The Flattening

How We Learned to Scroll Past Atrocity

I used to think there would be more wreckage. That when the world began to fall apart, we would hear it.

I imagined a cracking sound, the groan of steel under pressure, the unmistakable punctuation of things breaking: glass, trust, the sound a mother makes when she can't find her child. But the breaking didn't sound like that at all. It sounded like nothing. It sounded like a vibration in your pocket.

The first time I heard about children in cages, I was in line at Walgreens. I had a headache, the kind that arrives behind the eyes and builds slowly, like a migraine that forgets to announce itself. I saw the headline in the checkout line, just below an ad for probiotic gummy bears. I remember the font more than the faces. I remember scrolling past a photograph of aluminum blankets. A tweet that said "unspeakable" with a broken heart emoji. A comment thread arguing whether it had started under Bush or Obama. I remember the woman in front of me asking the cashier if the melatonin was buy-one-get-one.

I remember everything and nothing. That is what it feels like now to live through atrocity in real time. You remember what you were doing. You do not remember what you felt.

There is a numbness to modern life that is not the absence of feeling but the product of too much of it, misdelivered. We are overexposed and under processed. The images arrive without context, the pain without pause. There is no room left for comprehension. Only recognition. A nod. A scroll. A glance sideways at the microwave clock. And then you move on.

You are not indifferent. You are adapting. You are surviving the onslaught.

They do not build statues for people who stay soft in a hardening world. They build platforms. Apps. Engagement metrics.

The Architecture of Forgetting

There was a time when forgetting required effort. You had to work to lose track of things. You had to move, change your phone number, throw away the photographs. Now forgetting is automatic. The algorithm does it for you. Yesterday's crisis slides beneath today's scandal, which will be buried by tomorrow's emergency. The timeline is a conveyor belt, and we are all assembly line workers, sorting through trauma at industrial speed.

I think a lot about what it means to be a person who can still be shocked. I wonder if it is a failure. If it means I haven't kept up. That I have not properly adjusted to the climate.

My friend Neal calls it "outrage fatigue," but that isn't quite right. Fatigue suggests you've been working. This is more like atrophy. Like a muscle that has forgotten how to contract. We have been so busy reacting that we have forgotten how to respond.

I think about people who cried when they saw the photo of the father and daughter facedown in the Rio Grande. I did not cry. I saved the photo. I put it in a folder labeled "Not for Posting." It sits alongside screenshots of headlines that didn't go viral. A spreadsheet of names I do not want to forget. I do not look at the folder often, but I also cannot delete it. That is a kind of mourning, too. A refusal. A quiet anchor.

The folder has 247 items now. I counted them last Tuesday while waiting for my coffee to brew. There are images I have never shown another person. Videos I watched only once but cannot forget. Articles that made me feel like I was drowning in my own kitchen. Each file is a small act of rebellion against the forgetting machine.

Sometimes I wonder what archaeologists will make of our digital detritus. These folders full of unshareable grief. These screenshots of things we could not bear to lose but could not bear to keep visible. Will they understand that we were trying to remember? Or will they think we were simply hoarding horror?

The Geography of Attention

We talk now about "content." We do not talk about information. We do not talk about memory. We talk about the feed, the algorithm, the loop. This is not metaphor. This is geography. This is where we live now.

And it is flat here. Horizontally infinite and spiritually depthless. A plane without bottom or edge, just the constant shuffle of digital paper. You can live a whole life here and never touch the floor.

The topology of the internet was supposed to democratize information. Instead, it has democratized distraction. Every piece of news carries the same visual weight as every piece of entertainment. A school shooting and a celebrity divorce occupy identical real estate in your field of vision. The medium is indeed the message, and the message is: nothing is more important than anything else.

I remember when breaking news felt different. When the regular programming stopped. When anchors looked directly into the camera and said, "We interrupt this broadcast." There was ceremony to catastrophe. Gravity to grief. Now breaking news is just another notification competing with your Venmo requests and your mother's forwarded memes.

It is possible to be surrounded by horror and feel only a minor friction in your throat. It is possible to see suffering and think first of your reaction to it. The like, the share, the take. We speak of justice in captions now. We tell each other what to feel in Canva fonts and brand palettes. Our rage has become aesthetic.

The worst part is that it works.

The Mechanics of Moral Performance

Last month, I watched a woman at Starbucks craft an Instagram story about homelessness while stepping over a man sleeping in the doorway. She used the boomerang feature to make her coffee cup dance while she typed about "raising awareness." She tagged three nonprofit organizations she had never donated to. The man in the doorway did not appear in any of her frames.

This is how empathy dies in public. Not with malice, but with curation.

The machine was not designed to provoke action. It was designed to prolong attention. It has done its job well. We stay. We consume. We express. But we do not intervene.

We have confused documentation with action, expression with engagement, sharing with caring. The platform has trained us to believe that bearing witness means broadcasting, that solidarity means going viral, that justice means getting likes.

But what if bearing witness meant something different? What if it meant sitting with discomfort instead of sharing it? What if it meant changing your life instead of your bio?

We are what happens when the spectacle becomes the structure. We are what happens when grief becomes a loop instead of a ladder.

And still, we pretend to be surprised.

Still, we say "unthinkable." Still, we say "how could this happen." As if the architecture wasn't laid bare long ago. As if we were not warned. As if we were not complicit.

The Business of Forgetting

There is an ugliness to naming these things. To speaking plainly about the mechanisms of forgetting. But language matters. Silence, too, has a politics. I used to think the goal was to be kind. Now I think the goal is to be accurate.

We are not overwhelmed by tragedy. We are desensitized by design.

The platforms know exactly what they are doing. The engineers who built the infinite scroll studied addiction patterns in casinos. The executives who greenlit autoplay learned from the tobacco industry. The algorithms that surface content are optimized for engagement, not enlightenment. They have gamified empathy and monetized outrage.

A system that digests atrocity must first make it edible. It must soften it. Filter it. Crop it. Wrap it in commentary, surround it with links. It must give you context, and then take the context away. It must make the wound consumable. And it does.

You can scroll past the footage of a boy screaming for his mother and see an ad for weighted blankets before you blink.

This is not a glitch. This is the design.

The advertising model requires your continuous partial attention. It cannot afford for you to stop and think deeply about any one thing. Deep thinking is the enemy of impulse purchasing. Sustained focus is the enemy of sustained scrolling. The platform needs you agitated but not activated, concerned but not committed, aware but not awake.

The Rhythm of Amnesia

I am haunted by how ordinary it all feels. The juxtaposition of brutality and banality is no longer jarring. It is structural. Built into the timeline like scaffolding. An update about a man killed in a traffic stop. A tutorial on "glowy skin." A tweet thread on fascism. A dog video. A GoFundMe for someone's funeral expenses.

We learn not to resist the rhythm. We learn to blend grief with contentment, horror with consumption. We learn that the system will not allow us to feel one thing at a time.

This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of the flattening. It is not that we have stopped caring. It is that we have been trained to care about everything equally, which is to say, not at all. The human heart was not designed to hold the weight of the world's suffering. But it was also not designed to treat that suffering as interchangeable with a recipe for banana bread.

The morning after George Floyd died, I made coffee and cried in my car. The morning after Breonna Taylor died, I filed paperwork. I know people who went to vigils, and I know people who ordered takeout and posted on Instagram.Everyone did something. Everyone did something that looked like something. And most of it faded within the week.

I remember the black squares. Millions of them, flooding Instagram like a digital memorial. For one day, the feeds went dark. It felt significant. It felt like silence, like solidarity, like a shared acknowledgment of horror. By the next day, it felt like performance. By the end of the week, it felt like penance. Something we had done to ourselves, not for anyone else.

The square was perfect for the platform. It required no effort, no research, no sustained commitment. It was activism that photographed well and disappeared quickly. It was empathy as content, resistance as aesthetic choice.

I keep waiting for the after. For the denouement. But it never comes. There is no third act. There is only refresh. Repost. Repeat.

The Sacred and the Streamed

We used to think of memory as sacred. Now we think of it as a burden. Something to be optimized. Streamlined. Monetized. We are encouraged to forget. It is marketed as mindfulness.

"Be present," the wellness influencers say, as if presence were possible in a world designed to scatter your attention across a thousand simultaneous crises. "Let go," they say, as if letting go of yesterday's atrocity makes room for today's wisdom instead of today's willful blindness.

The mindfulness industrial complex has weaponized Buddhist philosophy in service of capitalist amnesia. The same system that creates the overwhelm sells you the cure for it. Meditation apps sponsored by the platforms that stole your focus. Breathing exercises bookended by the notifications that stole your breath.

And yet, the body keeps score. It always has.

The sleeplessness, the tightness in the jaw, the inability to sit through a full movie without checking the news. The fog. The fury. The fatigue you cannot name. These are not glitches. They are symptoms.

My doctor calls it anxiety. My therapist calls it depression. The internet calls it "languishing." But I think it has a simpler name: grief. Grief for the world we thought we were living in. Grief for the future we thought we were building. Grief for the version of ourselves who could still be surprised by cruelty.

I know someone who started keeping a grief log. Not for personal loss,no, those she could still feel clearly. It was for the other kind. The ambient kind. The communal ache that no longer registers as pain because it is always present. Like living with a low-grade fever. Like never fully waking up.

She writes down the date, the headline, the place she was when she heard the news. She does not editorialize. She does not analyze. She simply records: "Tuesday. School shooting. Making dinner." "Thursday. Deportation raid. Walking the dog." "Saturday. Hurricane footage. Grocery store."

It is not a pretty document. It is not shareable. It is not optimized for engagement. It is just a woman trying to mark the moments when the world broke a little more, trying to hold onto the feeling of breaking before it becomes background noise.

The Politics of Presence

We live in a culture that mistakes performance for presence. That rewards the display of feeling over the depth of it. That praises the people who "speak out" but not the ones who remember. Not the ones who say no. Not the ones who refuse to move on.

There is something subversive about remembering what you were told to forget. It is not romantic. It is not nostalgic. It is a kind of revolt.

When you remember the mother detained outside her daughter's school, the applause from the officers, the silence from the neighbors,you are not indulging the past. You are indicting the present.

When you remember that "kids in cages" became a catchphrase, a hashtag, a punchline,you are not stuck. You are resisting.

The system needs your forgetting to function. It needs your amnesia to maintain the illusion that each new crisis is unprecedented, each new cruelty is shocking, each new revelation is the first of its kind. If you remembered the patterns, you might start connecting the dots. If you connected the dots, you might start demanding different solutions. If you demanded different solutions, the machine would have to change.

I think often of a line I wrote once in a notebook I no longer own: "We do not grieve in public anymore. We stage grief in private and call it activism."

That sounds cruel now. Or maybe it sounds true. I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.

The Economics of Empathy

We know that the platform profits from pain. We know that virality is not virtue. But still, we treat attention like oxygen. Still, we believe that saying something,anything is better than saying nothing.

Even when the something is hollow.

Even when the nothing is holy.

There is a reason the most devastating posts get the most engagement. Trauma travels faster than truth. Outrage spreads quicker than understanding. The algorithm has learned to feed us a steady diet of crisis because crisis keeps us scrolling.

We have become consumers of our own collective pain. We harvest suffering for content. We mine tragedy for engagement. We turn every breaking heart into breaking news.

The child who died at the border becomes a way to signal your values. The woman who was assaulted becomes a way to demonstrate your awareness. The man who was murdered becomes a way to prove your allyship. We have made commodities of corpses and called it consciousness raising.

This is not about individual moral failure. This is about systematic moral corrosion. We are all trapped in a machine that rewards our worst impulses and punishes our best instincts. A machine that makes us complicit in our own dehumanization.

The Practice of Refusal

Stillness is not apathy. Slowness is not silence. Sometimes the most radical act is to sit with it. To refuse to scroll. To let the feeling come, not curated, not captioned, but raw. To see the wound and not immediately reach for the filter.

To remember that there is no algorithm for mourning. That some things cannot be summarized in a slide deck. That some stories should not be optimized.

Last week, I turned off my phone for six hours. Not because I was unplugging for wellness, but because I wanted to feel something fully. I wanted to sit with the weight of a story I had read about children being separated from their parents. I wanted to let the horror of it settle in my body without immediately jumping to my response to it.

It was uncomfortable in ways I had forgotten discomfort could be. The urge to check, to scroll, to find something else to think about, was almost physical. Like an itch I couldn't scratch. Like hunger I couldn't satisfy.

But after the discomfort came something else. Clarity. The story stayed with me instead of sliding past me. I could feel my actual feelings about it instead of my performed feelings about it. I could think my own thoughts instead of optimizing them for an imaginary audience.

We were not meant to metabolize this much tragedy.

We were not meant to forget this easily.

There is a reason they want you moving. There is a reason they want your grief legible, palatable, profitable. It keeps you from noticing the design.

And so, if there is a way through this, I believe it begins with refusal.

Refuse the pace. Refuse the spectacle. Refuse the curated carousel of concern. Refuse the urge to be first with your reaction. Refuse to be content. Refuse to forget.

Choose memory like a blade. Like ballast. Like a stone in your pocket that says "I was there. I saw this. I did not look away."

The Dangerous Act of Being Human

You are not broken for feeling too much. You are not weak for needing rest. You are not irrelevant for choosing to remember what no longer trends.

You are human.

And that is dangerous.

Because systems do not fear your outrage. They are built to withstand it. What they fear is your clarity. Your continuity. Your recordkeeping.

They fear your grief when it's not for sale.

The machine is designed to make you feel powerless, but your power was never in your platform. It was never in your reach or your influence or your ability to go viral. Your power is in your ability to remain human in an inhuman system. Your power is in your refusal to be flattened.

Every time you choose to feel deeply instead of posting quickly, you are committing an act of resistance. Every time you sit with difficulty instead of sharing it, you are preserving something sacred. Every time you remember what you were supposed to forget, you are bearing witness in the truest sense.

This is not about abandoning the tools entirely. The platforms can be instruments of justice when used with intention. But intention requires interruption. It requires stopping the scroll long enough to ask: What am I consuming? What am I producing? What am I remembering? What am I forgetting?

So write it down. Say it aloud. Pass it on.

Not because it will change the world overnight. But because it just might slow the erasure. Just might keep the names intact a little longer. Just might remind someone that they are not alone in the remembering.

Because that's what this is. All of it.

A fight to hold on.

To memory.

To meaning.

To each other.

Even now.

Especially now.

The center did not collapse because there was no center to begin with. There was only the endless plane, the infinite scroll, the flattening of everything into nothing. But we can still choose depth over surface, stillness over speed, remembering over forgetting.

We can still choose to be human in a world that profits from our forgetting how.

If this resonated with you, consider becoming a subscriber. If you’re able, a paid subscription helps sustain this kind of writing,quiet, reflective, not optimized for clicks. It’s not for everyone, but maybe it’s for you.