Vicarious Trauma
Things are ugly and getting worse, but you don't need to wallow in it.
This article caught my eye when it came out ten days ago.
More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD
People in third world countries find employment with western social media companies, and they’re given the task of keeping a lid on the absolute worst behavior of which our species is capable. They do this for a while, but they are permanently scarred by the experience.
The article covers an extreme case, but the principles broadly applicable for anyone dealing with troubling news.
Ukraine:
Russia invaded Ukraine in late February of 2022. I was watching what happened … until I came across this photo. The man just went to the market, but when he returned, a stray Russian missile had killed his entire family, except for Marsik. I keep this picture as a reminder of why I started to do what I’ve done in response.
I keep that photo, but I pointedly seldom look at anything to do with civilians or pets being harmed. Following that is not a direct duty, it’s not anything I could leverage, and it gets under my skin instantly.
Then I saw a video about this family in Lviv in my feed, two and a half years after I noticed Marsik.
The father was pulled from the wreckage of their home after it was hit by a Russian cruise missile. Mother Yevgenia and daughters Yaryna, Daryna, and Emilia were still inside. The video showed the firemen trying to restrain him, then finally letting him go to help dig. All four were dead.
Best Practices:
Years ago I received some wisdom from a person who knew what to do from having been in combat zones. I was told I needed to take a break in 2012, before I did some long term damage to myself. Told, but I didn’t hear it, and so I had to learn the hard way. Today I’m sensitive to the signs of burnout and I know, for me in particular, that laughing at horrors means I need to immediately duck and cover. I think during 2024 I did this four times for a total of about eight weeks.
I already knew to avoid looking at this stuff from the great ISIS hunt of the mid-teens. When one’s duties involve examining social and technical networks, or negotiating for access to intrusion data, you keep the beheading videos at a conceptual level. My life from late teens to late twenties left me with PTSD requiring treatment, in which I learned to reframe memories. The methods of doing that apply to traumatic content, if perusing such IS part of one’s work day. These include:
Turn off the sound if there’s no useful information in it.
Shrink videos down if you don’t need every little detail.
Distant, dissociated content is safer than first person cell phone captures.
A series of stills are better than a video.
Black and white stills are less impactful than color.
If I were tasked with looking at troubling content today I would cobble up a video to stills sampler that produced black and white images. That’s easily done in Linux, perhaps less so with Mac and Windows.
Best of all, if you can get what you need from a written report rather than exposing yourself, you always take advantage of a proxy that’s already done the work.
There’s a long, formal guide from Harvard’s Health & Human Rights publication containing the dos and don’ts:
Safer Viewing: A Study of Secondary Trauma Mitigation Techniques in Open Source Investigations
Corporate Media Implosion:
I was a daily reader of most of the Washington Post’s online content, minus the lifestyle and sports sections. When they refused to endorse a presidential candidate, I cancelled my subscription, logged out, and I bet I’ve spent less than fifteen minutes on their material since November 5th.
Many people have become similarly disinterested. A search for “decline in news viewership” brought these three top results.
This began when Kamala Harris went to the online content makers and largely ignored the gotcha games of corporate media trolls. Perhaps they were pleased with themselves in the moment, but the hardcore disinterest is not what they were expecting. Trump’s shitshow was great for ratings in his first term, but this time those of us who are entirely done with him are tuning out. Those entities that used to be described as the “mainstream media” are no longer; they’re influence operations run by oligarchs, and while people might not use that specific phrase, I think most of us understand that the former 4th Estate is as wrecked as the other three.
That written reporting you may need will still turn up all over the place … here on Substack, for example.
Conclusion:
One of the things I am doing this year is participating in dialog with people who hold diametrically opposite views to mine. My distaste for the Democrats today is not so severe as what drone me from the Republican party in 2004, but their sins of omission are just as serious as the GOP'‘s sins of commission. The dialog hasn’t done much to change my position, but it’s interesting being a person focusing intelligence analyst style, trying to get at what is real. I would not have associated Occupy Wall Street’s zeitgeist with a break in objective reality during the time in which I participated. Seeing the other side of the coin now, I better understand the danger of combining demagoguery and populism.
I replaced the Washington Post with Phys.org, a science news site with a front page that’s nearly as busy as a major metro area newspaper. There is very little video content here, but the climate news is uniformly a horrorshow. This is less problematic for me - because Mother Nature doesn’t DO spin. Droughts and fires, floods and hurricanes, none care in the slightest what the survivors are saying in exit polls.
'Dangerous new era': Climate change spurs disaster in 2024
The norm here at the Netwar Irregulars Bulletin is the declaration of a new direction at the beginning of each quarter, a pattern similar to the biannual research areas that appeared on the Neal Rauhauser Wordpress blog. Usually I know in advance what we’ll be doing next, but this time things are different. I sat with a group of associates earlier this week, talking about 2025, and came away with seven categories for the new year.
Obsidian+Kanban for project management.
Hexnode device protection.
GrapheneOS hardened Android device OS.
CheriBSD on Morello ARM single board computers.
TailScale overlay VPN.
Mesh radio networking.
HackRF spectrum analyzer.
So there is a single project management direction, then equal parts adversary resistant computing and adversary resistant networking. There’s a lot of technology R&D in there, but nothing at all that could be described as sense making.
Maybe Q1 2025 is going to be a continuation of Q4 2024 - a time to keep powder dry, to watch what is happening (but not too closely!), and be ready to swing into action when there is an opportunity to do some good in this world.
Looks like we’ll just have to wait and see …