The Medium is the Trigger
by Asa Boxer
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It may have been 2013 or 2015 when I first encountered the social damage caused by smartphones and social media. I was throwing a house party, making ice cream or sharing homemade ginger beer, something like that. There was a group of about 12 of us. Some were on the back patio and some were in the kitchen. I lobbed out a humorous remark about how feminism had achieved its goals, and wasn’t it about time our society gave it up? I mean, women are a lot like people, no? This comment wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular, but one fella took it mighty personal. He was a programmer, hardwired into the latest tech, and I guess he was ahead of the curve. He lost his nut on me. Full on meltdown. He began trembling, raised his voice, and I don’t recall what he said, but he seemed genuinely troubled and enraged. I had never seen that sort of reaction to anything other than a direct insult. I was genuinely concerned, and asked if he was okay, if there was something that had happened to him or to someone close to him. No. It was nothing like that. Whatever it was, I offered a hug and approached the guy to calm him down. I recall him accepting the hug. But he was shaken.
In the years following, I started witnessing more and more of that sort of overreaction to all manner of stimuli. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to notice a cultural trend, because the term triggered became popular to characterise the phenomenon. Before that, the term existed but was seldom used. In fact, the word triggered didn’t quite mean what it means today. Now it was everywhere all the time in its new incarnation.
As I began using social media and experiencing social media attacks, I learned what it meant to be triggered in the social media sense. Despite not knowing my assailants, I often found myself trembling uncontrollably over the keyboard. Same adrenaline rush I had witnessed that afternoon at my house party. I thought, Wow, this can’t be good. After several such experiences, I quit responding to anything eliciting that sort of reaction. Twitter was the first platform I left, not because of triggerings, but owing to the fact that it left me feeling dirty. It definitely wasn’t facilitating connections with interesting people. And once the lockdowns came along in 2020 and I saw the shameless worst in folks, I finally did what had been a long time coming, and dropped them all.
I suppose Substack is a social media platform, but I’ve rarely seen the sort of nasty behaviour so prevalent elsewhere. That said, I have encountered some ugly activity on this venue that I’d been subject to elsewhere. One is the classic meltdown over a perceived slight in response to a tactful critique meant to engage the author in productive conversation—the sort of thing one might hope for when writing a Substack article. In that case, the fella mobilised his electronic alter ego to bully me. I called him on it, so he quit using that pathetic (but all-too-common) strategy; and it wasn’t long before his band of merry followers began mobbing. It was kinda funny, but also upsetting. It’s not civilised.
Another recent encounter, which just rolled off my back, but is worth mentioning, was a fella who didn’t like something I wrote and so took to the Notes section to name-call using pointing-finger emojis. Again: funny, pathetic, but effective at some level of triggering. I mean, the pointing finger and name calling is very schoolyard, but also very Soviet and common in societies undergoing social revolution. It’s a call to mob and virtually lynch an individual who’s not with the party. It’s also rage baiting. Back in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up, if a kid or adult behaved that way, he’d probably get punched in the face. Those who get off on taunting—trolls—revel in the oh-yeah?-wachu-gunna-do-about-it factor.
What I’m aiming at is that there’s something clearly toxic about social media. It starts online but then leaks out into the real world. It definitely rewires personal reactivity in the real social world. Often enough, folks acknowledge the polarisation of politics, the extreme positions that people take, and how outspoken they are. Not that long ago in the still (barely) civilised world, it was considered impolite to broach conversations about politics and religion. Now, folks launch nasty political statements into casual chatter regularly. If one spends too much time on social media, one develops an instinct to share indiscriminately and await likes and outrage in response. Of course, outrage is key. When you get outrage and defenders, you can go viral. That’s when you really get attention. You get to be the covid and shake things up! By pavlovian training, one is rewarded into becoming a rather unpleasant provocateur.
Most unsettling is watching folks older than me succumb to social programming, often enough simply through Google News, which gives one the social media experience vicariously. So without having to actually hunt down the outrage for oneself, Google supplies it for you by reporting what is essentially gossip of the sort our elders would have soured at a decade ago because they were raised to know better.
These observations lead me to Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)—the culmination and avatar of social media triggering and outrage culture. Essentially, we’re talking about an obsessive preoccupation. The main symptom is introducing Trump into all conversations, no matter how far afield. You could be talking about a recipe for raspberry crumble or telling someone about your trip to Nova Scotia. Somehow, the avatar of all things bad will slither onto your shoulder.
In a recent conversation with an old friend, I was surprised to hear him admit he was very much worked up about political issues. This was a newly developed aspect of his personality. These things had never concerned him much before. And he certainly had never broached political conversations because. . . he was raised to know better. He’d been emotionally rewired by Google News via doomscrolling habits over morning coffee and after dinner.
When pressed, those with TDS often admit they have a problem, but it’s one they’re all too happy to maintain. Regular readers will recall that neuroscientist, philosopher, pop-atheist Sam Harris admitted he agreed with most of Trump’s policies, but that it was right to subvert democracy to save the democracy from Trump. Harris didn’t admit he had a problem. Instead, he took a lot of time rationalising his irrational position, which though entertaining, was really an education in how a clever man can rationalise his addiction to outrage.
I want to say that this is a bizarre turn of affairs: a person knows they have an addiction, knows they suffer from an obsessive disorder, knows it’s unhealthy, but nevertheless seeks out triggering and outrage. But I’d be missing the bald fact that that’s exactly the definition of addiction. And as with all addictions, destructive behaviours leak out, damaging relationships with friends and family.
The first failed assassination attempt on Trump was revealing of how deep the psychological damage goes. It wasn’t just a few deranged loons who lost their moral compass on TikTok. It was ordinary folks of all ages who experienced a blood lust: they wanted to feel Trump veins in their teeth. The rhetoric was truly, astoundingly ugly. Otherwise normal people were raging that Trump hadn’t been murdered.
This is zombie apocalypse material. We’ve been tilting toward civil war now for quite some time, and the role of social media has everything to do with it. At what point do we, as communities, recognise that we’ve got a serious problem on our hands? that too many of us have become social media junkies? that a majority have become too-easily influenced by these addictive machines and their addictive platforms? and that it’s as destructive as any illegal substance?
Meanwhile, when I raise the issue of social media and smartphone addiction and how the devices and the apps are purposefully designed to be addictive, I generally get a tepid response. I’m told the real problem is kids using the devices. No doubt that’s a problem. But don’t ya think maybe driving nearly every adult half mad might be a problem too? Don’t you think we ought to have developed better etiquette surrounding these devices by now? Shouldn’t the development of addictive substances and devices be illegal?
It’s unnerving to me to see how little folks seem to care about this issue. Many Liberals will freak out at the notion of a safe injection site opening up nearby. But their smartphones and social media, which are tearing the social fabric apart right under their noses. . .? Meh. The analogy is a stretch. It’s really no biggie. To each their own. . . until triggered.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
It's disturbing to witness how the toxic discourse of social media has leaked into the real world, illustrating the ludicrous extremes that political discourse has taken. I think it was Hannah Arendt who said that a totalitarian society is one in which even the personal becomes political, when politics becomes ubiquitous and a source of psychological terror. That's where we're at, and with the Far Left controlling the culture and media and tech industries, there's a set of right opinions one is allowed to state publicly and everything else is forbidden. People with correct opinions these days feel entitled to spew their hate on others because their views are the official ones. I had a doctor's appointment last week and this doctor I'd never met before angrily told me out of the blue that she'd watched the Trump-Harris debate the night before and obviously Trump was lying about the Haitian refugees eating cats. He's a liar! And he staged his assassination attempts! But what does Trump propaganda have to do with my medical condition, I wondered? And why does this doctor feel perfectly comfortable sharing her far left, hateful, conspiratorial opinions with a patient who's a complete stranger? She certainly would have kept her mouth shut if she were Maga. I felt a little terrified. A brainwashed psychopath has my life and health in her hands. So what if I disagreed with her views about Trump? Would she give me a blood test and deliberately jab a nerve instead of a vein?
I think this is well-reasoned. Like many, I’ve lost friendships over TDS. Those few who do acknowledge it in progressive circles, however, seek to mitigate the problem by speaking of heated rhetoric on both sides, so it becomes essentially negated, since a malady uniformly at fault. Certainly, it’s a human propensity, and sin is indeed a universal deformation. Yet I don’t believe it is a condition that in this historical moment applies equally across the board.
One of the reasons politics has become increasingly divisive is that for a deracinated culture that in terms of ultimacy is essentially nihilistic, meaning is reduced to the pragmatic and utilitarian wed to ideological fantasy that is mask for naked will-to-power. Meaning becomes ostensibly determined by plebiscite or by the “science” of scientism, whose political motivations are hidden behind presumed objective neutrality.
For many in the late modern/post-modern ethos, politics is ersatz religion. What this boils down to is what Augusto del Noce diagnosed decades ago: at bottom, all differences are theological, even for secular atheists. The question then becomes, are we living lives of humility that are open to wonder and gift, and created depths yet to be discovered, or are we trapped in what Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles”?
The algorithms of Google are not innocent. They dictate prescribed orthodoxies of the unseen archons, those worldly powers blind to beauty and hostile to the God glimpsed by prophetic poets as the alarming holiness of love.