Doomscrolling, explained

It was noon today, November 3, when I got my first warning to log off Twitter. It came from possibly the least likely source I could have imagined, a man whose job literally relies on people staring at the internet: Nate Silver, the founder of the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight, which has been publishing 2020 election predictions for what feels like 100 years.

But now, Nate Silver was saying what we all know to be true despite everything we’ve tried to glean from poll analyses over the past few months: “You’re not going to learn anything useful about the election outcome on here until 7pm,” he wrote, “when they start counting votes.” Unfortunately, he’s right: Twitter does not have the answers right now because nobody does.

Did Nate Silver’s tweet make me log off of Twitter? Of course not! Like everyone I know and quite possibly you too, I am spending this day refreshing every social media feed for tiny crumbs of information that will turn out to be mostly useless, despite the fact that when anything actually important happens we will all receive simultaneous alerts on our phones. There is no rush to be the first to hear the news, and yet today, we are all doomscrollers.

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