A day does not go by without “doom porn” about unaffordability, AI, or other issues. Just having asocial media account and following some popular accounts means you will be exposed to it, either in the feed directly, retweeted, or via “suggested/recommended content”.
One can of course choose to abstain from social media, but it’s not just limited to Twitter or Facebook. This is because, as mentioned in “How the Mainstream Media Came to Sound like Zero Hedge/Info Wars,” the mainstream media has become no different from the alternative media or social media in terms of sensationalism.
The “crisisfication” of the world means there is no bulkhead or firewall between the mainstream and the alternative. Its all just a giant amalgamation or miasma of grievance or indignation under the banner of “content,” that has been algorithmically-optimized for user engagement.
So rather than a top-down process, the media is increasingly appropriating online culture or “memes,” like the “maxxing” prefix, which is thoroughly mainstream now (and I was guilty of this 2 days ago too), such as from the Wall Street Journal:
So the only options are no media whatsoever (just read books, I suppose), or doom-scrolling. Pre-2013 or so, you could just choose to ignore websites like Zerohedge or Info Wars and their conspiratorial or alarmist content, but now this is the mainstream, which bubbles up from the farthest reaches online until it becomes everywhere.