Weekly Dose of Optimism #161

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 161st Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Packy here. This was a dark week in America.

On Monday and Tuesday, my whole twitter feed was filled with images and video of the murder of Iryna Zarutska. On Wednesday, I was offline for most of the day at Primary’s NYC Summit. When I opened up Twitter in the afternoon, the first tweet I saw was Mike Solana’s: “it can not be like this.” I scrolled for a few seconds before I realized what he was talking about; Charlie Kirk had been shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. He passed away soon after.

The ~36 hours between then and now have been weird, online. On the far left, some people are celebrating the murder, which left two young girls without a dad. On the far right, some people are calling for Civil War. These are the extremes, expressed by a loud minority, but they’ve been amplified to the point that it seems like “the left” is celebrating a murder and “the right” wants War.

Most people, however, don’t hold those extreme views. Most people are sad - about the specific incidents, and about the fact that we keep opening up our feeds to some new tragedy, to the point that it seems like the world is full of darkness and hatred.

Because we experience so much of this through the internet, things get distorted. People cheer, I think, because it feels like a video game. Not real life. But it’s not a video game. What happens online bubbles over into real life. People get radicalized, and they radicalize others, and they take peoples’ real lives.

All of this makes bad outcomes feel inevitable. They are not. As David Foster Wallace said about the internet’s influence nearly 30 years ago, “at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this.”

This is individual machinery. The vast, vast majority of us — those who think that killing innocent people is abhorrent and those who want no part of a Civil War, those who recognize the humanity in other people and who want to see each other be safe, healthy, and happy — need to resist the temptation to see the world the way a tiny handful of very loud voices (and bots)