The image that really grabbed me on social media this week was a faded photo of a man and woman standing on the front steps of their home. It's a candid photo - both focus on the baby in the mother's arms. This is probably one of the first photos of the new family and the caption breaks my heart: "This photo blew into our yard during the Eaton Canyon Fire. Does anyone from Pasadena/Altadena recognize these People?"
The painting was intact, not singed or torn, but it seemed to represent the loss of an entire universe. Staring at this photo, a piece of family history blown away by the same wind that burned Los Angeles, you can begin to see the outlines of what has been lost. The kind of sadness that can’t be listed on an insurance claim.
Then you roll. A satellite photo of a charred, flattened neighborhood is sandwiched next to some career news. On Instagram, I saw a GoFundMe campaign started by a woman who was nine months pregnant and had just lost her house; followed by other people’s glowing ski vacation photos and skin-care ads. I continued browsing the “For You” feed on ) and blaming the fire on DEI initiatives; then a trashy post about Meta’s content moderation changes (“I’m commenting ‘retarded’ on every Facebook post,” it read, 297,000 times browse). I scroll again: "Celebrities reveal how they really feel about Kelly Clarkson," teased another article. This was followed by a post about a new red flag warning in Los Angeles: The fires are not abating.
Viewing the devastation in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social media ecosystem can feel profoundly disorienting. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president next week; the government is setting fire to a "land grab"; and a new cannabis drink will help you "crush" Dry January. Mutual aid posts sit alongside those from climate denialists and doomsdayers. Stay online long enough and it's easy to feel like the world is ending simultaneously but somehow remain indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. One viral post suggested that "climate change will appear as a series of disasters viewed through your phone, with the camera getting closer and closer to where you live until you are the one filming it." Just scroll a little longer and you'll find out The author of the post wrote this sentence while on the toilet (although the author later deleted the confession).
You can call it doomscroll, jaw-dropping, eyewitness, or whatever you want, but moments of disaster have an irresistible pull to consume information. Added to this is the profound realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one hopes for. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article: “I am not a survivor or a rescuer. I am a witness, or a voyeur. What I feel The pain is a shame.”
To those on the ground, these networks mean different things. These people do not need to testify: they need specific information about their circumstances, and they need help. But they’ve also lost their way in the clutter of our social platforms and the divisive nature of the hollowed-out media industry. “This time, I’m a civilian,” Los Angeles journalist Matt Pierce wrote last week. “This time, the user experience of getting information about the disasters happening around me was shit”. Anna Meyland, Journalist mother joneschronicling the experience of watching fire engulf her home while packing up her car to evacuate, sifting through countless conspiracy theories and false posts.
As I read these flashes and watch helplessly from a distance, this sentence Live time Roaring in my head. This is a metric that social media companies optimize for and is exactly what the name suggests: the amount of time people spend on these apps. In recent years, people have how much time Users spend money on the site; tech industry veterans like Tristan Harris, who has built lucrative second careers, have warned of the addictive and exploitative nature of tech platforms and their algorithms. Harris' reforms began in 2016, when he proposed a healthier measure of "making the most of your time" in an attempt to reverse the "digital attention crisis." This became its own metric, adopted by Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 as Facebook's north star for user satisfaction. Since then, the phrase has fallen out of favor. Harris shifted his efforts from “time well spent” to a focus on “humanizing” technology.
But concerns remain. Parents are obsessed with the nebulous measure of “screen time,” while researchers are writing best-selling books and debating what exactly cell phones and social media are doing to kids and how to prove it. U.S. politicians are so worried about dwell time, especially when its byproduct metadata is collected by foreign governments, that TikTok is likely to be banned in the United States, where about a third of adults use the app. (In protest, many users simply started spending time on another Chinese site, Xiaohongshu.) Many suspect that time on sites does us no good, but time on sites is also how many of us learn about the world, e.g. community, and entertain yourself. The experience of logging in and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never been more frustrating, commoditized, confusing, and unhelpful.
So it’s useful to juxtapose this information ecosystem—one largely dominated by culturally warring tech executives and populated by attention-seekers—with real technological public goods. Last week, I downloaded Watch Duty, a free app that provides information like evacuation notices, up-to-date fire maps, and wind and air quality alerts. Launched in 2021 following the fires in Sonoma County, California, the app has become a critical information infrastructure for Los Angeles residents and first responders. It is run as a public service by a nonprofit organization, with volunteer reporters and full-time staff who help review information. Millions of people have downloaded the app this month alone.
When local government services are unreliable and residents are issued false evacuation notices, Watch Duty appears to be saving lives. It's a shining example of the best and most useful technology, so I was struck by what one of its co-founders, David Merritt, had to say edge WEEKENDS: "We don't want you to spend time on apps," he said. "You get the information and leave. We have the option to add more photos, but we're limiting those to ones that provide a different view of the fires we've been tracking. We don't want people to see the doomsday scroll." He rightly points out, This "goes against what many technologies do."
The contrast between Watch Duty and the broader swath of the internet is especially stark in early 2025. The toxic incentives and environments of our other apps are as evident as ever, and the people behind these services — especially Musk and Zuckerberg — seem intent on making the experience of using them worse than before. It’s all about increasing engagement and more time on site. Musk transformed X into a Superfund site filled with conspiracy theories, cryptocurrency ads, hate posts and low-rent memes, and he has always had a strong desire that his users come to the platform and never leave. He has allegedly de-prioritized hyperlinks that would take people from the platform to other websites. (Musk didn’t deny that this was happening when he confronted Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham.) He has a name for the metrics he wants X to optimize for: User seconds without regrets.
Zuckerberg recently announced his own version of Musk's playbook aimed at turning his meta-platform into an even more lawless posting zone, including getting rid of fact-checkers and turning off automated moderation systems for all content, but "illegal and highly Serious violations" are excluded. ”. The system prevents spam and disinformation content from flooding the platform. Make no mistake: it’s also its own time in the field. In an interview last month financial timesA Meta executive revealed that the company plans to try to introduce generative artificial intelligence-driven chatbots into its services so that they can behave like ordinary users. Connor Hayes, Meta's vice president of generative AI products, said this feature (which no one asked for, I should add) is a "priority" for the company over the next two years. This should be consistent with another goal, which is to make its applications "more entertaining and engaging."
This should feel even more frustrating to anyone who cares or still believes in the power of the internet and technology to broaden our worldview, build resilience, and bring us into contact with a humanity that is always worth helping and saving. Suffice it to say, spending time on set has never been so bad. Forecasts suggest things will only get worse.
In recent days, I’ve been revisiting some of the work of climate futurist Alex Steffen, who has a knack for putting our planetary crisis into words. The unprecedented disasters that are occurring with increasing frequency are an example of discontinuity, where “past experience loses its value in guiding future decisions.” Stephen believes we have no choice but to adapt to this reality and anticipate how we will survive. He offers no magic bullet or bromide. The climate crisis will hit us all, but the impact will be uneven. He believes that we are not together. But we need to take action, especially proactive repair, to make our damaged systems more effective and durable.
Clearly our information systems need this kind of work. They feel like they were built for a world we no longer live in. Most of them are run by billionaires who can afford to distance themselves from reality, at least for now. I don’t think the discontinuity or fragmentation of our internet will ever end. But we also see resilience. Perhaps a platform like Watch Duty can provide a template. "I don't want to sell this," said John Clarke Mills, the company's chief executive. hollywood reporter on Monday. He further said: "Nobody should have to have this. The fact that I have to do this with my team is not nice. Part of it is out of spite. I'm angry that I'm here to have to do this. to do it, and the government isn’t spending the money to do it itself.” Mills’s anger is righteous, but it may also be instructive. Instead of building things that make us feel powerless, Mills built tools that give people information they can turn into agency.
There is no clear conclusion to any of this. There is loss, fear, anger, but also hope. A few days later, I looked again at the post containing the photo of the man and woman with their child. I hope the internet can work its magic and allow those who have lost their photos to find them again. In all the replies, people were trying to send signals to push the post. In one response, a local news producer asked for permission to report on the photo. Another person sees them as having a leadership role in the family. So far, no happy ending. But there is hope.