From 8 Years Ago:

∞ There’s a disease that remains common amongst certain branches of intellectuals and artists. (Note: it has now spread to the entire population … as I suspected it would in the future ). I used to call it ‘spread the damage’. or ‘doom contagion’. My friends didn’t understand why I was concerned or accused me of wanting to remain ignorant about atrocity. That wasn’t the problem, however.

And Facebook is -made of this disease-.

Here is how it works. You learn something terrifying. Something that people somewhere are doing, and, probably, they are unopposed. So, for example, you wander into a conversation and announce “Hey, did you know that 6 million people have disappeared in Indonesia since the US started (etc)?”

Sharing the damage… ‘doom contagion’ actually has the opposite result of what it pretends. It adds to the damage caused by the event(s) thus reported. It doesn’t ‘wake people up’. It puts them into a coma. And this effectively just causes more disease.

You becoming a news source isn’t activism, it’s misguided. Intelligence knows how to use and deploy information in ways that deeply and even covertly affect the problems it has identified as goals for growth. Sharing devastating news is the opposite of effective action.

When we share toxic news, much of which is propaganda ( all sides lie in text, boldy, aggressively, and self-aggrandizingly ), we are choosing to become more helpless, more stupid, and more prone to repeat these behaviors. This doesn’t address the problems we are advertising. In fact, it can exacerbate them catastrophically.

See, it replaces action and thought. That’s the deadly problem. We get copies of news items instead of action or change. Our momentum of transformation becomes fashion, and our hopes of evolving disappear.

If you can’t think of something more creative and pro-active to do, you can start with a simple refusal: don’t be a doom vector. If we need news, we know where to find it, and when it is found in these forms in our friends and comm streams this is a sign they have probably been contaminated.

Don’t be a vector for communications poison.