Crack-Up
An Internet of Fear, Sadness, and Anger
It’s been an exceptionally stressful couple weeks in what is likely the most stressful year of any of our lives, with the shooting of Charlie Kirk leading to the Trump administration calling for a crackdown on “liberal groups”, and anyone can tell that it’s starting to have an effect on people. Our nerves have been fraying for a long time, over a decade at least, and I think we’re at a point where people are starting to legitimately crack-up. What’s worse, it’s both something that they’re doing to themselves, and what the people they’re afraid of want to happen.
Social media is primarily driven by three emotions: fear, sadness, and anger. Sometimes these emotions drive the conversation on their own, but frequently they appear in some kind of combination. Anger is the vodka in the emotional cocktail, it’s the one that has the most kick. It’s easy to feel like anger is your friend, the thing that makes you righteous, that it’s your fire. I thought this when I was a younger man, during the first Trump administration, but I learned the hard way that being mad all the time pushes people away who aren’t also angry, and clouds your judgement. I remember a teacher warning me that the Greeks believed anger was a “temporary madness”, and he was right. You can do constructive things with your anger, and it’s natural to become angry, especially given the state of things, but it’s also easily manipulated. Rage-bait is a common term now because people have mastered it as a manipulative tactic. That’s a sign that you need to let it go, not cling to it.
I’ve had an anxiety disorder my entire adult life, and the older I get, the better I get at managing it. Anxiety can start as a reaction to something, but it’s also an emotion, and it’s one that lingers inside you after the stimulus that caused it leaves, and that changes how you act. Sadness, fear, and anger work the same way. Once you’re feeling them it doesn’t just go away, it lingers inside of you, affecting you long after the thing that made you feel it isn’t even in your mind. I talk back at my anxiety, it’s something that is key to keeping it from consuming me. In that same way we all need to do a better job of talking back to our anger, to our sadness, and especially to our fear.
Talking back to my fear is something I started doing in a very mindful way during COVID, the last time that there were a lot of scary stories floating around. There would be big, eye-catching headlines about danger, but tucked into the article were explanations of how they didn’t apply to the populations that people were claiming they did. Seeing people like Eric Feigl-Ding manipulate well-meaning people with bad information and watching the bad information spread like wildfire by leveraging the fear of the well-meaning people was eye-opening for me. It’s also what gives me pause about our current moment, and the people that are cracking up.
It’s clear that there are a lot of people in the Trump administration that are voracious consumers of social media and the Internet. You can see it in the ways that government agencies are posting, you can see it in the people they’ve hired, and you can see it in the way that high ranking officials like Stephen Miller post. For the love of god, Laura Loomer is a trusted adviser in the White House. If I’ve noticed how people’s fear, sadness, and anger can be manipulated online, they’ve also noticed and they’re using it against you. They’re making bold proclamations about crackdowns that they aren’t going to be able to back up because they know that they’re going to make you afraid and angry. Taking them at their word is falling for their propaganda, and you are not immune. What’s worse is that by believing it, people amplify the message.
Trust is a funny thing on the Internet. The death of institutions has led to thousands of yutzes like me that you need to filter through for quality advice and information, and the dynamics of parasocial relationships online complicate this. Every analysis comes with the question of “is this information I trust, or do I just like the person who is saying it?”. If you aren’t asking if I’m just flattering your sensibilities when you’re reading this, you should be, because that trust also makes you easier for me to manipulate. Stephen Miller can make all the wild claims he wants, but if someone you trust says that they’re going to start coming for you? That’s something you’re going to be less skeptical of, while also doing the work that Miller wants. If everyone on your timeline is saying that they’re going to come for you? That’s going to fray your sanity really quickly. That’s going to make you crack up.
We live in times that can pull all those emotional levers all the time, and what you can do to make things better for yourself is to not seek out the people who are pulling those levers for you. Karen K. Ho identified the doomscrolling problem in 2020, but even now there are all kinds of people who log onto social media and want those levers to be pulled. I got a DM on Bluesky recently from a stranger, it’s how I started to think about all this:
Hey have you considered shutting your idiot mouth forever or are you going to continue to ask protestors to sign up for the Fed protest list that will certainly see the government execute you within a year? Real sincere question. Are you a fascist or suicidal?
I don’t know how you talk to someone who sincerely believes, or even claims that the Trump administration is going to round up and kill all the elderly people who signed up for the Indivisible protests in the next year, but I do now the levels of anger and fear that makes you write that and send it to a stranger. That’s not a single unwell person, that’s someone who has been stewing in fear, sadness, and anger for a very long time from people they trust. Your challenge online is to not become that person, and you’ve got to commit to working on that every day, or else you’re going to crack up.
Like most millennials, I got online because I genuinely enjoyed it. It was a way for me, a kid living in central Minnesota, to hear from and learn from people I never thought I would get to meet. When being online is good, there’s a joy to it, there’s a genuine community built around shared interests. If you’re only online to be afraid, sad, and angry, there’s no community there, just a downward spiral for your mental health. I don’t think any of us can ever log off at this point, but we can try to stop seeing the internet as a place to be afraid, sad, and angry. Follow people who make you happier, challenge the things that make you afraid. Try not to be so goddamn angry all the time. It might not prevent you from cracking up, after all, it’s hard to be somebody and it’s hard to keep from falling apart, but at least it’ll make your experience more pleasant and you more pleasant for doing it. We need that, especially when everyone wants you to feel fear, sadness, and anger.
