Doomscrolling In The Deep

The most successful cultural movement of the last two decades counts over five billion people as its members (the majority of the living human population) and has never once had to ask anyone to join. It’s spread faster than any religion, any ideology, and with less effort on everyone's part. It has no leader, no founding text or manifesto, no headquarters, and no name. The only thing holding it together is an algorithm. 

We’re all familiar with doomscrolling: the compulsive act of scrolling through your endless feed of content long past the point where it’s doing any good. We mostly treat it as a self-control or productivity problem, something to try and address with app timers or the recent “brick your phone” trend. What we talk about less is what it's actually doing to us collectively, and I don’t mean our attention spans.

Here's where I want to make a distinction, because the usual version of this argument loses me at around this point. This isn't a piece about how phones are rotting our brains or how we were all better off before. The problem isn't that doomscrolling makes us dumber or sadder or more distracted, though it probably does all of those things too. The problem is more specific, stranger, and honestly a little harder to be annoyed about: it's making us all into the same person. Gradually, pleasurably, with our full cooperation.

There's a version of you that exists entirely on someone else's algorithm. Not a fake version, exactly … more like a composite. Built from the same content you engage with, the sounds you let play through, the things you paused on for two seconds longer than everything else. The more unsettling part is that platforms might know this better than we do.

The thing is, they're running the same process on everyone. Every pause, every replay, every abandoned video at the one-second mark, all of it is fed back into a system that is just trying to keep you there mindlessly swiping. The level of surveillance creeps me out — how easily my phone can build a version of me from things I barely registered myself.

And it’s doing that for everyone. Different people, different lives, but all moving through slightly different versions of the same content. It starts to get ahead of your preferences and knows what you want before you’ve properly decided. When that’s happening at scale, taste stops developing in isolation. It starts to drift in the same direction. 

The result is a kind of cultural homogenisation that's hard to name because it doesn't look like conformity. Everyone still believes they're developing a distinct point of view. And yes, maybe they are. But without realisation, we're all doing it in the same aesthetic register and ending up somewhere uncomfortably similar.

This is where doomscrolling stops being your personal problem and becomes more of a cultural one. The sheer volume of time we spend inside our feeds means our phones do more to work in shaping us than almost anything else. I read something recently that described your phone as a kind of “fake home”: the home screen, chosen wallpaper, the way you move between apps as digital rooms, how instinctive it all feels. Curated, personal, familiar, and like a space you’ve built up over time. But it’s not, really.

It just feels that way because it’s been made to. The environment is supposed to be tailored enough that you recognise yourself in it and feel that you have control, but structured enough that it’s silently guiding you in the same direction as everyone else. You end up trusting it and stop questioning why everything feels so right and addictive. That’s what makes the whole thing work. Because we’re so comfortable in it, everything else just speeds up.

This speed at which everything moves through feeds leaves almost no space for the moment between encountering culture and absorbing it — the gap where you could form a real response. Your sense of what you like or dislike instantly becomes less about intentionality or gut feelings and more about recognising what already feels familiar.

Trends used to have a certain lag, and now they don't at all. Something can go from niche to mainstream to irrelevant before you even realise, and there's no space in between. Because this cycle is so compressed, most of us are just responding to the same things all the time rather than deciding what we think about them.

I used to think the Salomon hiking shoes looked like a bulkier version of those awful Keens your parents made you wear on holiday. But then I kept seeing them. In strangers’ outfit videos, people styling them with jeans, videos over-romanticising hiking. Without even noticing, I stopped thinking they were ugly. I started considering them and then folded to consumerism and bought them. I actually quite like them now, which feels like the more concerning part. 

What I find dystopian is, yes, the loss of originality, but also the fact that you can't feel it happening at all. The dystopia most people imagine is grey, brutalist architecture, everyone wearing the same thing. What's actually happening is quite the opposite of that. It's colourful and voluntary, and it comes with a dopamine hit. Nobody is forcing you to do it, but you keep choosing to, because it is enjoyable, and somewhere in the accumulated hours of that enjoyment, the edges of your taste quietly get filed down into something the system already knows how to serve.

None of this is a conspiracy. It's what happens when you build something optimised to hold attention at scale; it turns out what holds attention at scale is — across cultures, demographics, and time zones — more similar than we'd like to admit. Feed enough people the same signal for long enough, and the signal starts to look like a personality.

I don't know how to think about some things in the pure, unmediated sense anymore. I have opinions and reflexes and preferences, some of which are mine, some of which arrived fully formed and adopted without much interrogation. That might just be the condition of being online. 

I think this is worth sitting with. Not as a reason to delete your apps or get a flip phone, but to recognise that what feels like your own taste might not be entirely yours.

Illustration by Louisa Nguyen