Most of the systems in society still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn't protect freedom of attention. There wasn't anything obstructing people's attention at the time it was written. Back in an information-scarce environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring you information. Now it's the opposite.
Now what we need is information filtering. But filtering for the long-term benefit of information consumers is not only difficult -- it's hard to even know if it's being done right. So the dominant filtering systems feed on our impulses. Their goal is to get clicks, to get money from advertisers, to win a bigger slice of the predatory filtering market, with indifference to the social effects.
Dinosaur do-gooders, trying to "raise awareness", only add noise to the cacophony and increase our paralysis.
Into this wasteland steps an old-time villain, now doing something useful: information filtering with a political agenda. If you lack the resources to do your own filtering, why not turn to someone you basically agree with, and let them do it for you? It can't be worse than the nihilism of clickbait.
We are already in a postapocalypse world. Unbridled operant conditioning is turning people into zombies, while information-filtering warlords offer security against the famine of meaninglessness. I'm trying to stay independent, like Mad Max, but it's getting harder.
Everyone thinks they're immune to anxiety until it gets them. I used to even be able to handle a major trauma here and there without breaking a sweat. Then I got hit with two extreme traumas back to back, and since then, my resistance to daily traumas is gone. What I find funny is that from an outside perspective, I might even seem more resilient.
When I see people who have the same attitude I had before the trauma, I worry. It's like seeing a kid on a highwire. Oh, baby, I know it looks so easy, and everytime you've tripped you've caught yourself. But you don't know how far down it is.
I've written a lot about social collapse, but now I'm thinking about something like identity collapse. You develop a personality, a set of habits, that gets you through life, and it's probably more than half subconscious, learned when you were very young, and hard to change. But then some key component changes -- it could be something in you, or something in the world, or your role in the world. And gradually, or suddenly, your whole way of being no longer works.
When this happens to a society, or to an individual, and they don't flame out in destruction but fall into a deep slump, we use the same word: depression. The whole system becomes disjointed and ineffective, and recovery is a long process of rebuilding a working system from scratch.
I'm thinking about people who are blind from birth, and then their eyes get fixed. You'd think they'd be happy, but normally they become depressed, because they still can't see. It takes years to learn to interpret the light on the retina as a three dimensional world, and they have to learn this as an adult, where normal people learned it as babies with highly flexible brains. Meanwhile, now that they've become aware of that maddening world, they can't ignore it.