Okay I had a chance to read it. I appreciate the perspective and agree with it but I also think it’s pretty on-the-nose and just reminds me of something a mental health influencer would say, with a bit of leftist language peppered in. Scrolling is absolutely a coping mechanism for unresolved trauma and any type of mental illness, really. Double that for someone who’s autistic or has ADHD; it can be soothing and is a dopamine machine so that HAS to make it even more alluring. But there are many self destructive coping mechanisms that a traumatized person can turn to. If you are simply in a state of coping, that in and of itself is not healing the trauma. Therefore I think any way that you decide to cope with traumatic events is simply prolonging it and that’s not exclusive to internet addiction.

Before cell phones, I had drugs and booze and my iMac. Before drugs I had videogames. An entire lifetime of coping mechanisms to help me avoid processing my feelings. Would you not describe the experience of dissociation from substances as some sort of simulacrum?

I’ve gone to therapy for 10+ years. It has helped to untangle a lifetime of traumatic experience for me, but it was not something that magically cured my need to cope in whatever ways I can. I am still mentally ill. I’m still neurodivergent. Still living in a capitalist hellscape as we all are. Not everyone has access to therapy. So, then what do you do? Get rid of your coping skills, no matter how harmful, to just sit with your thoughts, not knowing how to work through them and let them eat you alive? Fuck that, give me cute capybara videos to scroll through please.

I agree that internet addiction is a real problem, and the access we have to it can make it a real hindrance to being in community. I’m experiencing this first hand. But I think the conversation is more nuanced and I wish the writer would have taken it farther.

I understand the impulse—to meme-ify this thing that has become a symbol for the cynical, trauma-mining jingoism of American life. But I also think it’s a way to do what I did, what all my friends did, after 9/11—to minimize its impact on us. Because whether you were there or not; whether you were born before or after, that event has deeply and tragically affected our lives—taken away your personal freedoms in the form of the Patriot Act; put blood on your hands and guilt in your hearts in the form of endless war on foreign soils. We’re all trying to put it behind a screen; to make it a movie.

this is where the left-libs’ “9/11 was a tragedy, I’m only mocking how it was used afterwards” position takes you: viewing anti-americanism as just an ironic performance, done by people trying to sublimate their cynicism from their fundamental love of country

but when I make fun of 9/11 I’m not using gallows humor to cope with cognitive dissonance. there’s nothing gallows about it bc I don’t particularly view 9/11 as a tragedy. I just hate this country and find the blowback for our crimes a bit satisfying