On not being able to read: doomscrolling and anxiety in pandemic times

Abstract

This article analyses ‘doomscrolling’, or the compulsive reading of anxiety-inducing online content during the COVID-19 pandemic, against the common idea that it is simply an addictive social practice that impedes mental flourishing. Instead, in order to open up its inclination towards care, I read doomscrolling through the anachronistic neologism that has come to define this specifically textual practice. Tracing the operations that doomscrolling and anxiety perform on lived time, the article uses the work of Eugène Minkowski, Sigmund Freud, Lauren Berlant, Walter Benjamin, and Lisa Baraitser to examine how these practices hope to take care of time when narratives of progressive history have worn thin. I include analyses of the anxious textuality of Don DeLillo’s The Silence and Saidiya Hartman’s reworking of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Comet’ to demonstrate how doomscrolling emerges from a moment when trust is anxiously fractured, but how it works, nevertheless, to witness what gets to count when time is felt to be coming to an end.