• Decline of Reading and Literacy:
  • Ed West examines James Marriott's book, The New Dark Ages, highlighting a steep decline in long-form reading and literacy among younger generations (Gen Z and Gen Alpha).
  • Anecdotal evidence from universities is reinforced by data showing sharp drops in student reading comprehension and recreational reading habits across both youth and adults.
• The Root Causes (From TV to Smartphones):
  • While contemporary society points to smartphones and short-form video (such as TikTok and YouTube) as the primary culprits, the shift is framed as the culmination of a trend that began with television.
  • The essay connects Marriott's thesis back to Neil Postman’s 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, which cautioned that screen-based visual culture favors triviality and emotion over sustained rational discourse.
• Societal and Civilizational Stakes:
  • Mass literacy was foundational to Enlightenment values, democratic institutions, and the erosion of autocratic authority.
  • The retreat from print to algorithmic, screen-dominated media risks ushering in a "post-literate" society characterized by fragmented attention spans, tribalism, and political susceptibility to demagoguery.

Hacker News Discussion

• Cognitive Resistance and Short-Form Addiction:
  • Commenters described personal struggles with attention fragmentation, noting that constant exposure to bite-sized content conditions the brain to resist deep reading or feature-length films.
  • Several users compared hyper-palatable digital feeds to junk food, noting that even intentional attempts to return to book-reading require deliberate cognitive retraining.
• The "Hidden" Doom of Reddit and Text Aggregators:
  • Participants observed that people often delete image-heavy platforms (like Instagram or TikTok) thinking they have escaped social media, only to retreat to Reddit, YouTube, or X.
  • Users pointed out that Reddit can be especially toxic and anxiety-inducing, serving as a modern equivalent of sensationalist cable news driven by outrage, doomerism, and algorithmic "Best/For You" sorting.
• Algorithmic Manipulation vs. Intentional Discovery:
  • A central theme in the comments was hostility toward engagement- and profit-driven recommendation algorithms that hijack human dopamine loops.
  • Users advocated for non-algorithmic, chronological, or strictly user-curated spaces (e.g., RSS, Mastodon, or local subreddits via stripped interfaces) as healthier alternatives.
• Technical Countermeasures and Friction:
  • Commenters shared tactical solutions to curb doomscrolling, including DNS-level blocks (Pi-hole), removing app accounts, using text-only frontends, and setting up keyword filters.
  • Many agreed that introducing even small amounts of manual friction is often sufficient to break unconscious scrolling habits.

[[Stephanie Booth p]] on how to get away from doomscrolling in the face of traumatic events, such as here the horrific fire in Crans-Montana (on the 25th year of a similar event in Volendam, 14 young deaths, 200 severely wounded w burns, in a 3minute fire from small fireworks),

The State of the Culture, 2024<br /> by [[Ted Gioia]]<br /> accessed on 2025-08-18T08:53:09

The vast majority of people browsing social media streams via the web are doing just this: spending a lot of time browsing junk content.

While much of this "junk content" is for entertainment or some means of mental and/or emotional health, at root it becomes the opiate of the masses.

and willpower, or, if you like, ego. It is well known that decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks...

Having a standardized and reliable working environment or even workflow can be less taxing on our attention, our concentration, and our willpower leaving more energy for making decisions and thinking which can have a greater impact.

Does the fact that the relative lack of any decision making about what to see or read next seen in doomscrolling underlie some of the easily formed habit of the attention economy? Not having to actively decide what to read next combined with the random rewards of interesting tidbits creating a sense of flow is sapping not our mental energy, but our time. How can we better design against this?