The anguish of infinite flow

The philosopher Martin Heidegger produced a very fruitful distinction between fear and anxiety that is still fully relevant. Fear always has a concrete object that threatens the realization of our projects (and here "projects" can simply mean staying alive); on the other hand, anxiety has no concrete object, because it is precisely the impossibility of becoming emotionally involved in any project, the unease that manifests when we realize there is no ultimate foundation behind anything and we are alone before the precipice of free choice. What is more characteristic of the internet: fear or anxiety?

From the outset, the internet as it is designed today, owned by private companies and driven by the logic of algorithms, seems like the perfect empire for fear. Since the best way to capture attention and, therefore, generate money, is to expose us to emotional impacts, and since algorithms are unbeatable at detecting what catches us and what doesn't, the internet unleashes an unbridled arms race. It is the exponential multiplication of a political problem we have been familiar with since the classics: the sublimity of images. The first to speak of the sublime was the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who used public executions as an example. The problem, Burke said, is that these types of stagings are so shocking that they generate "a mixture of fear and fascination" that goes beyond the empirical fact documented by the image. Thus, Burke explains how power uses sublime images to short-circuit our capacity for rational analysis of events and generate confusion and submission. From Burke to Susan Sontag's analysis of how the Gulf War was televised, we know we should be suspicious of the manipulative power of strong images.

However, the other characteristic of the current internet is its radical lack of context and credibility. What's typical of Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram is that a surprising video from Gaza appears alongside a photograph of a kitten, which is then followed by a community note warning you that an image you liked yesterday turns out to have been generated by artificial intelligence, all within a sea of accounts. Seen this way, the internet is much more like a Heideggerian hell of anxiety where nothing seems to have any ultimate foundation and we can only submit to a state of distrust and apathy. And this has also been a traditional criticism of media scholars, from radio to television: the difficulty of judging what matters and what doesn't when we are saturated with contextless impacts. Surrendering to the endless flow supplied by our phones is a fast track to an anxiety attack.

According to Heidegger, not everything about anxiety is negative. Precisely because the feeling comes upon us as a break from our daily involvement in things, the philosopher tells us that anxiety has the capacity to awaken us to our inescapable freedom and responsibility. And it seems to me that, in the world of screens, after a few years in which the bombardment of sublime images has kept us frightened and in shock, we are now entering an episode of anguish and disenchantment that is moving many people, especially the same young people who until now were totally trapped, toward conviction. The anguished internet is haunted by a latent and sad pain, but there is a critical lucidity that we didn't have in the romance phase, as if there were ever more involvement in our perception, as Antoni Muntadas would say.