Awareing Ourselves to Death
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.
When Habib posted about the project on X, he was shocked by the response. At one point, tens of thousands of people were using the site at the same time; more than 2 million people accessed it in the first 20 days. Habib’s inbox filled with requests for new features as well as messages from venture capitalists looking to spin up World Monitor into a full-time business. Via GitHub, where Habib has made the code for World Monitor open-source and accessible to all, developers have made thousands of customized tweaks to the site and have translated it into more than 20 languages.
Obviously, people want immediate information on the conflict in Iran and the geopolitical and economic fallout from the war. But the site’s popularity stems from something else too. For the past year or so, extremely online weirdos—news junkies, day traders, social-media addicts, amateur investigators, guys who put up long posts on X about hacking their productivity—have embraced a meme about “monitoring the situation.” The phrase originates from a 2025 viral X post showing a jacked, arms-crossed, headset-wearing Jeff Bezos watching a Blue Origin launch: “The masculine urge to monitor the situation,” the caption says.
Like most memes, the bulk of situation-monitoring posts are ironic. They poke fun at the self-importance of the phenomenon. (“He’s not unemployed, he’s monitoring the situation,” one representative example reads.) Most of the people who make these posts are offering an enjoyable, winking blend of two perspectives: This is loser behavior and Dudes rock. Suffice it to say, World Monitor has thrilled this cohort, causing its fans to post things such as “BREAKING: you can now turn your laptop into a CIA command center.”
But this year, the monitoring jokes have taken on a different valence. The fog of the Trump administration’s wars has created an information vacuum that can immediately be filled on social media. Some of the people populating the world’s feeds are doing valuable work—the journalists and open-source-intelligence gatherers trying to confirm events and produce original reporting, for example. But they are outnumbered by propagandists, trolls, anxious commentators, war-market gamblers, and clout chasers who, apparently, became experts on the Strait of Hormuz overnight. These people post things such as “Hey babe, wake up, they just dropped a new war monitor.” They aren’t just monitoring the situation; they’re posting constantly about monitoring the situation.
[Read: This is what it looks like when nothing matters]
People treating war like entertainment seems like a logical extension of X, which has lost some of its real-time-news utility since Elon Musk took over and alienated many of the people who used to post there, and encouraged an army of edgelord users who treat the site like a 4chan board. (And people used to complain about the ludicrous ways that cable-news hosts vamped to fill 24 hours of coverage.) The meme speaks to something much bigger than that, though: 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. The United States invaded Venezuela in the night and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro, 69 days ago. Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent 66 days ago; Alex Pretti was tackled to the ground in Minneapolis and killed by agents of the state 49 days ago. The last tranche of the Epstein files—millions of pages documenting Jeffrey Epstein’s dizzying connections to many of the most famous and powerful people in the world—came out 43 days ago. It’s been 22 days since the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s tariffs. On February 4, a pseudonymous account believed to belong to an Open AI employee snarkily commented that “Anthropic has the same level of name recognition among superbowl viewers as literally fictional companies.” Now the company is embroiled in a massive fight with the Pentagon; its CEO is on the cover of a forthcoming issue of Time. Yet most of these events have been pushed aside to make space for a war in Iran that the administration has hardly attempted to justify.
This is partly a consequence of our information ecosystem, which continues to evolve; more information is being created on more feeds, and through new products such as chatbots. Also, Trump’s reckless and erratic presidency has made reality move at online speeds. In the words of my colleague David A. Graham, the administration “can’t say why the United States went to war with Iran, and it can’t say what the goal of the war is. Now it can’t even decide whether the war is still going on.” The absurdity, the lack of pretense, and the senselessness all feel appropriate to the current age; as the writer John Ganz recently wrote, the war with Iran is “the first war that feels like it’s been launched by A.I: It’s all been done on a level less than thought.”
Monitoring is a reasonable response to all of this: It seems to offer a sense of agency. “They feel in control,” Habib told me when I asked why he thinks people like World Monitor. “They see everything happening in front of them, and it’s like, you know, watching a Bruce Willis movie.”
Yet this response to information overload is warping in its own way: People demand new news and commentary every time they refresh a feed. Taking even a short break can be disorienting when you attempt to rejoin a discourse that feels ever more self-referential and intense. Arguably, the best example of this dynamic is the Trump administration itself: Earlier this week, the official White House account on X published a video superimposing footage of the military bombing targets in Iran with the 2006 Nintendo game Wii Sports. The account publishes stuff like this all of the time—and that’s exactly the point. The content outrages some people and delights others; publishing more of it advances the meta discourse that’s been layered on top of the actual news, drawing attention from the unfolding conflict itself. Because in reality, your attention can catch on only so much.
This kind of thing is happening everywhere, constantly. If you’re not on World Monitor, you may be in a social feed, or in multiple social feeds, or trying to figure out which articles to tap into on a cluttered front page, or which newsletters to open in your inbox, or which podcasts to listen to at 1.3-times speed so that you can get to the good parts. 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 comparison may sound absurd, but, as Daniel Kolitz wrote in a recent Harper’s article about the subculture, it mirrors the hyper-online monitoring behavior that I’ve been describing:
What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar?
The internet now implores us to binge as a default behavior: to watch whole seasons of TV at a time, to watch every football game simultaneously in quad-box fashion. We’re prompted to keep talking to the chatbot for answers or companionship; to let the AI agent accomplish task after task until we have built a website in an hour; to obsess in relentless, completist fandoms or go down rabbit holes. 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.