Millipedes and Monsters

Dispatch from the echo chamber

Photo by Markus Blüthner on Unsplash

We don’t have a single crisis, we have a thousand crises.

We don’t have a single monster, we have a thousand monsters.

They come at us in varying degrees of severity, from losing a job in a bad economy to losing everything in a cataclysmic weather event.

The crises are in the news every day right next to the monsters, so anyone with their eyes open can be forgiven for feeling unsettled.

But wait…

You’ve heard about this.

You’ve heard about all of it.

Every gory detail, all the sad and sordid stories that populate our little corner of one of the thousands of echo chambers where people go to have their fears, if not assuaged, at least justified.

The echo chambers, while appearing impartial, are feeding us what we crave. I have never seen items wandering in from other echo chambers, if I want to see those I have to actively search for them, if I go too many times the all-seeing eye will begin to send me samples, like the people who give away tasty treats at Costco. I’ll get one and then if I like it I can get a lot more, so much, in fact, that the place I left will begin to disappear, to be replaced by a different chamber which will then begin tailoring what I see to my new found arena.

I desire approval, so much so that I have begun going to the grocery store more frequently just to see the notice that I have been approved show up on the little screen. It never says anything bad, unless my account is overdrawn.

It’s relatively easy to keep your chamber free of contradiction, you need only delete and block comments and people who disagree with you.

If you wanted to appeal to a different audience you could put something like Patriot, Constitution, Freedom, Rights, and America in the tags and a whole new crowd will be lured to your content.

This is the problem.

We hear about things that upset us or feel wrong and we write about it or make YouTube videos about it, and then our echo chamber responds positively, we get our dopamine rush and then charge on with more of the same.

We see the same stories in our little world.

The endless, tiresome repetition of accounts of government malfeasance, the endless, tiresome repetition of bad people doing bad things, the endless, tiresome repetition of would have, could have, should have articles, on and on ad nauseum.

It gets kind of like watching a police chase where the police never apprehend the criminal, they just chase them 24/7.

In the old days, and yes I like the old days better, you could spend days, or weeks, or months gathering data to support your position, and not just information that agrees with you but information that contradicts you, and then you would process that material and form a conclusion.

Today, you just check in to an echo chamber and you get everything spoon fed, which produces the illusion that you are well-informed.

Maybe think about this the next time you are witnessing or involved in the Great Echo Chamber Wars, because those are wars that can never be won.

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