The Content Churn of Fascism
Are We Playing Right Into Their Hands? A Fridays in Trumpland Bonus
Something has been happening in this era to those of us who comment and write on politics for a living.
As the ever-increasing chaos and harm descends from the top of our government, there is a demand for content creators to generate MORE MORE MORE.
This week, for example, I noticed that one of my favorite content creators here is generating at least three pieces of content A DAY, and sometimes as much as six.
Granted, this person is not just a person– they have an editorial staff, a backend team, video editors, guest writers, and paid employees who help them to generate written content, podcasts and interviews.
They’re not alone though in terms of this level of panicked creation. What I see on this platform, on YouTube, on Bluesky and elsewhere, is content creators farming out huge swaths of content daily, with all the ridiculous labor that entails.
Reader: do you know what it takes to create 3-5 nine minute videos on YouTube a day? It takes hours and hours of work— work that I know I couldn’t do alone in a 24 hour period even if I tried.
And as for writers, essayists, podcasters who have no staff: we are bearing the burden of all that content creation alone, on top of managing lives, raising families, caring for elders, and trying to do other work for money.
But truly, this churn of content: does it serve any of us, audiences included?
When I see this level of content production, what I think about is addiction— both in ourselves and in our audiences.
Believe me, I fall prey to it: this urgency culture to report on everything in real time, to consume analysis in real time, to generate more more more because that means more subscribers and that means money to feed my family, to consume more more more because maybe then I’ll be able to prepare for the next, most worst thing in the next line of horribles coming down the pike.
But I find myself asking more and more these days: is any of this healthy? For anyone? For content creators, or for those who consume our content?
I’m not so sure.
You may have noticed that I haven’t written my weekly essay here on *waves hands* all the bad news for the last two weeks. These questions I’m asking are the reason why.
I feel guilty taking a break. I feel guilty when a Friday rolls around and I am so overwhelmed I don’t know what to write. I don’t have a content production team. I don’t have editors or staff writers or people to churn content for me. And yet I feel compelled to generate and to consume content non-stop anyway.
Why is that?
For years now, I’ve been talking about hypervigilance as a feature of social media consumption.
Hypervigilance, as you may know, is a trauma response. It is an attempt to manage wild anxiety so that the thing that has traumatized us is something we are prepared for if it, or another unknown traumatizing event, arrives down the line.
In this era, doomscrolling is another word for it. And it’s having serious adverse effects on our mental and physical health. At a conference I spoke at a few weeks back on cognitive health, there was a discussion on the newly-coined concept of “digital dementia”— where perpetually online folks are showing earlier and earlier signs of cognitive decline due to the stress of the information news cycle we all consume on devices we carry around with us non-stop.
We are addicted to the dopamine hit of the bad news, to the allegedly-deeper analysis of the allegedly genius expert, the look-at-this-brilliant-cassandra-who-predicted-it-all-years-ago, the oh-my-God-fascism-is-here-the-constitutional-crisis-is-here-here’s-another-expert-to-explain-to-you-that-indeed-it-is-all-more-awful-than-we-can-imagine cycle.
Who does this serve?
I find myself routinely dysregulated these days after reading essays on this platform, or watching a content creator on YouTube with five million subscribers raise alarms (again, in screaming headlines) about the latest terrible news, or spending more than a few minutes on Bluesky. Even a few seconds of it sometimes leaves me agitated, anxious, angry, and though it’s not in my nature, sometimes hopeless.
And while therapists will remind us all that anxiety, anger, hypervigilance are normal reactions to abnormal conditions, nonetheless I am beginning to wonder how much of this stress is self-generated simply by the amount of content we (content creators) are feeling obligated to create to survive, and we (consumers of content) are being trained to consume.
But urgency culture is a feature of white supremacy.
Dysregulation serves the regime more than it serves us.
And when we are frozen by so much bad news, and so many experts telling us how bad things are, with no real concrete strategies being offered on how to combat it?
Well. Content creation becomes a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
If you are paying attention to even the slightest degree, you already know how bad it is. You don’t need one more essay, or one more expert, to tell you that.
You don’t need to be perpetually shot into hyper-anxiety or frozen into isolation and withdrawal.
You need instructions on how to be a part of the solution instead.
Yesterday, Mariame Kaba posted something on Bluesky that has me thinking.
She wrote this: “[W]hat's needed is a simple clear message and action. Followed by relentless repeating of that simple clear message over and over and over again. Followed by specifically telling people what to do/what actions to take in support of the message.”
So let me today be a part of the solution.
We can blunt the impact of this regime where we live. [simple clear message]
We can do it by getting involved with lifesaving organizations where we live. [action]
This can include volunteering at a food bank, joining an immigration rights coalition, getting involved in bystander intervention and rapid response work to ICE, supporting your local LGBTQ+ action organization, running for your local library board, attending city council meetings, creating or joining a mutual aid network, starting a community pod for support, feeding elders in your neighborhood– the list goes on and on. [specifically telling people what to do/what actions to take]
You can also get in the streets for protests, but just know that as crackdowns on dissent become more obvious and more violent, and as the surveillance state gets ever more robust, we will need local, stealth community organizing even more.
Every action against the regime is a good action, provided you don’t endanger those who are already targets. [white people: beware the hero complex, beware white saviorism, beware centering yourself with statements like “I would have stopped the Nazis in 1939! I’ll die for this!” when brown and Black folks are dying every day]
Work particularly to center those who are most vulnerable, and ask how you can help those folks.
Do not discount the skills you have acquired over the course of your life. Every single skill, from spreadsheet management to graphic design to answering emails to leading movements and people, is needed now.
These actions are not sexy. They are not the kind to advertise on social media for cred. And they matter more than anything else.
They matter a lot more than reading one more doom-driven essay or watching one more political short on YouTube.
As for my fellow content creators, I wonder: are you as exhausted as I am? Don’t you wake up some days and be like, no, I actually don’t really want to spend another day hijacking the central nervous systems of my audience for profit? Don’t you wonder what it would be like to help folks organize for a better future instead of shooting their adrenaline through the roof for one more sub, with one more terrifying interview or one more terrifying post?
How are we expected to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism when we are literally playing right into its hands?
These are valuable questions. They are ones I am committing to asking myself on a daily and weekly basis when I consider what I want to say versus what I want to do in the face of all this violence.
Maybe it’s time to generate and consume less (content and otherwise), and conserve and act wisely more.
Maybe it’s time to get offline and get into the real world, where we can actually do some good.
If you know you are here to make a difference, and you want to move the needle in ways that really matter now for future generations and beyond but aren’t sure how to make it happen, I want to talk to you.
Here at The Ripple Effect Institute, we work with leaders like you who are committed to changing the world and building a better future.
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You are so spot on with this. I had to really re-evaluate my social media intake over the past year and decided to focus only on one (Substack) and while I do follow some political content on here I also follow my favorite authors, artists, etc. I can’t stay in the “breaking news” cycle 24/7. I took your advice from your Resistance Live broadcast several months ago and got offline and into my community and started volunteering with two local organizations. It feels good to actually be DOING something even if it is small. All of this to say, your work is making a difference….Thank you for everything that you do!
Yes to every word of this essay! There are content creators who I used to find helpful, who have turned into factories of clickbait content that I now generally avoid. They increase the amount of content by making longer pieces then releasing bits and pieces with varying titles and headlines so if you were to watch every video they put out, you would see the exact same "urgent" and "new" and upsetting content over and over.
I appreciate the way you both provide information so we can stay informed, but also provide us with concrete steps to help blunt the effects of this regime where we live.
Do what you need to do to protect your well-being--when you model self care you are also helping others more than you know. You are doing so much! It's enough.