quality of the scroll that induces those fixated feelings of panic and paralysis.
About a week after the reflections went up, though, I stumbled across a precedent!
Something on Twitter (more on that in a minute) led me to look up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall":
Bob Dylan attributed his inspiration to the feeling he got when reading microfiche newspapers in the New York Public Library: "After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song."
Dylan, original doomscroller!
And the microfiche reader is a machine that you crank manually - so not unlike my mad-inventor contraption. (You can watch someone actually using one in the 1960s here).
The reason I was looking up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is a Twitter thread, started by someone who proclaimed that:
"the music opinion I have that people would hate me for is that I truly think Bob Dylan is underrated, like severely underrated. and that he’s maybe the single most interesting person alive on earth right now. and that no other living artist even comes close to his significance"
Someone else chipped in with a hard agree:
"It’s like living at the same time as Shakespeare"
Then someone else co-signed using a George Harrison quote: "There’s not a lot of people in the world who I see from a historical point of view. Five hundred years from now, looking back in history, I think he will still be the man. Bob, he just takes the cake.”
And then - in what was turning into a competition between Dylan nuts to say the most Dylan-nutty thing ever - yet another person declared that the line “Where black is the color, where none is the number” alone merited the Nobel Prize.
Not being a Dylan-nut, not in the least, I had to google the line, which led me to "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."
An enduring bemusement for me, this phenomenon of the Dylan-nut. D-nuts are forever quoting lyrics, brandishing them as if the most profound utterances ever uttered - oracular, Bible-level stuff. They seem to like the parable-like cadence, or the old-timey American quality: plainspoken yet poetic. Sometimes, they'll talk about how funny a particular line is. (I'm always like, "really?")
"Where black is the color, where none is the number” - partly it's the way it's sung, I should imagine. But as a stand-alone line, stripped of intonation, taken out of the mounting intensity of the rest of the lyrics, that particular line strikes me as.... fine.
Of course (I've written about this before), Dylan would not make my Top 1000. Not contesting the objective eminence, the historical importance, here - just talking about what I personally would reach for as something to listen to.
Still, Bob did invent doomscrolling, so there's that.
I wonder if he owns a dumbphone and actively doomscrolls today. Perhaps he'll write another "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". Then again, he doesn't need to. It's a hardy perennial.
postcript: A Britrap doomscroll from the mid-2000s
Another legendary aural doomscroll:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c
I think doomscrolling is also related to the sheer volume of information and opinion enabled by digital media, which makes it difficult to maintain fidelity to an established narrative. The comforting narratives both for conservatives ("the silent majority will never let this happen") and for liberals/progressives ("the arc of history is on our side") aren't really viable anymore, so people tend to feel adrift.
Probably quite a few Clash lyrics are like that - "Straight To Hell"
DeleteYes - and while some social media like Facebook creates a bubble / echo-chamber, others like Twitter expose you to the alarming ideas and passions of the other side. The signal from the moderating quasi-neutral centre (MSM) is competing with babble from the fringes.
Yes it's a bit of an obsession for the Clash. "The Magnificent Seven" is another example.
DeleteAnd does channel-surfing also count as proto-doomscrolling? "Rock the Casbah" always feels like the perspective of someone who is watching the news about the Middle East on TV, and doesn't really understand what's going on.
If channel surfing counts, why not Springsteen's 57 Channels and Nothin' On? And is it just me, or does the video allude to Cronenberg's Videodrome?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAlDbP4tdqc
DeleteIf you channel surfed but your 'faves' selection was only news channels, that would be close to doomscrolling on a phone.
DeleteProbably cable TV 24 hour news channels is the real prototype for doomscrolling - but you wouldn't be scrolling, you'd just have that channel on. (The chyron, which I mention in the Sasha F-J piece, is a sort of scroll - but a/ it's not all bad news on the tickertape running at the bottom of screen, sometimes it's just neutral stuff, and b/ you are not in control of it, or let's say, you're not activating it by a physical action. And it's quite easy to ignore as well because your attention will be mostly on the main part of the screen.
Doomscroll is really defined by this combo of inexhaustibility and the physical action of doing it, it's like you are digging your own grave, or like one of those cocaine pigeons in a lab experiment, you're addicted to hits of bad news, little negative dopamine bursts almost. So you are physically engaged in some mindless, a bad habit. The other factor that makes it unique is the algorythm - it learns what detains your gaze, what you click 'like' on, and starts supplying it. So it's a vicious circle, conceivably with no break or off ramp.
Well, I´m gonna try this new section too, chipping in with some doom: I don´t think it´s only the media: There´s global warming, that´s scary and real, with the massive unprecedented forest fires, record temperatures and so on. Trumpism would be scary for anyone thinking dictatorship isn´t good in any media environment. As is López Obrador in Mexico BTW. And I also have a personal theory which is scary and all mine: That humanity is getting stupid, of course there´s some evidence, IQ tests show a decline of intelligence, scientists are already wondering what is going on, already one theory has been discarded, that the influx of migrants is lowering the IQ of advanced countries because children are scoring lower IQ´s than parents. My apocalyptic theory though is that IQ tests made by less intelligent people are only catching a small glimpse of the intelligence catastrophe. I think it´s at least a novel or movie worth apocalypse
ReplyDeleteDo you know about the Flynn effect? It's the oft-observed phenomenon that performances in intelligence tests have constantly improved over the 20th century, to the extent that every 10 years the constructors of IQ tests have to make the tests harder to account for the improved performances delivered by younger people. So, if anything, the evidence contradicts your theory, and suggests we have seen a steady increase in the base intelligence of the average person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
DeleteYes I know about that, but results are decreasing now. It´s at the end of that page
Delete(A post on a different part of the blog which I made before Simon activated the comments on this section.)
ReplyDeleteIf I recall rightly, Bataille wrote in On Nietzsche (I think) that he would purposely read 120 Days of Sodom in order to feel wretched. Oddly enough, the sense of revulsion upon reading Sade has, in my opinion, largely been lost nowadays, and most people I know to have tried reading Sade have objected to the tedium, not the brutality (one or two did just find the work disgusting).
In that regard, does that make Metal Machine Music truly Sadistic?
I've never really read much de Sade - a few pages here and there. I've probably read more ON de Sade - I had that Angela Carter book The Sadeian Woman for instance. But I have a sense of what it's like as a prose experience. Endless recombinations of bodies and acts, submissions and cruelties. The repetitiousness is the point.
DeleteYou are probably right, though, in so far as horribly gruesome or perverse things have become more generalized, through later writing. American Psycho. Even some of Ian McEwan's early creepy stories.
I don't find Metal Machine Music that unbearable. It's just formless. If you play it really loud, then it does come across as sadistic maybe - so the appeal would be masochistic perhaps. But I know people who claim to find it relaxing! They play it at low volume, use it as ambient music, even fall asleep to it. So it functions almost like one of those white noise generator machines that people use to help them fall asleep.
My sense of Reed's intent with MMM was he was on some kind of solipsistic methamphetamine power trip. On some level, the noise is the amplified hum of his supercharged nervous system. The subtitle to Metal Machine Music is *The Amine β Ring - which is a reference to the molecular structure of amphetamine. The sleeve note is partly an ode to speed. He's like the ultimate chemical hipster, someone who really knowns his pharmaceuticals. In the liner note he talks about how he's no dilettante, but someone for whom the needle is equivalent to a toothbrush - a daily ritual, no big deal. Hilarious intravenous oneupmanship! Culminating in the famous kiss-off: "my week beats your year".
But are you saying that MMM is Sade-ian in the sense of being tedious?
Yes, in that the extreme becomes the soporific.
DeleteLiterally soporific in the case of my friend who uses MMM as fall-asleep background sound!
DeleteOn Dylan, I struggle with him myself, mainly because even worse than his singing is his harmonica playing, which is always far too loud in the mix (especially if you are listening with headphones) but also seems to be employed purely as a gap filler. i.e. when he doesn't know how to fill a few bars, out comes the harmonica with a random, tuneless blast of notes.
ReplyDeleteI also think much of his esteem amongst the Boomers is because in many ways he was relatively reactionary/conservative figure, and acted as a substitute parent. His songs aren't about being liberated and free, they are mostly about actions and consequences, and especially consequences. He seemed to have had the same relationship with the Boomers that Jordan Peterson has with the Gen Z's - he's the acceptable parent figure who isn't your parents, and is consequently revered for it.
I remember a cartoon in which the first frame showed a mother telling her young child "Tidy your room!" and the kid says "No way". The second frame shows the kid a few years older, and Jordan Peterson says "Tidy your room!" and the kid says "Genius..." It's a bit the same with Dylan, where the Boomers' parents told them they were irresponsible and going nowhere, to no avail, but Dylan pretty much said the same thing, to awestruck wonder.
I generally reject the framing of aesthetic choices as "my favourite" versus "the best", but Dylan is one of the cases where I do think that distinction makes sense. Like Simon, I would only very rarely put on one of his records for pleasure, but his power in our culture is incalculable and undeniable. I don't think it's obviously wrong to call him "the single most interesting person alive".
DeleteMy big problem with Dylan is how little aptitude he has for music. How many great melodies has he written? How many thrilling chord changes? There are a few memorable tunes: "It's All Over Now Baby Blue", "Every Grain Of Sand", maybe a couple more. Occasionally there is a great instrumental part, like Scarlet Rivera's whirling violin in "Hurricane", or Al Kooper's horror movie organ in "Ballad Of A Thin Man". But it's not much to show for a 60-year career. It's easy to see why his fans focus almost exclusively on the words.
In that sense, the closest parallel is Mark E. Smith. Who similarly inspired cult-like devotion.
And the other thing that has always made it hard for me to love Dylan is his fandom. For a Gen Xer like me, being told that the greatest rock star of all did his best work before you were even born is intensely offputting.
DeleteWith some musicians who I initially rejected for similar reasons, including Marley and Billie Holiday, I have been able to overcome my initial antipathy. With Dylan it is harder.
He does have some great tunes - "Positively 4th Street", "It's All Over Now Baby Blue", "Tangled Up in Blue", "Sara", plenty of others. That's shown surely by all the great cover versions, like The Byrds ("Mr Tambourine Man" , "All I Really Wanna Do", "My Back Pages", they did about thirteen Dylan covers) or Hendrix's spectacular "All Along the Watchtower". Julie Driscoll's "Wheels On Fire".
DeleteAnd I'm susceptible to the argument that within the limitations of that voice he does a lot with it.
The sound of the records, the bands he's had behind him (or The Band he's had behind him, specifically), can be glorious.
My personal stumbling block is the personality.
But also (whispering this extremely softly lest I die of embarrassment in a semi-public space) it's..... it's.... it's actually the words. They don't connect with me, hardly ever. Or create pictures in my head.
I mean, he's very good with song titles, that's true.
And then, yes, the fan culture, the exegesis... it's really off-putting.
Excellent description of doomscrolling affect, but I think one dimension it misses is that of the contemporary mind's almost permanent state of distraction. I recognize the numbed horror you describe, but when I'm doomscrolling I'm actually in a state of split consciousness. My web reading creates a cloudy mixture of the distant and global swirling together with the mundane intimacies of my daily life. Is democracy finished? Is today recycling collection? Will the world burn up? Did I forget my wife's birthday again?
ReplyDeleteFor me the song that captures this state-- and I know it's open to plenty of other interpretations, of course-- is The Beatles' "A Day In The Life", which not only has the news stories recounted in a mood of enervation and isolation but, in Paul's jaunty interlude, also contains that scattershot duality of mind. You're occupied with the news, in which the trivial jostles together with the profound-- another inescapable feature of doomscrolling, where genocide alternates with cat videos-- and yet some part of your mind can't let go of your own little world of desire, wants something nebulous, seeks an elsewhere and can't find it. Then, for a brief rush, life intervenes, you "wake up", meatspace draws you out, you experience movement and direction...only to drift again. Eventually, after years of this, you develop anxiety over an undecidable question. Are you interrupting your real life by grazing on endless streams of bad news on your device? Or is that your real life now, and the true interruptions are the brief intervals when your brain loans you out to what used to be called "reality"?
I'd never tamper with a masterpiece, but to make it wonderfully contemporary you might change a single word: "I'd love to turn you off..."
Oh: while some of the references are dated, this is probably my favorite "aural doomscroll":
https://youtu.be/RHjDYjvSJB8?si=Zsrtzm-xPb-BS--o
I think Everything, everywhere, all at once reflects that split consciousness
DeletePersonally I don't doomscroll at all, but then I have the blessing/curse of having a very high tolerance for ambiguity. This is also why I wasn't a particularly successful blogger, because I didn't follow an accepted narrative, didn't provide an anchor for people to latch on to.
DeleteThe antidote to doomscrolling, and the contemporary media landscape in general, is Taoism, the understanding that the world is inherently perverse and uncontrollable, and will always throw up bizarre and unexpected mutations, most of which will be benign and but some of which will be malign.
In fact, I think the internet provides real-time validation of the Taoist worldview, and once you understand that it seems far less threatening.
Another 1960s song that anticipates the doomscroll!
DeleteAlthough I wouldn't say the mood of the song is doom and gloom exactly - it's a mix of sadness and surreality, feeling that everything is absurd and unreal.... and that there's a realer reality behind it all.
It's amazing to think they went from "Love Me Do" to "A Day In the Life" in, what, five years!
You're right, there's something about the intimacy and portability of the phone, the way it interweaves with your everyday life, juxtaposed with the banal but equally pressing needs.
I suppose the newspaper anticipates some of that - looking at it while sat at the breakfast table. (Likewise radio and TV - that Gang of Four song about 'how can I sit here and eat my tea' while the news is all warzones and atrocity). The newspaper spread as a collage of the upsetting and the bizarre, absurd, grotesque - juxtaposing the weightiest urgency with utter trivia.
Thinking also the scenes in Look Back In Anger where they are flicking through the Sunday papers looking for ridiculous things or things to make fun of.
We Didn't Start the Fire!
ReplyDeleteI thought of "We Didn't Start The Fire" right away, too. To my ears it doesn't match the emotional register of doomscrolling. The song evokes not so much a state of consciousness as a straightforward reaction to information, a sad bar-stool rant fueled by Boomer self-righteousness.
DeleteAnother example of a kinda-sorta doomscroll tune is R.E.M.'s "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", which for me is more in line with Phil's above-stated Taoist ambiguity. The video drives home the ambiguity even more and is doubly relevant today since the boy's home has apparently been destroyed by a natural disaster. Given what's ahead it may become my official song of 2024.
I also thought of the opposite set of emotions encapsulated by Jesus Jones' "Right Here Right Now" (which also namechecks Dylan). Feeding off the news as a discrete event which produces awe and exhilaration, a feeling of being alive etc. I'm not a fan of the song, but it does stand out as a totally alien experience to what's going on in the media environment of today.
We Didn't Start the Fire, It's The End of the World As We Know It - good examples. There's also Husker Du's "Turn on the News"
DeleteI really like "Right Here Right Now", and it is unique as you say in being about good news - the hopescroll. One thing I find funny about it is that he says "right here right now / there's no other place I'd rather be". But he's sat at home, watching it remotely, far from the world historical Event. Presumably there is one place he'd rather be - right there at the Berlin Wall as it's being over-run and torn down.
Yes the "Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about" is interesting in light of the Dylan-as-doomscroller thing - and the sort of jousting with the Sixties generation who got to through Event-full Times. It's also self-reflexive song about songwriting - "hey, I got some great material here for a tune"
Joshua Clover wrote a whole book called 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This To Sing About.
The execrable Fall Out Boy cover of "We Didn't Start the Fire" from last year is even more doomscroll-y, abandoning the chronological order that at least gave the original some kind of structure, and just throwing out a random series of references.
DeletePlenty of doomscrolling vibes from Dylan's Sixties imitators, brought to an almost self-parodic peak in Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFZUDQ85bFU
DeleteNB., I just spent a bloody hour looking all this up, only for Ed to gazump me! That's really annoying!
ReplyDeleteJust thought of a doomscrolling song that's literally about doom: Barry McGuire's very Dylanesque 1965 one-hit-wonder Eve of Destruction (written by P.F. Sloan). But looking it up, I was surprised at the number of songs it generated in response.
The Spokesmen, I gather, were a group formed by a bunch of songwriters specifically to release Dawn of Correction, a pro-Vietnam War song intended as a rebuttal to Eve of Destruction. Their one album features two Dylan covers. One might initially assume it's Nixonian, but considering Dawn of Correction was released in 1965, along with references to, say, the Peace Corps, I think it perhaps makes more sense to call it Kennedian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t5-I0LJMdY
Tony Mammarella was a producer who once presented American Bandstand. Anyway, his Eve of Tomorrow doesn't seek to ape the style of Eve of Destruction, and very much comes across as a middle-aged guy on his third scotch ranting at the feckless, ungrateful brats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me9afH6dZtA
Johnny Sea was a country artist from the 50s who retired for a time in the 60s to become an actual cowboy. Returning to the music industry in 1964, he scored his biggest hit with Day for Decision, a spoken word, zealously right-wing and rather terrifying anti-hippy, anti-peacenik tirade. Actually, looking at the album cover, did Nixon have a secret career as a country musician? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XEf1f-LfIg
Alan Klein released a direct, and rather stinging, parody of Eve of Destruction called Age of Corruption, slamming the 60s folk singer boom as a mob of bandwagon-jumpers only after the money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NZkeCgmZCE
In 1970, a few years after Eve of Destruction and its rejoinders, the Temptations' Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today) not only namechecks Eve of Destruction, but is also a doomscrolling song in its own right (and is obviously the best song that refers to Eve of Destruction by a few parsecs). The best news item Ball of Confusion mentions is "Mod clothes in demand": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9poCAuYT-s
Barry McGuire released an updated version of Eve of Destruction in 2012, with a theme of environmental disaster rather than global war and racial hatred. The apocalyptic tenor of the original is dampened by the hints of McGuire's born-again Christianity and the children's choir accompanying him throughout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaO0yU5fJF0
Unconnected to Eve of Destruction, in 1971 Hildegard Knef released Holiday Time, a wonderful song that was the B-side to Christina, where Hildegard recants, with wry ennui, the news of das Sommerloch. And it's yet another sterling example of 70s German funk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4FZZDLlNQI
I suppose Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Pere Ubu's concept of data panik are worth mentioning here. The idea that "it's all too much" - and not in a blissed out way - but just too much information, much of it distressing, has been a recurrent refrain in the age of mass media. Yet somehow we limp on... keeping shreds of our humanity and humour intact.
ReplyDeleteI do find the smartphone to be an accursed thing in my own life - but not so much for the doomscroll as just the amount of time I've wasted and how I turn to it in moments that in the past would have been spent in daydreaming or thinking. Waiting in a queue, being in the passenger seat, even the ad break in a TV program I'll reach over and pick up the phone.
But, to be fair, it does bring you amusing and interesting things fairly regularly. It's not all a force-feeding of shite and nightmare.
I find amusing and interesting things regularly, but only because I consciously treat the web's many algorithms as deadly (if stupid) antagonists. It's like a game. You have to outsmart the AI, disrupt its rhythms and figure out its tactics. If you do that, yeah, I still think the web has plenty to offer.
DeleteYouTube is the supreme example. On one level I absolutely hate YouTube. The algorithm is an evil genie. Visiting the site is the equivalent of inviting an alien into my house to suck the brains out of my skull. I know this. But alongside a practice of disciplined searching, I keep one wary eye on what it throws up to capture my attention, and I have to admit the YouTube AI has surprised me with some gems. Just a week ago, searching for archival footage of Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Studios (I was making my way through Sam Wasson's excellent new biography), the AI coughed up full episodes of Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavettes' 1993 TV show "Hi Octane". I had no idea it existed. It is beyond obscure, with just 3 episodes airing on Comedy Central before it was canceled. And to be honest, it's not a very good show-- but as a document of early 90s American youth culture, not to mention the missing link in Sofia's career between "Godfather III" and "The Virgin Suicides", it was an incredible find. Discoveries like that are still possible.
The distinction probably comes down to how one approaches the web: as a cultural archive in which one can dive for pearls or as a news source, which will inevitably trap one in the, uh...shitemare? Doomscrolling belongs to the genre of news, and the incessant chatter about news, right? But it's hard to switch off and avoid it, because (as my own terminology suggests) older generations still live in the old analog concept of an information society. Our Gutenberg minds can't abandon the idea that the web is an information delivery service, whereas I think in the post-social media cyberworld the web is getting closer and closer to straight up brainwashing and behavioral conditioning.
It is better to think of our interaction with the web in terms of affect rather than a structure of information, which I gather you are hip to already. Yes, I am familiar with "1989"-- it's one of my fave music books-- and as you know Clover drew a lot of his insights by approaching the music of that era in a Raymond Williamsy way. That's kind of why I mentioned The Beatles song. Whatever the song is really about, the feeling it evokes chimes with my mood these days.
Of course another stance is that you see all the doom and the chaos, and you kick back and enjoy it:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_UJXxQnGvE
"Watch the humans create new frustrations."
Along those lines, might The Jam's "Going Underground" qualify? Not that Weller's enjoying the chaos, necessarily, but seeing it clearly enough to make a positive choice to step outside it. Which may not be possible anymore-- the underground, what's that?-- but it's nice to dream, or at any rate to remember a time when such dreams were possible (and wore stylish clothes).
DeleteHad to do some major doomscrolling to read the piece. Damn it's just been downhill all the way since the care free days of blogging in 00's. The concept reminded me of the Zone of Fruitless Intensity, which I think you coined in relation to the Continuum...just too much information, most of it bad, brain fried, powerless stasis...kind of deal.
ReplyDelete