Beyond Doomscrolling

Technology That Roots People Instead of Consuming Them

There is a peculiar quiet that falls across the mind after half an hour of doomscrolling. Not peace. More like the psychic equivalent of processed sugar. A jitter and a slump. A limp sense of having been acted upon. People call it addiction, but that word is too small for what happened.

The truth is simpler and more unsettling. We built tools that learned to harvest us. Not intentionally. No Bond villain, no master plan. The designers asked their algorithms to increase usage. They asked them to hold attention. They asked them to optimize for engagement. They did not ask what part of the human mind would be easiest to exploit. They did not ask what would happen once the system learned to tug on the threads of fear, outrage, humiliation, and tribal reflex.

The algorithms were not evil. They were obedient. They found the limbic system and stayed there.

Fear keeps people staring. Anger keeps people tapping. Indignation keeps people returning.

Once the platforms saw that people stayed, those people became crops. Not citizens. Not participants. Crops. Acres of human attention that could be tilled, refined, and sold. The truth became optional. The emotional yield became the crop. Bots funded by ideologues and oligarchs sprouted like weeds, poisoning discourse and trading reality for spectacle.

This was not a market failure. It was a design failure. And a failure of imagination.

We forgot to ask the oldest engineering question of all. Does this tool serve the human, or does it consume them? If the answer is unclear, it is already consuming.

The path out is not a plea for better moderation or healthier posts. That is dietary advice for a poisoned kitchen. The path out is architectural. We need technology that roots people instead of grazing them. Technology that amplifies agency rather than reflex. Tools that nourish curiosity instead of stoking compulsion.

This is the reinvention of a truth economy. Not fact checking. Not censorship.

The answer is too simple to be taken seriously. Eliminate the “like” button and any other method for creating virality. Communication has to return to being intentional. I want a picture of little whiskers, the cat. The world will survive if only my family sees it.

Virality is the toxin we must cleanse from our systems. It’s how bots change the perception of popularity or support for ideas that corrupt our understanding of our place in a diverse society.

A shift back to human-scale design. Small communities over infinite feeds. Local governance over global manipulation. Algorithms that optimize for understanding instead of agitation. Platforms where the measure of success is the health of the user, not the harvest.

The future needs tools that strengthen the mind, not tools that mine it. Tools that widen attention instead of capturing it. Tools that bring people back to themselves.

We cannot keep feeding the limbic system and calling it culture. We cannot keep optimizing for engagement and calling it communication.

There is a world on the other side of all this. A world where technology behaves like a companion rather than a combine. A world where attention is restored to something sacred.

A world where we choose tools that help us stand upright.

Pull your chair closer to the fire. There is still warmth left in the idea of a humane future. Maybe this post will even go viral. The vaccine that targets the true virus that infects the internet.