The image that really got me on social media this week was a faded photo of a man and woman, standing on what looks like the front steps of their home. It’s a candid shot—both are focusing their attention on an infant cradled in the mother’s arm. It is likely one of the first photos of a new family, and the caption broke my heart: “This photo was blown into our yard during the Eaton Canyon fire. Anyone from Pasadena/Altadena recognize these people?”
The picture is perfectly intact, not singed or torn, yet it seems to represent an entire universe of loss. Staring at the photo, a piece of family history scattered by the same winds that fuel the Los Angeles fires, you can just begin to see the contours of what is gone. The kind of grief that cannot be inventoried in an insurance claim.
And then you scroll. A satellite photo of a charred, leveled neighborhood is sandwiched next to some career news. On Instagram, I see a GoFundMe for a woman who is nine months pregnant and just lost her house; it’s followed immediately by someone else’s ebullient ski-vacation photos and a skin-care advertisement. I proceed through the “For You” feed on X and find Elon Musk replying to a video where Alex Jones claims the fires are part of a globalist plot to ruin the United States (“True,” he said), and blaming the fires on DEI initiatives; then a shitpost about Meta’s content-moderation changes (“On my way to comment ‘retard’ on every facebook post,” it reads, with 297,000 views). I scroll again: “Celebrities Reveal How They REALLY Feel About Kelly Clarkson,” another post teases. This is followed by a post about a new red-flag warning in L.A.: The fire is not relenting.
To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).
Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.”
For those on the ground, these networks mean something different. These people do not need to bear witness: They need specific information about their circumstances, and they need help. But the chaos of our social platforms and the splintered nature of a hollowed-out media industry extend the disorientation to them as well. “This time, I’m a civilian,” Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles–based journalist, wrote last week. “And this time, the user experience of getting information about a disaster unfolding around me was dogshit.” Anna Merlan, a reporter for Mother Jones, chronicled the experience of sifting through countless conspiracy theories and false-flag posts while watching the fires encroach on her home and packing her car to evacuate.
As I read these dispatches and watch helplessly from afar, the phrase time on site bangs around in my head. This is the metric that social-media companies optimize for, and it means what it sounds like: the amount of time that people spend on these apps. In recent years, there has been much handwringing over how much time users are spending on site; Tech-industry veterans such as Tristan Harris have made lucrative second careers warning of the addictive, exploitative nature of tech platforms and their algorithms. Harris’s crusade began in 2016, when he suggested a healthier metric of “time well spent,” which sought to reverse the “digital attention crisis.” This became its own kind of metric, adopted by Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 as Facebook’s north star for user satisfaction. Since then, the phrase has fallen out of favor. Harris rebranded his effort away from time well spent to a focus on “humane” technology.
But the worries persist. Parents obsess over the vague metric of “screen time,” while researchers write best-selling books and debate what, exactly, phones and social media are doing to kids and how to prove it. American politicians are so worried about time on site—especially when its by-product, metadata, is being collected by foreign governments—that the United States may very well ban TikTok, an app used by roughly one-third of the country’s adults. (In protest, many users have simply started spending time on another Chinese site, Xiaohongshu.) Many people suspect that time on site can’t be good for us, yet time on site also is how many of us learn about the world, form communities, and entertain ourselves. The experience of logging on and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never felt more dispiriting, commoditized, chaotic, and unhelpful than it does right now.
It is useful, then, to juxtapose this information ecosystem—one that’s largely governed by culture-warring tech executives and populated by attention seekers—with a true technological public good. Last week, I downloaded Watch Duty, a free app that provides evacuation notices, up-to-date fire maps, and information such as wind direction and air-quality alerts. The app, which was founded in 2021 after fires ravaged Sonoma County, California, has become a crucial piece of information infrastructure for L.A. residents and first responders. It is run by a nonprofit as a public service, with volunteer reporters and full-time staff who help vet information. Millions have downloaded the app just this month.
Watch Duty appears to be saving lives at a time when local-government services have been less than reliable, sending out incorrect evacuation notices to residents. It is a shining example of technology at its best and most useful, and so I was struck by something one of its co-founders, David Merritt, told to The Verge over the weekend: “We don’t want you to spend time in the app,” he said. “You get information and get out. We have the option of adding more photos, but we limit those to the ones that provide different views of a fire we have been tracking. We don’t want people doom scrolling.” This, he rightly argues, is “the antithesis of what a lot of tech does.”
The contrast between Watch Duty and broad swaths of the internet feels especially stark in the early days of 2025. The toxic incentives and environments of our other apps are as visible as ever, and the men behind these services—Musk and Zuckerberg especially—seem intent on making the experience of using them worse than ever. It’s all in service of engagement, of more time on site. Musk, who has transformed X into a superfund site of conspiracy theorizing, crypto ads, hateful posts, and low-rent memes, has been vehement that he wants his users to come to the platform and never leave. He has allegedly deprioritized hyperlinks that would take people away from the platform to other sites. (Musk did not deny that this is happening when confronted by Paul Graham, a Y Combinator co-founder.) He has his own name for the metric he wants X to optimize for: unregretted user seconds.
Zuckerberg recently announced his own version of the Muskian playbook, which seeks to turn his Meta platforms into a more lawless posting zone, including getting rid of fact-checkers and turning off its automated moderation systems on all content but “illegal and high-severity violations.” That system kept spam and disinformation content from flooding the platform. Make no mistake: This, too, is its own play for time on site. In an interview last month with the Financial Times, a Meta executive revealed that the company plans to experiment with introducing generative-AI-powered chatbots into its services, behaving like regular users. Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, says that this feature—which, I should add, nobody asked for—is a “priority” for the company over the next two years. This is supposed to align with another goal, which is to make its apps “more entertaining and engaging.”
This should feel more than disheartening for anyone who cares about or still believes in the promise of the internet and technology to broaden our worldview, increase resilience, and expose us to the version of humanity that is always worth helping and saving. Spending time on site has arguably never felt this bad; the forecast suggests that it will only get worse.
In recent days, I’ve been revisiting some of the work of the climate futurist Alex Steffen, who has a knack for putting language to our planetary crisis. The unprecedented disasters that appear now with more frequency are an example of discontinuity, where “past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future.” Steffen argues that we have no choice but to adapt to this reality and anticipate how we’ll survive it. He offers no panaceas or bromides. The climate crisis will come for each of us, but will affect us unevenly. We are not all in this together, he argues. But action is needed—specifically, proactive fixes that make our broken systems more effective and durable.
Clearly our information systems are in need of such work. They feel like they were built for a world we no longer inhabit. Most of them are run by billionaires who can afford to insulate themselves from reality, at least for now. I don’t see an end to the discontinuity or brokenness of our internet. But there are glimpses of resilience. Maybe platforms like Watch Duty offer a template. “I don’t want to sell this,” John Clarke Mills, the company’s CEO, told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. He went further: “No one should own this. The fact that I have to do this with my team is not OK. Part of this is out of spite. I’m angry that I’m here having to do this, and the government hasn’t spent the money to do this themselves.” Mills’s anger is righteous, but it could also be instructive. Instead of building things that make us feel powerless, Mills is building tools that give people information that can be turned into agency.
There’s no tidy conclusion to any of this. There is loss, fear, anger, but also hope. Days later, I went to check back on the post that contained that photo of the man and woman with a child. I’d hoped that the internet would work its magic to reunite the photo with those who’d lost it. Throughout the replies are people trying to signal-boost the post. In one reply, a local news producer asks for permission to do a story about the photograph. Another person thinks they have a lead on the family. So far, there’s no happy ending. But there is hope.
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