WHO WILL MONITOR THE MONITORS?
Maps, Feeds, and the Promise That I Will Eventually Know Enough
This essay was inspired by a back and forth I’ve been having with Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick from The Trend Report™. Whether he meant to or not, he made me aware of the now omnipresent ‘monitoring the situation’ meme. I’m washed. I’m chopped. I’m Unc. So I may be late to this meme and a bad monitor. I’m 45 years old, cut me some slack.
When I was five years old, my bedroom walls were covered — floor to ceiling — with maps. Political maps, topographical maps, atlases with their thin onion-skin pages. I memorized borders for sport. I could redraw continents from memory before I could multiply reliably. I still do this. I still look at maps for pleasure. Did you know there’s a town called Batman in southeastern Turkey, not far from the Syrian border? The locals have spent years fighting over licensing rights to the Batman franchise. I know this.
This is, apparently, a personality trait visible from space. Some of my friends have a nickname for me: Doc-ipedia. As in: the human reference database you consult when you need exhaustive contextual knowledge about nearly anything — the history of a conflict, the biography of an obscure philosopher, the genealogy of a musical subgenre, the political geography of a region most people couldn’t find on the maps I memorized as a child. I am the go-to explainer in a lot of rooms. People text me questions. I answer them, usually at length, usually with more context than was strictly requested. I have, without entirely meaning to, built a life around the project of knowing where things are and how they fit together — literally and otherwise.
The nickname is affectionate, but it’s also a double-edged sword. There’s a reason why I’ll eventually get ACTUALLY tattooed on my knuckles. I am fully aware that I am that guy — equal parts a useful font of information and also capable of being profoundly annoying. I want to spend some time interrogating how I got this way — and also suggest that, while I might be an extreme case, I’m pretty representative of a dominant mode of behavior. A specific kind of compulsion.
Very early on, I seem to have absorbed an equation: if I can map something, I can steady it. If I can situate it in a wider frame — geographically, historically, conceptually — it becomes less threatening. Knowledge exerts a calming pressure. It gives contour to what would otherwise feel amorphous. This is the promise the maps made to me when I was five, and I have been renewing that promise ever since, at increasing scale, with increasing urgency, and with a success rate I am only now beginning to audit honestly.
Kyle’s line — ‘our lives fall into crisis and here we are: monitoring’ — and the above meme from Buddyhead — which is just one of many I could have chosen — point to the same impulse in different registers. Together they form a kind of stereo image of a universally shared compulsion: We are all, at this particular moment, monitoring the situation.
Intellectualization or Repetition Compulsion?
Anna Freud introduced the term intellectualization to describe a maneuver like this. When reality threatens to overwhelm, the ego does what it can: it analyzes, categorizes, contextualizes. Anxiety becomes abstraction. Chaos becomes a diagram. The move is not foolish. It is protective. And I want to be honest that I have found it genuinely useful — the capacity to hold a situation at one remove, to trace its structure rather than drown in its affect, has served me in ways I don’t entirely want to disavow. Doc-ipedia is not purely a defense mechanism. Sometimes people genuinely need to know where Batman, Turkey is.
But intellectualization, as a frame, starts to break down when applied to monitoring. Anna Freud’s concept assumes that intellectualization eventually ‘works’ as an ego-defense mechanism. Anxiety is processed, distance is achieved, the ego restores its equilibrium. The map gets drawn and stays drawn. What monitoring produces is categorically different. The feed doesn’t calm down after you’ve mapped it. It refreshes. The stabilizing payoff never arrives, because the system is engineered to prevent arrival.
What looks like intellectualization is actually closer to what Freud diagnosed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the repetition compulsion. Not pleasure-seeking. Not even pain management. The ego’s attempt to master a situation it never quite caught up to — to go back and get it right, to finally achieve the comprehension that was foreclosed the first time. The feed is structurally perfect for this. It is always one refresh ahead. There is always a development you missed, a thread you didn’t read, a map whose borders shifted while you were sleeping. The compulsion keeps running because the conditions for its satisfaction are never met.
I am not being metaphorical here. This is what I am doing when I crack open a C4 Tri Stim before I’ve been vertical for ten minutes and open seventeen tabs before breakfast. I do not drink coffee. I have, through careful iteration, landed on a triple-stimulant energy drink that the label assures me is optimized for performance.
MUST NOT SLEEP. MUST WARN OTHERS.
I am not seeking information. I am seeking a resolution that the information is structurally incapable of providing. The C4 simply ensures I remain alert enough to not notice this for several more hours at least.
Monitoring when it’s all signal and/or all noise
The media environment matters, and Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick’s catalog of the monitored world is worth sitting with: war in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan sparring, cartel violence in Mexico, Gaza, Venezuela, ICE raids, the Epstein files, data centers, heat waves, blizzards, Shia LaBeouf’s homophobia, Sweetgreen’s fall from grace, Demna’s Gucci, Jim Carrey’s face. All arriving on the same screen, in the same format, with the same demand for uptake. The flattening is not a side effect. The flattening is the product. A feed that preserved salience hierarchies would slow you down.
What has changed most dramatically is both the volume of information and the disappearance of lag. Even in the mid-nineties, when I was building a terrible little website to review hardcore punk records to an audience of no one, events retained a buffer. News traveled. It congealed. It arrived with a delay that made digestion possible. The gap between event and representation created cognitive space in which a response — or a decision not to respond — could form. Now the event and its representation nearly coincide. The feed refreshes and the world pours in. There is no moment between stimulus and scroll.
Robin Dunbar’s research on social cognition points to something foundational: human beings evolved for finite networks of roughly 150 stable relationships, and within those networks, information arrived with stakes attached. Your knowledge of a conflict had consequences because you were in it. Reciprocity and ownership were built into the signal. What monitoring produces is the opposite — signals that arrive in a register deliberately stripped of action-relevance. War in Iran and fashion week reach you in the same format and with the same gravity because the medium has removed the variable that would tell you whether to act or look away. The question isn’t whether you can hold that much in your head. It’s that nothing in the design of the system tells you what holding it is for.
And as a child nurtured on Weberian Protestant work ethic, I can’t help but notice quickly the demand for attentional vigilance takes on a moral coloration. There is pride in staying informed, in having read the thread, in being able to narrate the background of a conflict when someone else cannot. Exposure begins to feel like seriousness. The capacity to stomach the feed resembles fortitude.
I am implicated here as much as anyone. I often experience the act of tracking events as a form of responsibility. To look away feels vaguely unserious. To limit intake feels like moral failure, or at least an admission of weakness.
You’ll notice that even in this quick analysis, several distinct heavily-loaded concepts have sneakily braided themselves together: seeing blends into knowing, knowing into caring, caring into moral standing, moral standing into citizenship, citizenship into identity. Once those threads are fused, they are very difficult to separate.
The result is a posture in which consuming the totality of available crises feels like an obligation for anyone who wants to see themselves as a decent person — and in which stepping away feels like an announcement of your indifference.
This is a trap that I am firmly stuck inside of.
I have spent most of my adult life — including fifteen years teaching philosophy at the university level — operating on the premise that education is the closest thing we have to a solution. Not a sufficient one. Not a painless one. But the direction in which problems get smaller rather than larger. The more people understand, the better equipped they are to act. The better informed we are, the better we will behave. I have staked a career on some version of this. I am Doc-ipedia because I genuinely believe that context matters, that knowing where things are helps you navigate them, that the hard work of explanation and understanding is worth undertaking.
The problem is that I have made knowledge do work it cannot do. I have treated the knowledge gap as the primary gap, when the actual gaps — of power, of resources, of structural access — are not informational in nature and are not closed by information. The compulsion to monitor makes this sleight of hand visible: the faith in knowledge-as-cure assumes that the distance between knowing and acting is itself informational. Give people the facts; behavior follows. But what monitoring actually produces isn’t a knowledge surplus that overflows into action. It produces a diffusion of attention that forecloses the kind of sustained, situated engagement that changes things. Or it creates a guy like me who is essentially an over-educated trivia machine.
You can know everything about a situation and be perfectly paralyzed by it, because the knowledge arrived without a vector. We know about climate change; we book the flight. We know about labor exploitation; we click ‘Buy Now.’ We know the conflict’s backstory; we refresh the feed. Knowing and acting are not on the same axis. They are orthogonal.
More of one does not produce more of the other. Without a point of application, information isn’t power.
The Will to Truth, powered by a three stimulant blend
Nietzsche’s reflections on the will to truth hover around this whole discussion. The desire to ‘get it right’ carries enormous psychological weight. Correct apprehension promises stability. To position oneself accurately within the swirl of events feels like anchoring, like securing a foothold in moving sand. The act of situating — naming the actors, tracing the history, placing the town on the map — produces a specific satisfaction I have spent most of my adult life chasing. Not pleasure exactly. More like relief. Like briefly outrunning the feeling that things are happening faster than I can hold them.
But total perspective is never actually on offer. The map can grow more detailed, more intricate, more exhaustively labeled — and still the terrain shifts beneath it. The relief is temporary. The feed refreshes. The compulsion continues. And somewhere halfway through my second C4 Tri-Stim of the day, if I’m being honest with myself, the mapping starts to look less like mastery and more like a particularly elaborate way of not sitting still — a way to fabricate some agency.
The childhood bedroom covered in maps now looks less like precocious intellectual formation and more like a young mind attempting to render the world containable. The borders were crisp. The colors were clean. The scale was printed neatly in the corner. There was a legend. The legend told you what the colors meant.
The contemporary feed redraws itself every second. It expands without limit, collapses distance, and delivers the sublime in digestible thumbnails. We scroll, we monitor, we update our internal maps. We experience the updating as participation. We experience the exhaustion as the cost of being serious. Neither of these is quite right.
Monitoring vs. Witnessing vs. Attending vs. Letting
The concern isn’t whether monitoring is good or bad. It’s how many different functions we’ve asked it to perform at once — and whether it can actually perform any of them without the others corrupting the result. It steadies us, but the steadying requires constant renewal. It signals seriousness, but the signal has decoupled from the thing it was supposed to signal. It creates the sensation of participation, but participation without a vector is just exposure.
The selected meme — ‘if I sleep tonight, who’ll monitor the situation’ — lands on something true: the monitoring has become load-bearing. We have outsourced our sense of presence in the world to the feed — and when I thumb down to refresh, I’m really not looking for news. I’m looking for permission to stop. The compulsion to repeat is about an attempt to master, dominate, and control the uncontrollable. That’s why it’s Freud’s entry point to introducing the death drive — the seemingly inexplicable tendency of the organism to circle the same unresolved stimulus again and again, as if repetition itself might finally domesticate it. Unfortunately for all of us humans, Simone de Beauvoir had it right: “nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive.”
So what should I be doing? I’m suspicious of the genre of essay that ends with five bullet points about digital hygiene, and I’m equally suspicious of myself in the role of the person who spent decades explaining things to people now explaining that explaining things to people might be part of the problem. Both suspicions are probably correct. But I do think the problem is misframed when it’s cast as a question of discipline or detachment — as if the solution were simply to look away more, or look less, or curate better. What monitoring produces is not an excess of attention but a distortion of its quality: restless, grasping, never quite arriving.
I intend to dig deep in the coming months into an ethical stance or comportment that is better suited to our world. Aristotle had a concept worth dusting off here: *hexis*, the cultivated disposition, the character you grow into through repeated practice rather than the rule you follow. The person of practical wisdom doesn’t apply a procedure to each situation. They have become the kind of person who perceives situations rightly and responds accordingly. What I’m after is something from the other direction too — not detachment, but a mode of dwelling that doesn’t grasp. A tuned presence rather than a surveilled one.
What a practice of staying and discerning might actually look like — as a cultivated disposition rather than a technique, as a way of being in the world rather than a strategy for managing the feed — is something I’m working through at length and will be writing about a lot in the future. Consider this a promissory note. The short version is that the opposite of monitoring isn’t ignorance or withdrawal. It’s a different relationship to attention itself: one in which you are present to what calls for presence, rather than equally available to everything that arrives.
I still memorize maps for fun. I still feel the quiet satisfaction of placing a town — Batman, Turkey — into a wider geopolitical frame. The act itself is harmless, often intensely gratifying, and occasionally even serendipitously beautiful. The borders stay where I put them — while I continue to discover new things. The legend still works.