I was recently thinking back to the, I don't know, 2001-2004 era and how shitty the world was, but also how I never had a sense of dread about anything (other than, maybe, the first few days after 9/11.)
It got me thinking about how much worse my interpretation of events would have been if Reddit/Twitter/TikTok/whatever had been around at the time.
"Ya'll there was a fucking massive terrorist attack in a major American city, thousands of people dead, and now we've got people sending anthrax around, we're in a recession and unemployment is over 6%, the economy seems to be teetering, we're in a war and about to start another one, we have a crazy christian for president who wants to spy on all of us and who's trying to ban gay marriage, now there's a fucking SNIPER in the nation's capitol -- how the fuck do people expect us to show up when the world is such a hell hole?" etc etc. Just thousands and thousands of posts and videos like that, like a firehose.
This decade has been similarly pretty sucky so far, but it's yet another thing that makes me miss the pre social media internet. Sticking to a handful of subreddits kind of recreates the feel of old message boards but not really