The last couple of days have been a great example of the insidiousness of social media generally and Twitter in particular. Not as a platform for radicalization, but as an addictive source of a false sense of being informed.

When actual breaking news happens, there's a kind of exhilarating sense of seeing events unfold in "real time," and I end up refreshing Twitter like a lab rat given access to a button that dispenses food pellets. *CLICK* Give me my next news pellet!

The problem with this is twofold: First, it's almost impossible to get a meaningful understanding of events in "real time," even if you have access to unfiltered sources of information from the scene, which Twitter very much is not.

The second problem is the more insidious one, though, which is that this compulsion to click for more news pellets carries over long past the point when significant events are taking place rapidly enough to justify it.

I was struck by this yesterday afternoon, when I found myself clicking the button and looking for news pellets EVEN THOUGH NOTHING WAS HAPPENING. It took a disgracefully long time to realize that I really didn't have any reason to be doing that.

That realization, as always when some dramatic event drives me back to clicking the feeder button, was quickly followed by the realization that much of what I had been getting for the last several hours wasn't actually news pellets, but something ersatz. N00z pellets.

When you're getting updates of the form "The cousin of the secretary of the assistant to a senior advisor to the brother of a cabinet member says they're talking about the 25th Amendment," that's not news, it's n00z.

But like the lab rats with the feeder button, we're conditioned to keep clicking, even when the pellets being dispensed have all the nutritional value of compressed sawdust. Well, sure, this one was a n00z pellet, but maybe the NEXT click will be real...

And it's not just addictive to the Media Consumers ((tm) @thepressboxpod )-- the suppliers are addicted, too. There's an endorphin rush from clicking on the button and getting a jackpot of pellets, but think what it's like for the folks getting all the likes for making pellets.

There's a constant demand for more pellets, be they news or n00z, and thus a constant demand to shovel more informational sawdust into the hopper to be compressed and pelletized and then dispensed to the next lab rat who clicks refresh.

I think that's the secret driver of the problems with insider-ism that @swarthmoreburke was talking about yesterday. It's not just social connections, it's a need to constantly have n00z pellets to dispense. https://twitter.com/swarthmoreburke/status/1347354552123727872

Because when you step back for a moment and look at most of the stuff reported by the cousin of the secretary to the manager of the guy who cleans the floors in a Senator's office, what really stands out is how utterly insignificant it all is.

Integrated over a span of months or years, there's a tiny amount of value in there, history to be extracted from the pattern of n00z, in the same way that, given time and a full lab you could probably extract actual nutrients from a large enough pile of sawdust.

But none of this is actual meaningful news, the sort of thing it's worth pausing a family dinner to refresh Twitter for. It's just meaningless churn, filling time on the feeds that keep the clicks coming.

And yet, there I am, like an asshole, checking Twitter on my phone at the dinner table, just to see what the latest dispenser-load of n00z pellets contains something real.

It's maddening when I catch myself falling into it, and it's ultimately as toxic as any of the problematic #content being pushed out via social media. We want-- nay, DEMAND-- news to be happening RIGHT NOW, at all hours of the day.

And the sad and boring fact is that real news is a system of punctuated equilibria. When significant events happen, they happen rapidly, and then absolutely nothing meaningful happens for hours or days.

We've been tricked, though, into thinking that there's always news, 24 hours a day, and when there isn't, we try to elevate n00z in its place. And that's severely corrosive to both individual mental health and general civic health.

This was on full display yesterday, when there were dozens of tweets of the form "Nothing major has happened today, that must be Significant..."

That actually helped snap me out of the n00z cycle, because I said "Wait a minute, that's just how things are SUPPOSED to be..." And realized that I'd been frantically refreshing the feed to learn what Josh Hawley's dentist's receptionist overheard, or whatever.

The constant expectation that we should be in the middle of dramatic events is not realistic, and it's not healthy. Take a breath. Put down the phone. In the immortal words of Jimmy Serrano, eat a sandwich, have a glass of milk, do some fuckin' thing.

Rant over. No, wait, one last thing: Get off my fucking lawn.