As I start my severely restricted internet diet, some thoughts.

Media is fundamentally evil. The “news,” whatever the source, trains you to be passive. What others are doing/deciding takes precedence. You are just a spectator.

The world seen through media is an inversion of your existence. You should be absorbed in the the things that you can and should manage. You should be attentive to and deriving satisfaction from mindfully doing everyday things like making a meal, taking a walk, or playing with the dog. Or just breathing. These are the important things. But instead, you are caught up and vicariously living off the drama purveyed by media, which solicits your opinion about everything.

Of course, you do this because you want to escape from the mundane. But there is a feedback loop here, as in all addictive behavior. You want to escape the mundane because your exposure to media has desacralized and diminished the mundane. You have been seduced by the idea that the big reality is over there, in the virtual space of online chatter. Your own immediate sensations and surroundings have been emptied of significance. The immediate has become unreal. You recoil from it. You treat it with contempt. The immediate is an encumbrance you must shed so you can focus on the real issues of the day, which are whatever it is that agitates the social media mobs. Social media immerses you in the imaginary. You regress into the hysteria of identification. (All talk about what you identify as is just that, hysteria. In a sane society, you are what you do, i.e. what makes you useful to others, not what you hallucinate.)

Once your contact with the immediate is broken, your craving for the mediated intensifies exponentially. People talk about porn addiction. But addiction to porn is merely the most garish form of addiction to media. Porn is the ultimate form of hysterical sexuality, where imaginary relations have completely displaced actual social intercourse. But the idolatry of the imaginary (and the corresponding devalorization of the immediate) is the essence of media spectacle in general. Mass media is mass onanism. Everybody on social media is jerking off.

Media critique, an obsessive academic practice, does not address this problem. It amplifies it, adding chatter to chatter.

To regain any kind of autonomy and respect for your own authentic way of being in the world, a radical disengagement from media is necessary. You have to impose a strict purge. Meditation helps. It makes you aware of how much foam there is in your head, how much of what you think of as self is a tissue of knee-jerk responses to media provocations. Taking a “position” on every media-fabricated event is how you condemn yourself to a lifetime of impotence.