Are you a doomscroller? It's time for us to focus on hope instead

The National

7 hours ago

By which I mean 'the activity of spending a lot of time looking at your phone or computer and reading bad or negative news stories', as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it.
It's funny to observe myself wrestling with this term, which renders me as just another techno-addict. Of course not! I'm the realist in the room, facing the world with honesty and without delusion!
But I also have to check myself on my doomscrolling preferences – how much gratification I'm getting out of them. Why, for example, do I constantly seek out stories and interviews about AIs becoming conscious agents, running out of human control?
The tech-bros talk about their 'p-doom' factor (probability of doom) when predicting whether superintelligent AIs will act in our favour or not – often expressed as a percentage (1% to 99%).
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That feels crude to me. I prefer to think that I am acknowledging the evolutionary shift that self-improving AIs might represent. So what might seem to others as doomscrolling, obsessively informing myself about what will supersede humanity, I see as readying myself for a coming new era.
My other apparent 'scroll of doom' is climate worsening. Again, I'm checking my gratifications here. What does it mean to fill your attention span with worse-than-ever indicators of summer heat, ocean acidification and plankton die-off, irreversible tipping points, on and on?
Again, I don't feel lost in doom. It's more that I'm preparing myself for an oncoming future of greater difficulties – ones that will compel profound transformations in what counts as a 'normal lifestyle', our consumptions, productions and values.
I'm getting myself ready for things dropping out of, and into, my life. Fewer shiny objects, more community relationships; less international flying, more local flying.
For me, the doomscroll (so-called) of hard climate news sets the ground for all the upheavals, at micro and macro levels, that are to come.
Could the AI doomscroll be an answer to the climate doomscroll? One paper that popped up recently in my feed was examining renewable energy futures in Finland.
The writers concluded starkly that the country simply couldn't provide enough clean electricity to meet current demand. So demand has to drastically reduce.
Can AI help us with that? To move away from duplicatory and wasteful market economies, matching goods and services to needs and desires in radically more efficient, parsimonious ways?
And can this be the better story of AI in our lives – not just as a supplanter of humans in their current jobs, but as a system supporting a wholly new texture of society?
Well, that's my 'hopescroll' mentality, on a good day. It's not too far from Antonio Gramsci's axiom, 'optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect', though I could happily re-write it as 'generosity of the will, clarity of the intellect' (the original always seems way too exhausting and antithetical).
Do I have my bad days, when the scroll of high p-doom stories does what we all fear to my head and heart – which is to enervate and induce despair? Undoubtedly.
The current conflagrations in Israel and Gaza, and the possibility of seeing the worst things imaginable on one's feeds from that atrocity, have been too much for me. I confess that I unfollow and skip posts to avoid any possibility of encountering it.
This is hardly because I seek to minimise the importance of this genocide, as a collective act of violence and cruelty. The very opposite, in fact. It viscerally confronts me, video clip by video clip, with the appalling levels of violence that are deeply sedimented into modern societies – currently and historically.
My adult life has been haunted, ever since I learned about them, by the nuclear bomb and the concentration camp. Both are industrialised, technoscientific forms of mass killing, one towards a people – and one towards all people.
The history of near-misses at nuclear catastrophe, either by strategic mistake or malfunction in the weaponry, is long and unnerving. Daily life, as it putters along under this terminally lethal umbrella, teeters at the edge of absurdity.
The traumatised and vengeful disproportionality of the Israeli state and its military forces' response to the Gaza border massacre is appalling and criminal enough.
However, this conflict, and others, are triggering a new wave of nations commissioning tactical nuclear weapons – labouring under the delusion that they are somehow deployable in a theatre of war.
This just deepens the absurdity of our times.
We live on a planetary powderkeg stuffed to overflowing, liberally drenched in petrol, waiting for enough matches to be sparked.
This is a scroll with so much doom, generating so much nihilism about the human condition, that one can barely even think about it, let alone flip fingers up the screen. A deathscroll is not bearable, even for we numbed ones.
How do we escape from being caught up in these loops of despair? There's plenty of practical advice out there. Summarised: you should create deliberate friction and boundaries around your digital consumption.
That means turning off notifications, deleting problematic apps, physically isolating your phone in another room or a bedroom drawer, using time limits within the phone.
We should also realise that our brains have a defensive bias towards negativity, and consciously seek out positive or solutions-focused content which counteracts all that.
But I can't help thinking that the ultimate solution is for us to raise our collective ambitions for how our societies function. I've always had hopes that Scottish independence would be part of that solution.
Tom Nairn's theory of nationalism is that it's Janus-faced. One face looks back to the past, selecting resources from history to cope with the future to be faced; a future shaped by global developments, arriving at your doorstep. The main question is: who are we, in the face of these challenges?
SO, independence is how we handle the future. And whereas imperial capitalism was the challenge of 19th and 20th centuries, now it's a combination of unlimited (and wonderful/dangerous) potential in computation and biotech, and the hard horizons of planetary ecological boundaries.
There are defensive, or hedonist, responses to this turbulent vista. Faragists appeal to the status quo ante. Netflix (and lifestyle consumerism) sends you on escapist journeys.
Independence has to be an answer and alternative to both responses – something beyond fearful and angry reaction, or seeking compensation from our entertainment bubbles.
The Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger often talks about the importance of 'institutional innovation' in a 'high-energy democracy'. By which he means a healthy nation has an appetite for building structures, organisations and enterprises. It knows the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Independence should be that very 'spirit to build'. But this means small-i indy has as much, if not more importance than large-I Indy.
Community-owned renewable energy schemes are enthusing many at the moment because they are precisely that grip on the future that communities need.
(Image: Submitted)
A dynamic of confidence/competence is required to sustain a group through all the stages of such projects. And psychologically, when you're absorbed in this kind of community development – real, tangible, socio-economic – it banishes the attraction of siren calls towards gloom or boom.
A national independence that can be a partner and enabler to these kinds of autonomy, exactly where and when they bubble up, would be a powerful and attractive vision.
And, suffice it to say, this prospectus demands at minimum a 'hopescroll'– a digital feed of locally and globally sourced exemplars of community power, full of stories and tools that provide scripts for action.
Beyond our wits to devise such a technology and service? I think not. The doomscroll is an inevitable expression of our digital modernity, both creative and destructive. But in Scotland, it could be otherwise.