In the spring of 2006, I was detached—from following politics, from my coursework at college, from everything. Why I was so out of it, I can’t explain, even in retrospect.

The results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, which had happened during my first year living away from home, had been immediately demoralizing, but I’d forgotten about them within days. My philosophy class that met the morning after had briefly discussed the situation in Ohio—wasn’t anyone going to do anything, it’s too bad that Bush won, and so on—and then it never came up again, not that and not anything political, even though I worked closely with the instructor for years afterward.

How I followed the results on election night 2004 is as unclear to me now as the rest of that class session after the opening political bit. I remember going to someone’s dorm and talking political shop with several students, but the decisive moment—when Bush was projected to win—never happened, for me. I wasn’t following along obsessively with vote tallies, but instead periodically going to the big news site homepages to get an outline. Earlier in the day, I’d walked across the city to my psychiatrist and he’d been excited; it really had felt like, for a few hours that afternoon and when the initial exit polls arrived, that Kerry might win, and the post-9/11 era (which already felt like it’d lasted a century) would end.

But 2005 was going to be even worse. Again I wasn’t tracking the play-by-play of Bush’s second term but I got my pain without even having to seek it out: This was my first full year on my own, and I struggled with my classes, my identity, and with the bits of news that slipped through while I was on my desktop PC back in my dorm. Katrina, the attempts at privatizing Social Security, the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor. My main ways of following political news had evolved somewhat from the year before. Thanks to one of my suite mates1, I was reading blogs like Talking Points Memo (TPM), Eschaton2, and Raising Kaine3, which provided a drip-drip update on Bush-era minutiae that was easily ahead of what was on the major news sites or TV stations.

By the time 2006 and detachment arrived4, I still occasionally took the pulse of political news but had also resigned myself to a permanent sort of Bushdom. I’d really hoped for his defeat in 2000, his rebuke at the 2002 midterms, and his re-defeat5 in 2004, but nothing happened and I was out of a politically engaged mode. Twitter launched around this time.

It may have been as late as 2009 that I remained unaware of Twitter, due to my disinterest in most tech news until I began working in the industry in the 2010s. I think I found it when doing some research on a prospective date, and seeing an account that was mostly tweets like “How does Twitter work?”. How, indeed; the site seemed useless when I first discovered it. Tiny posts with inscrutable links, check-ins, maybe a photo. My late discovery meant I wasn’t yet on the site for the 2008 election cycle, which nevertheless I was much more engaged with than 2004 due to my blog consumption reaching my pre-unemployment peak. I learned of the moment of Obama’s victory by following along with the TPM editor’s blog feed.

This blog-checking remained my primary mode of news-gathering for the first half of the Obama years. I learned about the ins and outs of Obamacare negotiations, the rise of the Tea Party, and the Beer Summit. But my more visceral connection to politics still came through TV. I was sitting alone in my dusty studio apartment, desperately looking for work, when I watched the 2010 State of the Union address and heard President Obama talk about the need to tighten the government’s metaphorical belt for some reason. This premature call to austerity, when unemployment was in double digits and millions were losing their homes, is my view the skeleton key for understanding American politics til this day. It contributed to the 2010 landslide losses in the midterms, and to the 2011 negotiations with John Boehner that nearly resulted in massive Social Security and Medicare cuts, until Boehner blew up the deal because he couldn’t stomach the modest rise in taxes that the proposed deal would entail.

Anyway: The point being, I learned the most important political news not from the internet, but from simply watching someone on TV talk. My consumption of political news on Twitter began in 2011, surged during the 2012 cycle and reached its peak in the run-up to during the 2016 elections. Although I missed much of the 2014 midterm news cycle due to having to move across the country, that lapse was more than offset by how by late 2015 I was following guys with avatars of John Rawls and Disney’s Aladdin discussing the intricacies of the Iowa caucuses.

Twitter on election night 2016 was a dire place. Jokes about a cake shaped like Donald Trump’s face quickly gave way to despair at the big red map of Pennsylvania’s counties. The gut punch of his victory turned me and it seems like everyone else into Twitter junkies. From 2017 to 2021, I don’t think I forewent checking the site for even a single day. I scrolled it aggressively, looking for the breakthrough piece of news that would finally signal the waking from a nightmare. My doomscrolling6 brought me back to 2006 levels of detachment, even though my political news consumption was the polar opposite of what it had been then.

I see now that all this obsessive Twittering had positive effects for me or anyone else. I didn’t benefit or profit in any way, and I drove myself nearly insane reading snippets of bad news and extrapolating them out to truly awful scenarios, most of which never even materialized. People said I seemed different, slower moving, more aloof. The only silver lining of the 2024 election was that it made finally leaving the site7, and returning to my old detached outlook (but with some introspection, I guess) all the easier.

Make it 2006 again, by science or magic; I’m back to reading news via RSS feeds, the occasional flick-on of TV, and in actual magazines and newspapers. Social media, something that really took form when I was in college and then quickly outran its own utility in the 2010s, becoming instead a dangerous set of politically polarized latter-day chatrooms. It’s literally hazardous to my health to doomscroll, so I don’t. I’ll be on Mastodon, and even then mostly as a place to auto-post my missives from here, and nowhere else. 2024 was the year of Alex and The Last Doomscroll.

  1. I had my own room that academic year, but there was a shared common space and bathroom. ↩︎

  2. An Infinite Jest reference. ↩︎

  3. A reference to Tim Kaine, then a candidate for Virginia governor. ↩︎

  4. Now that I look back on what I said earlier, I think the proximate cause was my inability to finish a Greek history course. That memory still hurts. Anyway, I made up for it with a class in 2006. ↩︎

  5. When I first arrived on campus for a tour before I committed to going to the school, we saw a car with a “Redefeat Bush” bumper sticker right before we parked. ↩︎

  6. This great neologism came from Twitter itself, and captures what it was like to just passively scroll through wave after wave of terrible news. ↩︎

  7. I hardly need to explain that the site is now named X and is overrun by right-wing propaganda as per the wishes of its owner. ↩︎