Obedient attention: Doomscrolling and the production of authoritarian subjectivity

Contemporary authoritarianism has unfolded alongside multiple crises that, mediated through social media feeds, appear as a continuous stream of decontextualised violence rendered alongside mundane updates. The impulse to scroll through this content for hours, known as doomscrolling, is a compulsion to bear witness in real time; a mode of witnessing without registering. As a pervasive habit, doomscrolling produces a subjectivity that is information-saturated, hyper-engaged, paranoid, inert, and ripe for authoritarian capture. Contextualising it within historical concerns about 24-four-hour news consumption and drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, I argue that doomscrolling constitutes a form of passive complicity. This complicity is rooted not in malice but in routinised disengagement, repetitive consumption, and overexposure that ultimately forecloses the capacity for thought, producing a subjecthood habituated to thoughtlessness. As capitalist technologies, social media platforms accelerate this, not necessarily by promoting authoritarian ideologies, but by structuring attention, flattening temporality, and incentivising endless reaction over reflection. By situating doomscrolling as both a symptom and mechanism of authoritarianism, this article contributes to understandings of the relationship between the techno-cultural infrastructure of digital information and democratic collapse.