Have We Lost the World for Its Parts?

11:47 PM. The blue light again.

First, Gaza. Rubble. A child kissing the hand of a dead parent. Swipe. An unfinished academic thread on decolonial theory. Swipe. Italian disco, 1983, a sequined void that feels more real than anything I touched today. Swipe. Lebanese news: another collapse, the lira at 90,000 to the dollar. Swipe. A meme about therapy costs, followed instantly by an ad for therapy. Swipe. An AI mood board: 80s nostalgia, analog warmth. Swipe. Protest footage—Paris? Spain? Hong Kong? Somewhere I haven’t been. Swipe. Geopolitics explained in 90 seconds. Swipe. Palestine again. Or maybe it is dying right now. I try to memorize the features of another crying child. I send a prayer. I close the app. I lie in the dark. I try to remember what I saw.

Nothing.

There is something obscene about scrolling past genocide on the way to disco. We have lost the ability to imagine tomorrow. I mean this literally. Not as metaphor. As a description of a cognitive capacity humans once possessed and are now losing. Our mental faculty that allowed us to picture next week, next year, a future worth building, is being stripped from us. Frame by frame. In 30-second intervals. By systems that turn human attention into a resource to be extracted with the same ruthless efficiency mines use to strip fields.

I. Iconoclasm and Its Weapon

August 4, 2020. I understood it viscerally, in my body. When you care, distance is an illusion.

I was in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Beirut exploded. My brother was near Karantina, close to the blast. I scrolled frantically through videos, trying to understand. At first, the sounds seemed like voices in a foreign language. The thing that still haunts me is that I couldn’t recognize my own dialect. I couldn’t place the screaming as Lebanese Arabic. My mother tongue became foreign. My brain decided what I was seeing couldn’t be happening to my people. I thought the sounds must be coming from somewhere else. Some other catastrophe. Some other geography I could safely scroll past.

When I confirmed my brother was safe, I slept. Exhausted by adrenaline and the particular horror of being far from disaster, I woke with a thick patch of white hair on the left side of my beard. I was 32. I had gone to sleep with a dark brown beard. Even when the blast happened 5,600 miles away, my body felt it. This proved that all the technology promising to connect had accomplished its mission: to make the whole world visible, yet unintelligible.

That explosion was an iconoclasm. I mean this literally and as a framework. The deliberate destruction of meaning-making structures. Of symbols. Of the shared narratives and institutions that once allowed human beings to imagine themselves as part of something larger than immediate survival. The Beirut port blast wasn’t just the obliteration of infrastructure; it was the destruction of a symbolic promise to the Lebanese. The place where Lebanon received the world, where goods flowed, where one of the bridges between East and West once held place, was gone. It held that place in our hearts, and then it didn’t.

If you have never stood where symbol and reality collapsed simultaneously, you might not understand how disorienting it is. How it leaves you unable to distinguish between what you lost externally and, most importantly, existentially. A blast of a loss.

The most powerful mechanisms of this modern iconoclasm aren't always bombs or policies; they are the media. Social media platforms and news channels have become the fragmentators. On one hand, they actively destroy our mental and civic health because their business model requires it. The more anxious we are, the more we scroll. The more we scroll, the more data they harvest. The more data, the better they target advertisements and propaganda. The more profit. Their entire incentive structure rewards our addiction, our exhaustion, our inability to look away.

This accelerated after COVID. Governments needed populations that were compliant, distracted, too exhausted to organize sustained resistance. Media systems provided those tools: keep people scrolling through catastrophes they can’t affect. Make every crisis feel equally urgent and equally distant. Destroy the ability to distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t. Between what can be changed and what must be endured. The result is a population that knows everything and can do nothing. Perpetually overwhelmed by the enormity of what’s wrong while unable to hold any single wrong in consciousness long enough to organize a response.

Our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to remember stories, not stimuli. Memory worked through meaningful narrative. We remembered where the water was by remembering the story of finding it. We remembered when animals migrated by remembering the pattern of seasons through a poem or a song. This narrative capacity wasn’t just about the past but how to carry on into the future. The future was imagined as an extension of those narratives. We could picture the next season because we remembered the last. We could plan for winter because we held the story of the cricket and the ant. Story was the architecture of preservation for the past and transmission into the future. A cognitive scaffolding that allowed humans to visualize, organize, and to imagine tomorrow.

Social media dismantles the neurological architecture that makes narrative possible. It replaces the slow accretion of meaning with the feed.

Our feeds are designed with extraordinary precision to maximize emotional arousal per unit of time. Content that sparks strong reactions—outrage, fear, desire, disgust—gets amplified. Algorithms have learned, through millions of iterations and billions of data points, exactly which emotional triggers keep you scrolling. Content that requires us to slow down, to think, to hold multiple notions in suspension—content that might help us construct coherent narratives—dies in the algorithm’s indifference. It is buried under the next wave of stimuli designed to override whatever we were just thinking.

Every scroll is also a context switch. Neurologically, this means our brains don’t process the refugee crisis, then the disco mix, then the climate report as separate events. We experience them as a continuous, undifferentiated stream of stimuli competing for attention. Because the brain can only hold so much in working memory, each new stimulus overwrites the last. This is why we scroll for an hour and remember almost nothing except the burnout sensation of scrolling. The feeling of anxiety or numbness. Over time, this strengthens the episodic memory of *feeling* something, while destroying semantic memory: the ability to construct the narrative that would allow us to say, “I saw this, it meant that, here is what should happen next.”

The result: we lose the ability to construct coherent narratives. Without narrative, we can’t build models of causation. Without causation, we can’t plan. Without planning, we lose the future. I mean this literally. The future becomes something that happens to us, that we brace for rather than build toward.

I notice this in myself constantly. It terrifies me. It feels like losing a faculty I once possessed. Like going slowly deaf to a frequency only I used to hear. I pick up a book. Something I genuinely want to read. Something I know is good. I can’t get past 30 pages. Because my attention has been trained, literally trained through operant conditioning. I read a paragraph, and my hand reaches for my phone. I scroll. I read another. Repeat.

When I am hard on myself, I experience this as personal failing. Though it is conditioning by an environment deliberately designed to punish sustained attention. Yet the adaptation that allows me to survive in this environment is the same conditioning that destroys what I need most: the ability to imagine complex long-term solutions, and to sustain the collective action required to implement them.

Facebook’s founding president said in 2017 the platform was designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology.” The need for social validation. Every like, comment, share triggers a dopamine hit. Literally activating the same neurological reward pathway as cocaine or gambling. Conditioning you to keep refreshing. Keep checking. Keep scrolling. These design patterns are lifted from casino architecture: infinite scroll, no natural stopping point. Pull-to-refresh mimics slot machines. Notification badges create fear of missing out. Algorithmic feeds provide unpredictable rewards. All calibrated through A/B testing and machine learning to maximize time on platform. Data harvested. Money made.

And what performs best? Rage. Internal Facebook studies found posts generating anger were five times more likely to be engaged with than neutral posts. The algorithm learned to show us things that make us furious. It shifted toward clickbait headlines and partisan outrage. Everything sharpens toward emotional extremity, and nuance doesn't travel on social platforms. Complexity isn't engaging enough.

The result is an information ecosystem optimized for affective intensity rather than truth. This systematically destroys the cognitive faculties required for collective political action. To organize, we need to understand complex systems. To remember what happened and why. Who did it. What they said they would do. What they actually did. We need to imagine alternative futures. To picture how things could be different. We need to plan coordinated action over time. This requires sustained attention. The ability to hold goals in mind despite setbacks.

A population that can’t imagine tomorrow is a population that won’t demand one.

II. Abandoning Universalism

To understand what is being destroyed, we must understand what it was. The ideals I was raised with.

After the little seminary, I continued as part of Focolare. A Catholic movement founded in Italy in 1943 during World War II. Chiara Lubich and her friends, sheltering in a basement during bombing raids, decided to live the Gospel radically. To love one another in a way that would break down barriers and build unity in destruction. By the time I joined Gen3 (“the youth for a united world”) in Lebanon, there were Focolare communities in 180 countries.

We held youth congresses, days filled with activities and testimonies. We practiced “the ideals”: see every person as part of the human family regardless of nationality or religion. It was in the friends I made. In the feeling of being part of something larger. In the sense that love could change structures if enough people committed sincerely. The sense of being part of something larger was real.

What I didn’t understand then: universalism has been rendered a colonial mechanism. This doesn’t mean it was malicious. It presents itself as benevolence, as the generous extension of something good to people who don’t yet have it. When Christian missionaries were spreading the Gospel and spreading empire, they used Christian values to infiltrate local communities. Preaching elevation to a higher plane of human dignity that just happened to require adopting European languages, European social structures, European ways of organizing family and community.

“We’re all one family” sounds beautiful until you realize it means “join our family on our terms.” Universalism says there’s one true way to be fully human, and we embody it. You can join us if you accept our representation of God, our language, our organizations. If you resist, you are shamed, left behind. And who wants to be left behind by their one and true savior? Excluded, eventually deserving destruction if you persist. We can’t have unity if some refuse to unify on our terms. Every empire practiced this. Romans called it civilization. French called it liberty, equality, fraternity (for those who qualified). Americans call it democracy and human rights (except where “manifest destiny” dictates otherwise). British called it the white man’s burden. They romanticized it and believed it sincerely.

The genius of universalism is how it makes the dominated complicit in their own subordination. It offers the language of inclusion while hiding the price: assimilation. The erasing of whatever makes us different. If we’re all one family, inequality can’t be structural injustice. It must be unfortunate circumstances. Some members struggling, needing help. But the family structure is sound. If we share universal values, the problem can’t be empire, can’t be power. It must be that you have failed to live up to our values.

I was raised inside this. Focolare wasn’t deliberately malicious. They genuinely believed they were offering liberation. That universal love is the answer. But the structure is colonial. Northern and Western missionary movements spreading to Southern and Eastern populations. Teaching “universal” ideals aligning suspiciously well with Western modernity. Offering inclusion on the condition you assimilate to a framework never truly universal. Always particular. Rooted in European Christianity and its global expansion.

Here’s where I’m stuck: those ideals did something for me. That something was real even if the structure was colonial. The friendships are still genuine. I guess the practice of loving across difference was what I made out of it, and it taught me things I still hold dear. The sense of being part of something larger filled a hunger I haven’t experienced before. This makes it impossible to reject everything I was taught. It still gave me some words for connection, care, commitment.

Now, post-COVID, even the pretense is gone. The performance of universal values abandoned by the forces that created them. COVID should have been the moment universalism proved itself. “We’re all in this together” meaning more than a hashtag. A truly global pandemic affecting rich and poor, North and South, demonstrating universal solidarity: share vaccines. Share technology. Coordinate response. Protect the vulnerable everywhere.

Instead, coupled with other economic and political fatalizers, we got "unprecedented" vaccine nationalism. The U.S. quickly invoked the Defense Production Act to monopolize vaccine inputs, preventing other countries from manufacturing even when they had capacity. The EU imposed export controls. COVAX, the global initiative for equitable distribution, became a cruel joke. Rich countries pledged doses while signing bilateral deals to jump the queue. By early 2022, rich countries administered over 1.5 billion doses. 83% of Africa remained unvaccinated. The system works as designed.

More than failing to live up to ideals: governments deliberately dismantled even the rhetoric of solidarity. “America First” was its campaign slogan. After COVID, it became policy everywhere. Italy First. Britain First. And now Israel First. The pretense that international institutions existed to build cooperation dissolved overnight. The post-WWII liberal order decided that the performance was no longer necessary.

The mask came off. Power no longer needed to justify itself through appeals to shared humanity.

This was strategic. Post-COVID governments understood reasserting control required destroying ideals that might constrain them. Making it clear universalism was over.

What universalism was replaced with is the weaponization of progress. Literally. Technology stopped being framed as improving human welfare. It became a tool for dominating adversaries. The US-China relationship became about technological supremacy. Semiconductor export bans. 5G infrastructure. AI development reframed as national security. Progress redefined as competitive advantage. Domination. Capacity to impose terms through superior technology or resource control. Control rare earth minerals? Energy supplies? Chip manufacturing? Use it as a weapon. Make others dependent. Leverage dependency for compliance.

Russia weaponized energy exports. Europe discovered decades of dependence on cheap Russian gas meant their industrial model could be held hostage when war came. China weaponized rare earth minerals. The Global North discovered building green technology required buying from China on Chinese terms. China controlled 80% of global rare earth processing. Climate change, the most universal crisis, became another domain of domination. Rich countries promised climate finance. Didn’t deliver. Small island states begging for crumbs at COP27. Extracted a “loss and damage” fund. Initial pledges less than 0.2% of estimated need. A symbolic gesture. The minimum necessary to maintain the fiction the system cared about justice.

The months after August 4, 2020, were my education. What abandonment of universalism means on the ground. My brother in Lebanon sent voice notes: couldn’t find medication for my father. Pharmaceutical supply chains collapsed. People reverting to survival strategies from my grandmother’s famine stories. Eating less, stretching groceries by cooking recipes we only heard in stories. Currency disintegrating. Lira from 1,500 to 90,000 per dollar. 6,000% devaluation. My father's life savings turned to worthless amounts in comparison. Then the banks locked those accounts.

2021. New York. Art Seminars at SUNY New Paltz. Discussed iconoclasms. Read theory on different values from craft work ethics. Every week my phone rang, another disaster, survival becoming tough for people I loved. The universal human family didn’t send medication. Didn’t stabilize currency. Didn’t restore electricity. Didn’t do anything except watch. Pretty language about shared values makes the abandoned feel it’s their fault. If they’d lived up to values better and been more civilized, maybe they’d be worth saving.

Meanwhile, Palestine. Iconoclasm literal again. Bombs. Rubble. Thousands of bodies. Palestinian journalists documenting genocide targeted systematically. As of early 2026, over 230 Palestinian journalists and media workers are butchered. Many clearly marked as press. Accountability threatens the colonial enemy narrative too directly. The world talking endlessly about press freedom watched and did nothing. Or worse, they provided the means to destroy that freedom, because it's not their own to defend.

Done openly. Without shame. Values always conditional. Subject to power. Secondary to interest. Pretense abandoned.

I mourn something I know was poison. Grieving ideals that sedated me even as they gave me language for love.

I am relieved the truth is exposed, and I understand that contradiction is the condition. We can drink the sea and spit the sand. We can observe life as it happens, fully, digitally and physically.

We can imagine tomorrow, when we close our eyes or look away from our screens.