Weaponizing Despair: Doomerism, Digital Influence, and the War for Reality

[atreestump]

Everywhere you look, someone is declaring the end of the world. Social media feeds drip with climate catastrophe charts and headlines about collapsing ecosystems. Economists warn of cascading debt crises. News tickers count the seconds on the Doomsday Clock. The subreddit r/collapse has nearly half a million members trading scenarios of societal breakdown.

It would be comforting to believe this collective sense of despair is simply organic — that we’re responding rationally to a deeply unstable world. But what if it isn’t? What if part of what we call “doomerism” — the belief that civilizational collapse is inevitable and resistance is futile — is also the product of modern political warfare?

In a 1970 interview, media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted that World War III would not be fought on physical battlefields but as “a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” Half a century later, the Marine Corps University’s Journal of Advanced Military Studies describes this reality in stark terms: nations and non-state actors are waging digital influence warfare — manipulating information environments not just to mislead, but to shape how entire societies feel about their own future.

And despair, it turns out, is a powerful weapon.

The term doomer emerged from internet forums in the late 2000s. At first it was niche — oil peak enthusiasts, climate collapse theorists, existential dread hobbyists. But in the past decade, doomerism has gone mainstream.

Its core narrative is simple: ecological tipping points are past, and irreversible. Political systems are too compromised to reform. Technology accelerates dangers faster than solutions. Humanity is inherently self-destructive, doomed to implode.

Doomerism isn’t nihilism, exactly. Nihilism doubts whether life has meaning. Doomerism asserts something more specific — that meaning may exist, but it doesn’t matter, because collapse is inevitable. And so, it whispers, nothing you do will make a difference.

This worldview breeds apathy. People stop voting. Stop organizing. Stop imagining alternatives. And in that paralysis, existing power structures face no resistance.

The Marine Corps University Press essay describes a different but related phenomenon: political warfare in the digital age. Where 20th-century propaganda involved pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and cinematic spectacle, today’s influence operations bypass governments and target individuals directly.

Through bots, deepfakes, coordinated troll farms, and microtargeted outrage loops, adversaries exploit psychological vulnerabilities: fear, uncertainty, tribalism, loneliness.

The goals aren’t always to convince us of something specific. Often, they’re subtler: undermine trust in institutions, amplify polarization, flood the infosphere with so many conflicting narratives that truth itself feels inaccessible.

As RAND researchers put it, this isn’t about degrading computer systems — it’s about hacking reality. “The battle,” they write, “is not over information itself but over the perceptions, emotions, and decisions that information produces.”

Now consider doomerism in this light. What better outcome could a destabilizing influence campaign hope for than a generation convinced that the future is lost, that collective action is pointless, and that hope itself is naïve?

Here’s the unsettling part: it’s difficult to know where the objective crises end and the engineered despair begins.

Climate breakdown is real. Geopolitical instability is real. Technological disruptions are real. But so too are the deliberate strategies described in military doctrine: Russian troll farms creating false activist personas to radicalize both sides of political divides; Chinese “Three Warfares” doctrine blending psychological operations, media influence, and legal framing to dominate narratives before conflicts even start; Western actors running their own perception-shaping campaigns — not always benevolent, not always transparent.

Within this ecosystem, despair itself can be weaponized. Digital influence operations amplify the most catastrophic headlines, the bleakest scenarios, the outrage that burns hottest. Algorithms — whether controlled by state actors or profit-driven tech platforms — privilege virality over accuracy, meaning emotionally triggering content wins by design.

The result? A hyperconnected infosphere in which reality fragments, polarization intensifies, and a sense of doom feels self-evident — regardless of whether it’s wholly justified.

Which raises the central question: is doomerism a grassroots cultural response to genuine existential threats? Or is it also, at least partly, a top-down outcome — engineered, amplified, and exploited to keep populations passive?

History offers precedents. The Marine Corps article traces influence campaigns back to the Mongols, who spread exaggerated tales of their own atrocities to make cities surrender without a fight. During World War II, Goebbels perfected propaganda designed to demoralize opponents and fracture alliances.

But the digital layer changes the game. Unlike leaflets or radio broadcasts, today’s influence operations are personalized. They know what makes you anxious, your ideological triggers, your sense of identity. And through microtargeting, algorithms, and AI-enhanced content, they can feed despair into your feed until hopelessness feels like common sense.

This isn’t conspiracy theory. It’s military strategy. The Marine Corps calls it compound security threats: the convergence of physical dangers with psychological, emotional, and cognitive manipulation. In this model, societal cohesion itself becomes the battlefield.

If doomerism is a trap — whether self-made or engineered — how do we avoid falling into it?

The philosopher Albert Camus described an existential tension: humans crave meaning, but the universe offers none. He called this “the absurd.” Faced with it, we have three choices: surrender, invent comforting illusions, or revolt by embracing life anyway.

Camus chose revolt. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he wrote — condemned to push his boulder up the hill forever, yet finding freedom in choosing to do so.

In this frame, hope isn’t naïve optimism. It’s an act of defiance. Acting — planting trees, building communities, resisting disinformation, imagining alternative futures — becomes a way of saying: I refuse to surrender my agency, even when the world insists it’s pointless.

This aligns, interestingly, with insights from modern psychology. Researchers on active hope argue that agency itself — the feeling that our actions matter — is essential to human well-being. Small acts of engagement, especially when shared in community, create feedback loops of hope that counter despair.

If digital influence warfare seeks to fragment reality, then one form of resistance is to reclaim the story. That means cultivating media literacy, skepticism toward virality, and solidarity across divides. It also means acknowledging real crises without succumbing to fatalism.

Because here’s the paradox: if we believe collapse is inevitable, we behave in ways that make collapse more likely. But if we act as if change is possible, we create the very conditions that make it so.

This doesn’t mean ignoring systemic threats. It means refusing to let them define us. It means recognizing when despair is fed to us — whether by hostile states, corporate algorithms, or our own doomscrolling habits — and choosing not to be consumed by it.

So, is doomerism a top-down manipulation or an inevitable response to an unraveling world? The answer, uncomfortably, is both.

Real crises create fertile ground for despair. But in the digital age, despair isn’t just a symptom — it’s a strategic objective. Influence campaigns weaponize hopelessness because hopeless populations don’t organize, don’t resist, and don’t imagine alternatives.

Recognizing this doesn’t solve the crises we face. But it reframes them. It reminds us that beneath the noise, there’s still agency — individual and collective. And perhaps the most radical act in an age of engineered despair is simple: to keep imagining, to keep acting, to keep choosing hope, not because success is guaranteed, but because surrender is exactly what someone — somewhere — wants you to do.

[atreestump]

https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press/MCU-Journal/JAMS-vol-12-no-1/Political-Warfare-and-Propaganda/

[kFoyauextlH]

Combined and moved here:

viewtopic.php?p=3130#p3130

I'll replace all posts like these at some point hopefully so they look better or more relevant to the topic for later readers and reading.

[kFoyauextlH]

[kFoyauextlH]

Replaced, it is with the other posts from above at the link mentioned.

Added in 1 day 20 hours 39 minutes 48 seconds:
I'm not entirely sure if this is appropriate here, and I may have edited into an earlier post, but currently I can't edit any of my posts:



This just might be a clue about the stuff spamming the senses from the platforms most people are frequently looking at now, being very manipulated by political entities and lobbyists.

Added in 2 days 17 hours 38 minutes 12 seconds:


"
@roguewizard01
2 days ago (edited)
I am a scientific researcher, and I would just like to say that this format is dearly needed on this platform. Not only does it nuance the scientific results that we - as researchers - produce. It further exemplifies that research is an on-going endeavor, and that statistical data can be interpreted differently by two researchers within the same field. It not only goes to show how hard it is to create recommendations and guidelines for specific issues such as social media use, but it also makes it clear that individuals that speak as if there is certainty of evidence within certain fields is very unlikely to be experts in the field. I can think of multiple successful authors who fall under the category of cherry-picking data to create a specific narrative, while ignoring the rest of the literature or scientific consensus.
"

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People are asking that the "real views" be expressed at the end, since people seek "authenticity". I think that social media influence is mostly recognized as having a negative impact on people and believe both these people likely would have thought so and that one of them had to be in the position of the Devil's Advocate, the Devil being pernicious corporate social media influence. That just tells you or anyone that some people come into looking at debates pre-loaded with opinions that they look to recognize out of what is said and not with an interest in being moved to think differently. So what projects like these can do is provide debaters from both sides of any issue with ammunition to waste their time in their own pointless discussions with people who don't care about any evidence provided to them at all.
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[kFoyauextlH]

Will replace

Added in 21 hours 45 minutes 13 seconds:


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six ... al_History

https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/w ... o-about-it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_symbol

All these f*ckers can do is create symbols lol.

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The symbol has been called "this generation's peace sign".[1]
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I've never even seen it in comparison.

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In 2019, The Guardian reported that "Where the symbol has come from is something of a mystery".[1][9] The Guardian noted that the most reliable attribution is to an anonymous East London artist known only as "ESP" or "Goldfrog ESP", who declines to be contacted directly except via his Extinction Symbol website,[a][1][6] which has been supported by design media,[11][12][4][9] and the wider media.[7][8][13][14]
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https://i0.wp.com/littleneocreative.com ... .jpg?ssl=1

It turns into The Sims diamond.

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https://grist.org/article/the-story-beh ... -protests/

Added in 2 minutes 1 second:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_th ... tics_begin

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The slogan is a quotation from The Revolution of Everyday Life by the Situationist philosopher Raoul Vaneigem.[2] This book was first published in 1967 as Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations and inspired many such slogans painted as graffiti by Paris students during the unrest of May 68.[3] It then inspired British revolutionaries such as the Angry Brigade.[4]

The accompanying picture shows a child planting a seedling and labelling it with the extinction symbol, which is the logo of Extinction Rebellion.[5][6]
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Added in 2 days 17 hours 35 seconds:


They brought in professional clappers lol.

[kFoyauextlH]