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Oddly enough, I spent a significant fraction of the past two weeks desperately avoiding all the news on the Internet and called that vacation (see the fireworks in DC trip which ended up being rained out in a location many, many people rather disappointingly let down by promise of a good balance between beauty and simply walking distance.)
Mainly, I was fed up with the news of the world as on the Internet. So, to me, that comic above is The Doctor telling off my ADHD, like, how dare me pay attention to what’s going on! So, I took a few weeks away from the news from the Internet.
It wasn’t easy. I kept wanting to go there, as if the hypersonics of the iPhone were triggering a Pavlov-trained addiction to a need for doom scrolling on a bright colored rectangle full of frustration and anger. while also frustratingly implemented. But, with all the craptastic-crapy-crap-crap that’s been going on in the world, I’ve found very few places in the Internet that are newsworthy but just don’t get there: I stuck to the newspaper comics (also on the Internet), reading this and a few other blogs, and then the fires came.
I tried to look up the news just for the fire information, and that was a dramatic and symbolic failure of personification of the Internet whose rich morons would call A.I. while firing the real people behind it all. The same can be said of the cable overlords against the streamers, while both feel all the customer wants to pay for are the adverts.
The point is lost. I felt like a battle against the wind mills had gone full circle yet again, just in fewer pages than a lower-budget-why-bother Don Quixote remake.
I can’t say ignorance was bliss, but it did make me want to do other things than doom scrolling while questioning why we can’t have good things that don’t infuriate all of us in 2024.
I have to avoid all but the barest details of politics. Having already drastically cut back my social media scrolling, I’ve stopped reading comments anywhere except a few accounts I follow where most of the commenters are lighthearted and funny and fun. I don’t even read the “feel good” or “good news” kind of stuff because even those commenters can be so vile.
I’m tired of people behaving badly. Anywhere there’s a lack of civility is a place I’m no longer interested in visiting. Now and then, things from Threads pop on my Instagram feed, and if what I see is any indication, it’s just a place where people complain about how they’ve been wronged by some business entity or its workers. Not interested.
Yeah, me too, but no that me too.
Unfortunately, some stories need an antagonist or some wrong-doing that gets its justice in the end. A serial, though, keeps getting that sneaky escape, just so that we can all say “So! We meet again, Villain!” in the next installment. Then the ratings finally fall (whoever decides those ratings) and even the likes of Apple and Marvel Studios feels the saturation machine churning and withering. Maybe a new age finally dawns after the crap is finally overwith… (to be continued)
Time will tell…