Doomscrolling ourselves to death
- ID
- 22023
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 06 Sep 2026, 7:53 PM
- Fetched
- 08 Sep 2026, 5:56 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/doomscrolling-ourselves-to-death
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 1.5
- Created
- 08 Sep 2026, 7:04 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Ed West reviews James Marriott's new book 'The New Dark Ages,' which argues that declining literacy and doomscrolling are producing a cultural catastrophe, particularly for children raised on YouTube rather than books. The piece is a personal, pessimistic cultural essay rather than a technical or industry analysis.
Why it matters
There is no actionable takeaway for builders here; it is a cultural commentary on media consumption and literacy decline. It does not touch on AI, developer tooling, infrastructure, policy, or startup opportunities relevant to the audience.
Discussion angle
At most a brief tangent: whether the products this community builds (AI agents, recommendation feeds, content tools) contribute to or could counter the attention-fragmentation problem Marriott describes — but this is a stretch from the article itself.