And I Thought Alcohol Addiction Was Dangerous

Audio version now available.

I turned off facebook notifications because every time I put my phone in my pocket, it would ding about ten seconds later. Without fail, the ding was a facebook notification. Like a dog who sticks his nose in your crotch when you stop petting him, facebook demands attention and isn’t interested in the other things you have going on. We all know that we see ads for things we converse about within our phone’s earshot. We know that the intricacy of the techno-web designed to paralyze us while their venom finds its way to our bloodstream is vast beyond our capacity for conceptualization. But this particular tactic is particularly despicable to me. It is evil incarnate. Are you engaging in direct, face-to-face human interaction? Fuck you! DING! Pet me with your eyeballs.

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I drank vodka and watched television news like it was my job in the days that followed September 11, 2001. Airplanes crashed into buildings. Nothing resembling that fresh horror had ever happened. Not in my lifetime. Not ever. America was angry, America was shocked, and America mourned the loss of our fellow citizens.

I was a sales manager for a steel company at the time. Nothing about my job was necessary on September 12th. Or the 13th or 14th. I don’t remember when I started paying attention to work again. That is not among the memories seared into my hippocampus. I remember that the tragedy gave me permission to drink vodka in the morning. I remember that while I sincerely and deeply wished the attack had not happened, I felt some sick relief from feeding my addiction with an incessant loyalty to the facts. No opinions were necessary. The counterattack was an undebatable inevitably, and I needed to drink to soothe while I did my patriotic duty of sitting on the couch in an intoxicated stupor.

I remember Peter Jennings. He was my guy. Old people talk about getting their news from Walter Cronkite–straight and without opinion or commentary. Jennings was a disciple of the long-standing tradition that conflating opinion with facts was the equivalent of buying underwear at a garage sale. He was stoic and professional, never breaking down no matter how chilling the corollary stories to planes crashing into buildings might be. I screamed and cried and drank more vodka. Jennings read the teleprompter like he had no soul. But he did have a soul. After decades of abstinence, he returned to smoking as a result of the 9/11 attacks, and died of lung cancer a few years later. I drank. He smoked.

We were both immersed in our addictions, but the truth held a solemnity that rose above.

Twenty-four Septembers later, Pew Research reported that the majority of American adults get “news” from social media, with young adults consuming “news” from TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and X. Social media is, by definition, about opinion. Your opinion and my opinion. Social media is as antithetical to Peter Jennings’ version of the news as Indiana University is to a tradition of championship football. Our mouths should hang as agape about the words news and social media appearing in the same sentence as they do when we consider that the Heisman Trophy currently resides in Bloomington.

I used to filter the factually anchored news through my addiction of choice. Now, that which masquerades as the news is the addiction itself. This is the equivalent of believing the whispers I heard from my vodka bottles.

I’ve been surprised, recently, to witness a number of examples of people not understanding how the social media algorithms work. We all know that the algorithms are to be decried in polite conversation around the water cooler or on the sidelines of our kids’ basketball games. “I don’t know why my Instagram feed is all mostly naked women. It must be the algorithm.” Don’t get me wrong–I am not, and don’t want to be, an expert on the formulaic mathematics. But I don’t have to know how to make a pipe bomb in order to fear the potential devastation.

Anything that is algorithmically manipulated means people get paid big bucks to find a way to keep you from putting it down. Leading psychology researchers and behavioral economists have identified “contempt” as one of the primary emotions that keeps humans scrolling. It is no longer enough to know the facts about the unfortunate circumstances that befall humans. The accurate truth doesn’t spring the trap that gets us out of our prefrontal cortex and into our amygdala.

In order for us to slide deeper into the spectrum of addiction, we have to know who to hate.

A hurricane is no longer news. The government official who made decisions in the face of impossible circumstances is the true villain. The motivation of the terrorist who killed Americans is unimportant. What we really need to get to the bottom of is the color on the election-night map of the state through which the terrorist traveled on the way to the killing field. The facts are boring. The conspiracy and the blame-game foment contempt. The algorithms are conspiracy and blame machines.

If you get your “news” from algorithmically manipulated technology, your opinion doesn’t matter. You have been compromised.

The real tragedy isn’t that we have a leader who suffers from an addiction to power. The real tragedy is that we’ve co-opted the system to make sure all of our leadership is extreme and motivated by self-interest. We let the people who make money based on hijacking our attention convince us that the actual corruption is in what they describe as the mainstream media. They’ve convinced the majority of Americans that: If you listen to the 2026 equivalent of Peter Jennings, you are an unpatriotic fool. Don’t listen to the people with fact checkers, a code of ethics, on-the-record sources, and editors whose job performance is judged by measurable accuracy. Listen to me. I’m your pal. I used to be one of them, but now I’m one of you. One of us. I’ll tell you things so far-fetched that if you don’t believe them, I’ll call you a naive nube who needs to open your eyes.

Donald Trump is just an addiction-addled pawn. What if the next one is intelligent and mentally stable? And if we keep getting our “news” from algorithmically manipulated sources, there will be a next one. Guaranteed.

If our source of information has the singular purpose of creating contempt, it is, by definition, molding us all into extremists. As a lifelong centrist–who believes we shouldn’t buy it if we can’t pay for it, but also that how people live their lives, assuming it doesn’t impact me or others, is no place for government intervention–not only do I no longer have a political party, I also have a diminishing group of people who pick up what I’m laying down. I am not hate-filled enough to make points worth consideration. In 2026, I am as relevant as Peter Jennings.

So who’s it going to be in 2028? AOC or Erika Kirk? Those will be our choices. Or maybe Michelle Obama is right, and Americans, no matter what we say in polite dinner conversation, are not ready to pull the lever for a woman. OK then. Will it be Nick Fuentes or Bernie? Trump isn’t killing democracy. Democracy is committing suicide-by-voter because we only pay attention to fascists and socialists. We don’t choose leaders because they are intelligent and understand compromise. You can’t catch a buzz from listening to reason. Moderates are fly-over country. We get riled up by our hand-held addiction machines, and vote for the extremist who is the nastiest to the person for whom the algorithm has filled us with venomous hate.

We have done this to ourselves because we don’t recognize algorithmically manipulated “news” to be an addiction. And if we do, we laugh it off like our addiction to caffeine or true-crime podcasts. We laugh. We get really mad. But we refuse to see the forest through the trees, and we are left with choices so radical that in the eras of either of the party’s icons, Reagan or FDR, the 2026 candidates would have been laughed into obscurity. Now we laugh because the idea of governing through compromise is so boring that we’d rather hate-scroll while imprinting a toilet-seat ring on the backs of our thighs. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but it was better when addiction looked like me sitting on my couch and drinking vodka.

At least vodka never made my pocket ding ten seconds after I emptied the bottle.

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