Can you hear my echo?

I woke up in the middle of the night, twisted in my sheets like a python’s lunch, huffing and fuming. I tried to relax, uncurling my toes, relaxing my shoulders, and rotated my neck. I had a warm headache. I couldn’t think of anything, other than how angry I was. Dizzying fallacies and arguments more synthetic than a computer buzzed inside my mind, fortified against all attempts to stop what had become a constant vicious droning. I let out a soft scream. Why couldn’t I get this out of my head? Why couldn’t I relax? Why, when there was no sound, could I only hear this noise? I fought with it a little, but slowly drifted back to sleep.

The harsh white glare of sunlight reflecting off of snow pierced my eyes. It was an early Tuesday morning and I was already miserable. My feet and back were killing me, all my stress was pooled there like dirty bath water. I grabbed my phone and felt my head flare up. Apple News, Twitter, Gmail; stream after stream of bullshit. I ignored it and looked for the message I was waiting for. “On my way,” it said. My friend Alex was coming to pick me up for a morning class I was too unwilling to purchase a parking pass for. Not that I didn’t enjoy riding with Alex. She’s one of my closest friends and is great at conversations. She’d been the highlight of my Tuesday’s since the semester started. It’s impossible to survive college without real friends.

We drove to class and plopped down into what had to be our 200th boring serialized lecture. I popped open my laptop and immediately opened tabs to Twitter and the New York Times. I scrolled through each and felt my headache growing. I opened two more publications but my irritation wasn’t going away. It wasn’t that the topics of the articles were bad, or that the tweets were abhorrently garish, but something kept digging into the back of my mind. Despite everything appearing fine, the bad feeling was growing.

What could be so off about everything I was reading that it was making me react physically? Shouldn’t everything being normal be comforting?

It’s no surprise–though how this idea had become partisan is–that people change. Think about our own childhoods. The growth that we experienced from birth until now was not only physical. Our tastes in foods, tastes in music, and tastes in people have all shifted, shaped by the variety of experiences each of us has lived, as we have aged. I’ve changed. When I first graduated high school, I was much more politically active, even going so far as to publicly comment on who I was voting for. I was more progressive, less open, and more invested than I am now. My social media feeds at the time resembled that. Each, as 2016 came and went, became sucked into the growing progressive echo chamber.

An Echo Chamber is, “an environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered.”
Every faction of politics has an echo chamber. Any opinion can grow one. Inherently, echo chambers aren’t particularly dangerous. Tim, from Wait But Why has been working for the past three years on a series that explains this concept in depth–as well as many more difficult political topics–but essentially: echo chambers are dangerous in media and politics because of the scale and impact of the ideas being echoed.

Let’s talk Mac Miller. If I were to tell you that Circles, Mac’s first posthumous album is the best of 2020, you may disagree with me. You may disagree with me so much as to bring my ideas to your friends and self congratulate yourselves over how obviously wrong I am and how right you are, that you may even start to vilify me. Of course, then you’d be a weirdo because it’s just music.

Now visualize that scenario with any political idea like abortion, illegal immigration, or Iran and you can see why an self-congratulatory echo chamber might form and it’s participants might not be willing to listen to other ideas.

Once again, I recommend reading Tim’s series as it explains this concept and many more in as polite a fashion you can read on the internet today.
As for myself, I stopped being able to enjoy the world around me, because I was constantly plugged into an echo chamber full of people’s opinions I didn’t agree with. Pretty scary considering how good it must feel to be part of an echo chamber we agree with.

I realized that I was in an echo chamber in the beginning of December. Since then I’ve left behind all my accounts where I felt like I was getting no sense of diverse opinion, stopped reading a number of publications whilst trying to find a more diverse selection, and have started focusing on myself more than the opinion of others. Still, the concept of how intoxicating an echo chamber full of positive opinions is tantalizing. Is there a way to bring people willingly out of these echo chambers into reality?

I have a hypothesis based upon my nostalgic view of childhood and what I know about history. Perhaps, in part, why we find ourselves faced with the decay of truth and objectivity is that we simply can avoid them now like never before. Reality was always a wet blanket for our feverish dreams, and though we did our best to attempt to escape it, the weight of the world is hard to ignore when to escape its gravity you’ll need 500 pages.
Now, we’ve visualized, simulated, and opened up any possible world we want. Even our conversations don’t have to be with real people. We can live in a reality by our own design more accessible than nearly anything save for sunlight and air. If we were to bring back the wet blanket of reality as an unquestionable and inescapable gravity, would we then be more willing to return to what is objective and truthful?