Architectures of Urgency: Walls of Text and the Infinite Scroll
From a POSIWD lens — Purpose of Systems in What’s Done — viral doom essays are more than pieces of commentary. They are artifacts of the systems that produce and circulate them, shaped by the incentives of algorithmic platforms and the behaviors those platforms reward. These essays rarely do what they claim. They don’t just warn. They don’t just analyze. They don’t mobilize. What they reliably produce is something quieter but far more consequential: sustained engagement without collective momentum.
To see this clearly, we have to look at two reinforcing dynamics. One is built into the texts themselves — their fortress function. The other lives in the environment that amplifies them — the doomscroll medium that conditions how we encounter, share, and process political information.
The Fortress Function
Viral doom essays are designed, intentionally or not, as intellectual monoliths: long, dense, and seemingly comprehensive. They demand attention, but they resist real engagement. Their structure isolates readers, silences dialogue, and keeps ideas frozen in their original form.
The Isolation Mechanism
Offline, political ideas are forged in contact. In a union hall, a neighborhood meeting, or a church basement, ideas survive only if they can withstand questioning. They’re challenged, refined, discarded, or rebuilt through a slow process of communal testing. That friction is what turns talk into strategy.
Online, the wall-of-text format erases that feedback loop. It turns conversation into monologue — analysis meant to be read alone, processed alone, and shared alone. The result feels rigorous, even intimate, but it’s stripped of the collective interrogation that turns raw analysis into actionable knowledge.
The Authority Paradox
The fortress also produces an illusion of authority. These essays look serious: dense paragraphs, historical references, confident conclusions. That density simulates rigor while bypassing the structures — peer review, editorial scrutiny, collaborative discourse — that keep serious analysis accountable.
The effort of reading compounds the effect. When you’ve invested twenty minutes working through an essay, you’re more likely to defer to its conclusions. The labor of consumption becomes its own proof of value, creating what amounts to intellectual arbitrage: the markers of depth without the discipline of depth.
Fragmented Resistance
This design also discourages critique. Short, targeted rebuttals can be waved away as superficial; longer responses rarely gain traction because they demand the same cognitive effort as the original, guaranteeing a tiny audience. The fortress remains standing, not because it can’t be challenged, but because meaningful engagement is too costly for most people to attempt.
The Scroll as Political Form
Marshall McLuhan’s insight — that the medium is the message — lands sharply in the age of infinite scroll. Platforms don’t just deliver information. They shape the very conditions under which thought and engagement happen.
The scroll rewards speed, novelty, and emotional charge. Urgent problems are compressed into bite-sized narratives optimized for rapid reaction. Deliberation collapses. The medium trains us for immediacy and performance, not for patience or collective reasoning.
This is how spectator training works. We don’t just consume politics; we learn to experience it as something happening elsewhere, to other people, in real time. We comment, we share, we scroll. Action — the slow, structured kind that builds power — becomes harder to imagine, let alone initiate.
Partisan Trenches and Performative Academia
The result is a fragmented landscape. On one side are the partisan trenches: sharp, tribal posts designed for instant affirmation and predictable outrage. On the other are the performative fortresses: those dense intellectual monologues that mimic deep engagement while insulating themselves from real dialogue.
Both thrive because they are algorithmically legible. They generate clicks, shares, and comments. Neither creates the slow, dialogic space where democratic problem-solving actually happens. Offline, strategy is messy, iterative, and collaborative. Online, platforms reward unilateral broadcasts and rapid cycles of agreement or derision, reducing politics to performance.
The Medium’s Training Effect
This is the deeper, subtler lesson: the medium disciplines us more effectively than any single message. It teaches us to equate sharing with action. It rewards outrage over curiosity, performance over collaboration. It keeps us anxious and hyper-informed, but alone — each user trapped in their own curated feed, engaged but disconnected from the infrastructure of real mobilization.
This is how urgency becomes self-contained. The more we consume, the more informed we feel, and the less capacity we have for the slow, often invisible work of collective resistance. Anxiety becomes a closed circuit.
Caveats and Openings
This isn’t to say the dynamic is absolute. Platforms shape behavior, but they don’t erase agency. Movements like Black Lives Matter in 2020 or the organizing that followed Dobbs in 2022 show what happens when online amplification intersects with existing offline networks. When there’s scaffolding — unions, neighborhood groups, local campaigns — digital urgency can accelerate collective action rather than dissipate it.
The challenge, then, is not to wish platforms away but to rebuild the connective tissue that turns urgency into power. Without that, we remain caught in loops of engagement that never quite break into action.
Urgency Without Exit
Viral doom essays don’t just describe our political moment; they are products of the platform environments that shape it. Built for circulation rather than dialogue, they reward attention while discouraging engagement, creating the sensation of political fluency without the conditions for collective reasoning or action.
The doomscroll amplifies this dynamic. The infinite feed doesn’t merely deliver content — it trains users to conflate sharing with participation, and urgency with agency. What emerges is a loop of anxiety and performance, optimized for platforms but corrosive to the slower, reciprocal processes where ideas are tested, refined, and made actionable.
The task, then, isn’t to “fix” these essays or imagine they will evolve into blueprints for resistance. It is to understand how they operate within these engineered attention systems — and to start creating spaces, online and off, where slower dialogue, mutual critique, and collaborative thinking can actually take root.