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Fiction is good for you! Even if we find ourselves in the age of Peak TV, there’s still something singularly satisfying about getting lost in a book. It’s time to get our poolside reading mojo working!

Here’s a recommendation: Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Set on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, it’s a recent novel that depicts at its outset the kidnapping of two sisters at the hand of a nefarious man who absconds with the girls to a hiding spot of unknown location. From there, Disappearing Earth shifts its focus in successive chapters to various townspeople in Kamchatka who all have some manner of connection to the kidnapping but otherwise are embroiled in their own dramas and struggles. Nevertheless, the specter of this crime fogs every aspect of the residents’ lives. The overall effect of Phillips’ interlocking character sketches, while arresting on their own, is that of an oblique meditation upon how one horrific event can engender pain, anxiety, fear, and anger in larger communities of people. Call it “ambient trauma.”

Sadly, I’ve been sensing similarities between the ambient trauma within Disappearing Earth and how friends are struggling to process news of the recent shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. No, we haven’t been directly affected by these massacres, but we’re also not unaffected by them, if that makes any sense. We’re fogged.

Much of my headspace recently has been occupied by considering the relation of national or world events to individual wellness. I don’t think it’s ultimately healthy for us to have our emotional lives shackled to the roller coasters of headlines, but on the other hand, if so many of us become understandably triggered by what’s continually blowing up around us, saying “stop it” doesn’t appear to constitute a workable coping strategy, either.

Smarter minds than I have observed that globalization and technology have produced a new and different modality of human existence than what our forebears experienced. Via smart phones and social media, we’re plugged in like never before—and I fear for the long term consequences of this sea change.

What hath hyper-technologization wrought upon us? A few ways in which this era of information consumption is genuinely different from previous generations:
— Our absorption of news is decreasingly mediated by words. For example, before we’ll read about the latest round of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, we’ll see a thousand pictures and videos that stir us emotionally in ways that words never could. Or again: it’s one thing to read about the murder of George Floyd, but entirely another to witness it on video.
— Social media “flattens” our news feeds in such a way that we can’t differentiate between the fatal and the frivolous. By contrast, remember how the old nightly news broadcasts were structured, namely from more serious (news), to somewhat serious (weather), to less serious (sports), and the for the last couple of minutes, to the trivial (e.g., that final segment about the kitten that learned how to play “Three Blind Mice” on piano). On that older model, informational scaffolding helped us to know how to hold and process different forms of news in varying registers. Now, that apparatus has been taken from us. Instead, everything is serious and important; and nothing is serious and important.
— Not a newsflash, but the news keeps flashing, 24/7.
— News is algorized, not edited. (“Algorized”: Jim’s made up word for “resulting from automated, algorithmic calculations; not “resulting from Al Gore.”) Multibillion dollar corporations are deeply invested in maximizing your dopamine bang for their bucks, and nothing fires the limbic system like the scorching hot take. Whatever makes us as angry and amped up as possible is what the algorithms amplify in our direction. Yes, in previous generations every news outlet came with an editorial bias, but that’s also my point: human beings edit, while machines algorize. Hence we have human beings consuming content that is inhumanly generated.

Not great, Bob! Between these factors and also the fact that our headlines so often contain heartbreaking content, no wonder that we’re living in an age of ambient trauma. What to do?

Part of me wants to reply, “Well, just unplug.” But that’s too facile a solution. We’re into the internet too deep simply to cut the electricity, Pete Seeger style. What’s more, some sociologists are predicting a “reverse digital divide” in which only the wealthy will have the means to periodically disconnect from the online world, whereas the less moneyed will have no choice but to remain wired in. (E.g., if you drive for Uber or run for DoorDash, you can’t very well say, “This week I’m going to totally turn off my phone so that I can be more productive at work and more present for my family.”)

So, “just unplug” won’t cut it. I’ll check in next week with some thoughts on ways forward.

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