Reading Charlie Warzel's piece at The Atlantic about "monitoring the situation" - and specifically about a website that turns your screen into a situation room, with multiple ever-changing data feeds on the war and its economic repercussions - I thought of two prophetic bits of writing:
Baudrillard, in "The Ecstasy of Communication", 1982, on how the modern domestic space is effectively a kind of orbital satellite plugged into telematic streams of data:
Bravo, and Jean B probably could have - should have? - retired after writing this essay, everything that later came is just embellishment.
But even more amazingly prophetic is this short story by Borges from 1949, "The Aleph"
"I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins… This twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muhammad and the mountain--mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad"
"The Aleph" culminates in the character's access to an experience of absolute data-saturation and overwhelming omniscience, what another initiate describes as "the only place on earth where all places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending."
Today's plugged-in consciousness seems to be trending towards a paradoxical state that fuses total anxiety and total boredom - instability and inertia..
You might wonder, as Warzel does in his own very-well-worth reading piece, if it is deliberately designed to paralyse - the besieged attention just gives up... the phrase he uses is "attentional death".
Indeed it's a kind of saturation bombing in itself.
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The Warzel piece is titled: One Situation After Another
The dek goes as follows: Doomscrolling is over. Now, everyone is “monitoring the situation.”
The piece starts:
"From the comfort of my desk, I can see it all. A series of webcam feeds show me the sun setting over Tel Aviv and southern Lebanon. A map of the world, flecked with red dots, indicates that most of Europe and the Middle East are on “high alert.” I toggle a button on the map’s control panel, and the globe is instantly latticed with the locations of undersea fiber-optic cables. Below the map, a live feed of Bloomberg TV is running with the chyron Oil Extends Rout on Stockpile Talks. I scroll down and am greeted by walls of headlines, grouped into categories such as “World News” and “Intel Feed.” A “country instability” meter clocks Iran at 100 percent, while a different widget informs me that the world’s “strategic risk overview” remains “stable” at 50, whatever that means.
"I am looking at World Monitor, a website that turns any browser into a makeshift situation room, and I love it. Built to look like a cross between a Bloomberg terminal and a big screen at U.S. Strategic Command, the site aims to display as much information about world events as possible in an assortment of real-time feeds. This is information overload presented as intelligence.
"World Monitor was built over a single weekend in January by Elie Habib, an engineer based in the United Arab Emirates whose day job is as CEO of Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music-streaming services. “I wanted to extract the signal from the noise,” he told me recently. But what he really built, by his own admission, is a noise machine. Right now, the site pulls in more than 100 different streams of data, including stock prices, prediction markets, satellite movements, weather alerts, major-airport flight data, fire outbreaks, and the operational status of cloud services such as Cloudflare and AWS. The information is all real, but what exactly a person ought to do with it is unclear."
Warzel writes about the swarm of memes about World Monitor and the phrase "monitoring the situation":
"Ours is a culture that has developed an insatiable need for instant information on all things at all times. Of course, we all live in saturated information environments, powered by constant connectivity and on-demand-answer services—Google, Wikipedia, chatbots. But I’ve also come to see all of this as a defense mechanism in an era of real chaos, when overlapping crises and technologies make the world feel unknowable and hyperreal.
"The abiding feeling of 2026 is that too many consequential things are happening too fast for most people to follow, let alone understand.... Monitoring is a reasonable response to all of this: It seems to offer a sense of agency....
Paradoxically, though -
"The effect is not necessarily that you feel more informed; if you’re anything like me, you probably feel alienated, if not worse. Those who have chosen to try to keep up with the news cycle in 2026 are awareing themselves to death, as the writer Geoff George put it.
"The situation brings to mind yet another grotesque online phenomenon: “gooning.” For the blessedly unaware, gooning is when maladjusted young men consume immense, overstimulating amounts of pornography and masturbate for hours on end to reach some kind of transcendent release....
The pay-off
"Total bombardment is partly a surrender to the internet and its logic and algorithms—a kind of attentional death in which a person is no longer overwhelmed because they have given up. You could also see it as an attempt to hold their footing as the zone floods with shit. Because everything is happening too much, too fast. More.
There is a cost to all of this—a flattening of every event, feeling, and piece of art, commerce, joy, and suffering into the same atomic unit of attention, all of them easily replaced by what comes next. The worst, most shameless people in the world already understand this and use that cold logic to their advantage. You do not need to justify a war if you believe that, ultimately, people will lose interest in it and move on to the next outrage.
I have suggested in the past that our information ecosystem is broken. But I now suspect that’s wrong: This is how it is meant to work. These online products sustain themselves by making us dependent on the content that makes us feel powerless and miserable. Where does this all lead? To further exploitation? To some kind of informational oblivion? Or will there be a breaking point, a moment when the addled masses reject the logic and speed of our information environment? I can’t say—but I’m monitoring the situation."
Or as Baudrillard himself climaxes:
In Baudrillard's schema, the stage (scene of drama, passion, selfhood) is opposed to the screen (which is ob-scene, a cold space of infinite loss, infinite contamination)
Perhaps then the metaphors that I track at the other place, obsessively, to do with political theater.... our punditocracy's endless tropes of anti-theatricality (showbiz, spectacle, TV reruns, etc)... these are in fact out of date... they don't really have a purchase on reality, which is now reels-ality (if you'll forgive me).
Reality - politics, war, deportation enforcement, etc - is just feed for the reels, the demonic engine of attention-enthrallment and remorseless erosion of the capacity for linear-thinking
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Borges on his protagonist's encounter with the Aleph itself:
How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency...
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon - the unimaginable universe.
I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.
