Weekend Gems 013
On air mattresses, timelines and the ability to know.
In the past two decades information systems and our relationship with them has radically changed, and with it, this weekend I argue, so has our ability to process the world. So brace yourselves, because this weekend I chose depression and now I am taking you down with me.
On October 9th, Mike Smalls Jr. decided to ride out the Hurricane Milton storm on an air mattress because Adin Ross, a twitch streamer, said he’d give anyone who did it $70,000. A total of 10,000 people watched the live stream, and then 60,000 more watched Mike move on to do a “hurricane in a tent challenge” in real time where he attempted to set up a tent in the middle of a 200km/h wind dystopia.
Smalls and Ross were not the only ones who participated in the narrative as if it was an entertaining event. In the aftermath of the storm, Twitter flooded with painfully obvious AI-generated videos and CGI images, mixed with real-life footage from past years and previous disasters, all claiming to be real footage of Florida. This kind of images received thousands of likes, millions of views, and hundreds of comments, with people casually engaging with the idea of the end of the world while commuting home from work on a Tuesday evening.
We live in the glorious year of 2024, which means that it’s been only 20 years since we walked out of the theaters having just watched The Day After Tomorrow, crashed by the existential dread of an imminent apocalypse as any sane person would be. Today, it’s hard to imagine anything climate-related having that big of an impact on our collective psyche anymore, despite the fact that we have a much better understanding of the phenomenon that what we did two decades ago. As Bruno Latour noted, “the threat created by the anthropic origins of the climate upheaval is probably the best documented and the most objectively developed piece of knowledge on which we can rely before moving into action”. Yet all of this information does not really seem to resonate, almost as if the act of getting informed itself has been distorted, keeping us further from actually processing the information we consume.
So why does this happen?
On Knowing
In 2002, during a press briefing about the Iraq War, the then US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld famously divided information into three categories: known knowns - the solid foundation of any decision-making process, the known unknowns - factors we know exist but we do not fully comprehend, and unknown unknowns - things that exist beyond any capability of prediction.
In the case of climate change, every known-known under the sun has been virtually documented as a Doomsday Clock and more than 10million results on google scholar suggest. Known-unknowns are also a key element of most climate strategic planning and foresight endeavors. For instance, consider the climate sensitivity number, a key measure that essentially drives predictions about how quickly our planet will warm as carbon dioxide levels rise. However, despite its importance, we are not entirely certain about the accuracy of this number, even though much of our climate planning is based on it.
Where things get nebulous, however, is in the third category: the unknown unknowns. These are the unpredictable, the forces beyond our comprehension or current foresight—the true shocks that could tip us into catastrophe. It’s the realm where imagination and abstraction tools attempt to fill the void. For example, movies like Don't Look Up join an arsenal of speculative portrayals of catastrophe, attempting to illustrate the absolutely preposterous and unthinkable. There are even websites offering interactive maps that show which cities will be erased from the map in the near future, complete with a slider that lets you adjust the scenario based on the penultimate unknown-unknown: “luck":
slide left for "moderately lucky," slide right for "completely fucked.”
From Chronological to Algorithmic
So we do know stuff, we can predict stuff and we are more or less able to imagine stuff. Cool. Now imagine: The year is any year before 2016. Our understanding of events is grounded in linear time, which creates a sense of causality. Everyone is more or less experiencing the same thing at the same time, or at least participating in the same narrative, while acknowledging the same sequence of events. The present, simply put, is common and shared.
However, within a few months in 2016, this fundamentally changed when some —if not all— of the main platforms we used to get our news from and share our lives in transitioned from chronological feeds to algorithmic timelines.
As a former Twitter employee wrote at the time:
"In a purely chronological feed, tweet quality is distributed *randomly,*" he wrote. "If you miss any tweets, *any at all,* there will be just as much good stuff in there as there is in what you actually see. Delivering some of that, by pushing down something else, is *guaranteed* to give you a better experience. Not by principle, just by math." The employee concluded: "Someday soon, the tweets you see will be a little more interesting, and the tweets you miss won't be as important. And guess what: You won't even notice. You won't! You think you will, but you won't."
This shift signaled the dawn of a new logic: the world now unfolds not based on shared experience but according to where you end up looking—and not necessarily by choice. The “better experience” that the employee mentioned is an increasingly private affair, pseudo-dictated by individual preference. As a result, the linear unfolding and processing of events begins to break. The logic that contextualizes the information we are getting, disengages from the way things unfold in the real world, while we are losing the ability to synchronize with each other. In other words, temporal distances much like the Arctic glaciers are slowly evaporating and with that, any hope of all of us ever being on the same page to build organized bottom-up discourse on non-fragmented events.
Mechanisms of Visibility
A chronological feed is like death: it’s the great equalizer—regardless of content, posts appear in the order they are created and there is no escape from that. But now, by ditching chronological sorting, the algorithm weighs importance based on factors other than the objective passage of time, primarily on engagement. And it’s no secret that outrage drives engagement - to enrage is to engage. Take for example the tsunami of misinformation that is now flooding the US, with the likes of Trump, Musk and Vance engaging in false-information fearmongering in platforms that prioritize content which, in turn, fires up people, because this type of content holds attention for longer. And this, finally, drives the bidding price for an ad about shoes to the sky.
When a pile of trash is on fire on the street, some will storm out with an extinguisher. Others will blame the first for being dogmatic and for “making a scene” out of it. There are plenty more, who will take turns jumping over it in search of catharsis. All of them, however, as a friend of mine suggested the other day, have the luxury to respond in any way, let alone notice, the fire.
What is this great force that makes a person grab an air mattress, an umbrella and some noodles, and casually head out in the middle of a landscape taken straight out of Zack Snyder’s wettest dreams?
The individual who willingly sensationalizes disasters is not a new phenomenon. Several outlets are currently referring to them as online grifters, assigning moral responsibility to people who act as willing participants in this alternate reality. Mike Smalls Jr., actions are absolutely subject to criticism, but, for a moment, let’s entertain the idea that greed and a desire for attention is not what drives them. Coming from a lower socio-economic background, Smalls might have seen no better opportunity than to monetize the chaos. In this context, creators are not merely seeking attention—they are navigating a collapsing system where economic survival is increasingly tied to engagement and visibility. Today tik tok personas earn monetary “gifts” from followers who are entertained or worried or both. The distance between pretending to be an NPC character for 8h straight, faking your girlfriend’s death, and what Smalls did is, well, small. The guy does not care about climate change, he may not even notice any connection between his actions and the context in which they exist forever in the digital - I do and you do now and we do so because we have the time for that and the luxury of learning about it. Also because I am clearly overthinking this.
In preparation for this week’s blog post, I revisited The Big Short—Adam McKay's other great film about the 2008 financial collapse. In the film, McKay does an amazing job at showing how the entire collapse wasn't necessarily caused by the people in Miami getting multiple morgages, but largely by a system that not only allowed but actively encouraged and fed off of this behavior, instigating and perpetuating it through absurd constructions with weird names like the Collateralized Debt Obligation investment product (CDOs). Likewise, today it's easy to point fingers at those who live-stream during disasters or create AI-generated misinformation in hopes of going viral. But by doing so, I’d like to argue, we severily underestimate the power of a system to direct behaviors at scale. The system itself—one that constantly rewards the absurd and the enraging—is the real problem. I would go as far as to argue that if the system didn't incentivize personal financial gain through misinformation and spectacle, many wouldn't feel the pressure to seek income by playing into the mechanics of online visibility.
The ones who remain, don’t.
It’s 9 PM, and you're about to watch another “Joker: Folie a Deux” trashing review on youtube when an ad suddenly interrupts with heart-wrenching images of destruction in Gaza. Through all of the shitstorm, you have somehow retained the ability to empathize, so you decide to ditch Joker and watch the latest news on the Lebanon bombing instead. Click on the video and now you have to skip another ad about the latest anti-aging serum made out of the tears of blind possums in Sulawesi. This disjointed flow of information has been proven to create a cognitive disconnect. It’s jarring and leaves us in a state of numbness, as the barrage of conflicting messages makes it harder to meaningfully process or respond to what we see. As Jaron Lanier has said in the past, “The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments“.
And while I couldn’t help but mention Lanier again, I’m holding on to dear life here to not mention Baudrillard and his work on “Simulacra and Simulation” so instead I will turn to Franco "Bifo" Berardi. For Bifo this phenomenon is part of what he calls semio-capitalism, where the exchange of signs, symbols, and information becomes central to economic activity. The algorithmic flood of content fragments our attention, overloading us with constant stimuli that lead to a form of affective exhaustion. As engagement becomes the currency, our emotional and mental capacity is drained, and we’re left alienated, anxious, and burnt out. The rapid circulation of symbols and signs strips away deeper meaning, making our interaction with the world superficial, devoid of reflection, and ultimately detached from real human experience—so much so that we are willing to accept obviously fake AI-images if they already fit our existing and comfortable world views.
On True Catastrophes
Through this long-winded post, which took way more time than expected to write, I am essentially trying to say this:
First, it starts with a reality of asynchronous perceptions where we cannot engage in timely discourse based on linear, real-world time. This change, then, prioritizes sensationalism over factual truths, which leads to distorted perceptions, anxieties and internal negations. Without the ability to collectively process the same information, and with the extra weight of affective exhaustion, we are prone to accept or, even worse, blindly participate in a system that not only fails to protect us from all of this mess but rewards our participation in it. And thus, we are all left lingering in a reality which increasingly fails to reward individuals through meaningful or productive means, and where consensus is basically just wishful thinking.
Two years after Rumsfeld’s address, a fourth category on knowledge was added by Slavoj Žižek who wrote in response: “What (Rumsfeld) forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns” the things we do not know that we know—which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which does not know itself”, as Lacan used to say”. These are the uncomfortable truths, disavowed beliefs, and unspoken practices that underpin public discourse and societal values.
So, it may not simply be a matter of what information is available, our access to it, or our ability to document reality. Instead, the issue might lie in how this particular system, regardless of any levels of factual certainty, distorts and twists perceptions and dynamics, pushing knowledge into a liminal space and ultimately, making meaningful action nearly impossible.
In other words, we are witnessing the formation of a new ideology rooted not on what we know or don’t know but on our inability to truly and collectively know—an ideology designed to never lead to collective action.
And this, right there, might be the true catastrophe.
