Doomscrolling Turns Endless Information Into a Sirens’ Trap
Chris Williamson reads Homer’s Sirens as a warning about the pursuit of information that feels too valuable to ignore: the promise of one more insight can become an endless intake that prevents people from returning to what they need to do. He argues that doomscrolling works similarly, overwhelming users with purportedly urgent material until they lose the time and capacity to reflect or reach settled judgments. Against that saturation, Williamson presents long narrative as a durable form for holding complexity and revisiting it when judgment is required.
The Sirens promise the knowledge that keeps you from getting home
The Sirens are dangerous not because they offer empty distraction, but because they offer the kind of knowledge Odysseus most wants. The speaker reads them as an allegory for the temptation of exhaustive, privileged insight.
Their offer is tailored to Odysseus: the hidden story of Troy—the motives, contexts, and perspectives he could not have known while living through the war—and, more broadly, knowledge of everything that happens on earth. For a curious man who already understands the value of special knowledge, that is a powerful proposition.
The temptation is not merely trivia. It is the thought that the next thing learned may be useful: another book, the conclusion to an unfinished story, a detail that might improve a morning routine. The speaker recognizes the impulse from academia, which he says both attracted him and helped push him away: the compulsion to hear more, read more, and resolve every open question.
The Sirens’ victims do not leave because their pursuit has no stopping point. The bones on their shore belong to people who listened until they starved. Taken allegorically, a person can pursue insight until they are “never getting home and never doing what you need to do.”
Doomscrolling is the contemporary version of the trap because it commonly presents itself as useful research: an anonymous prediction about Bitcoin, a claim that seems too important to ignore, a thread elevated by an algorithm. The feed is constructed to command attention. Its effect, the speaker argues, can be not only inaction but unreflection.
An endless feed can exhaust the capacity to judge
Chris Williamson describes the problem as being “permanently on absorb.” Constant intake leaves little room to consider what has already been taken in.
Well certainly if you're permanently on absorb, you have very little time to do reflect.
Williamson says his working theory is not that most propaganda—or even most online information—is trying to persuade people of one particular narrative. Its more common effect, he suspects, may be to drown people in so much material that they become apathetic and give up trying to sort it out. He allows that such apathy could later be organized and directed somewhere; his immediate point is that saturation can leave people unable to form a settled view.
He connects the formulation to Bill Thompson, whom he describes as an information expert with experience around US government and Army contexts. Conspiracy research supplies Williamson’s model: each apparent explanation yields another, deeper and opposing explanation. Research becomes less a route to resolution than a mechanism for generating further uncertainty.
For every conspiracy there is an equal and opposite conspiracy, which is even deeper... the iceberg never stops.
The result is, in Williamson’s words, an ouroboros of uncertainty and further research. He offers no finished remedy, but contrasts that condition with the relief of returning to something with “a bit more firm foundation.” After spending time with Homer, he says, he feels detoxed and somewhat salved.
Long narrative gives reflection and memory a durable form
Long narrative is offered here as a cognitive form for reflection and memory. Rather than presenting information as isolated inputs demanding an immediate response, a story slows the mind and creates a framework that can be retained, revisited, and used later.
For figures such as Alcinous, Odysseus, or Julius Caesar—people imagined as surrounded by decisions and incoming information—a great story supplies more than entertainment. A listener can remember the shape of Odysseus’ journey and draw lessons from it years later, when a new circumstance makes some element of that narrative relevant. The speaker sees this as part of why an oral culture such as the Greeks’ invested so heavily in stories of heroes.
Those stories need not produce simplistic moral examples. Odysseus makes mistakes, and his conduct remains arguable. Some listeners can see a man who did what he had to do; others can see a liar and a cheat. The speaker says later Greeks divided in much the same way, with some treating Odysseus as a bad man and others as the greatest hero.
That unresolved quality is not a defect. Homer may have his own view, but he presents multiple perspectives and leaves audiences to do interpretive work themselves. Epic poets also had to make their stories travel across cities, classes, and tastes. Different listeners could identify with Odysseus, condemn him, or find themselves in another position within the story.
The speaker’s case is not for flawless heroes. It is for stories that preserve moral complexity without assuming that every admirable figure must be exposed as secretly degraded. A hero can be fallible and contestable while still being worth thinking with.
On this account, the poet’s task is not to extract and announce a single message. Like Odysseus entertaining the Phaeacians, or the bards within the poem, the storyteller must first charm an audience and draw it into the narrative. What the audience finally makes of the hero remains partly its own work.