The Doomscroll Industrial Complex: How Anxiety Became a Business Model

We need to talk about the doomers and the attention economy they’ve built. Not because they’re entirely wrong — from climate change to political extremism, a lot of their concerns are valid — but because they’ve created something extraordinary: a perpetual motion machine powered by anxiety.

Let’s call it the Doomscroll Industrial Complex (DIC). It operates on a simple principle: bad news is good business. But unlike traditional doom-peddlers who simply predicted the end times and waited to be proven right or wrong, today’s digital prophets have discovered a much more sustainable model.

The trick is to never be specifically wrong, only generally right about the direction of badness. Predict “The stock market will crash next week” and, if it doesn’t, you’ve failed. Predict “The financial system is built by fascists, careening into the sun and about to crash at any time,” and you can’t fail. Any volatility proves you right, and stability just means the calm before the storm.

It’s Schrödinger’s Apocalypse — the world is simultaneously ending and not ending until someone opens Twitter and collapses the waveform.

The Ecosystem of Doom

But the DIC isn’t just prophets shouting warnings. It’s a symbiotic ecosystem where everyone plays both preacher and follower.

Here’s how it works:

1. A prophet (influencer) posts a dire prediction.
2. Followers share the warning, adding their own layer of anxiety.
3. The prophet’s reach grows.
4. New followers join, primed to expect disaster.
5. The prophet must find increasingly dire warnings to satisfy the growing demand.
6. GOTO 1.

This creates a Nash equilibrium of neurosis, where the rational move for everyone is to keep feeding the loop. The result? A collective mental health crisis.

Yes, humans have always loved bad news. Town criers weren’t exactly announcing golden harvests. But the difference now is speed and reward structure. Town criers didn’t get dopamine hits from real-time engagement metrics. They couldn’t A/B test which version of “The plague is coming” would get the most traction. They didn’t build personal brands around being consistently, aesthetically pessimistic.

Modern prophets, however, are working within a system that optimizes for anxiety.

The Numbers Behind the Doom

Studies consistently show that negative content garners significantly more engagement than positive content across social media platforms. Research analyzing over 105,000 headlines found that each additional negative word increased click-through rates by 2.3%, while positive words had the opposite effect.

A study of nearly three million political posts on Facebook and Twitter revealed that negative posts received roughly twice the engagement of positive ones, with criticisms of opposing ideologies driving the highest interactions. This trend — known as negativity bias — extends to online news consumption, where negative headlines attract more attention and are shared more frequently than positive ones.

Collectively, these patterns incentivize content creators to focus on pessimistic narratives, perpetuating the dominance of negative content in digital spaces. It creates a paradox: the more accurate a “prophet’s” warnings, the less engagement they get. Real problems require nuanced solutions, careful analysis, and boring policy changes. That earns you 12 likes. An eloquent prediction of civilizational collapse? 12,000.

The DIC doesn’t just make us needlessly anxious. It dilutes our ability to respond to genuine threats. When everything is an emergency, nothing is.

Monetizing the Apocalypse: How Doom Sells Subscriptions

But doomerism isn’t just an attention economy; it’s a subscription economy. For many modern prophets of collapse, platforms like Substack and Patreon have become lucrative tools for converting anxiety into income. The formula is simple: identify a real or exaggerated threat, package it as exclusive insight, and charge people for access to your unique brand of pessimism.

Here’s how the monetization cycle works:

1. Free Content as a Hook: Doom prophets start with alarming public posts — often on Twitter, Medium, or other high-visibility platforms. These posts are designed to spark immediate engagement, planting the seeds of fear and curiosity.
2. The Paywall Pivot: Once a sizable audience is hooked, they introduce paid tiers on Substack or Patreon. The promise? Deeper insights, more urgent warnings, or specific “actionable steps” to survive the inevitable collapse.
3. FOMO and Exclusivity: The language shifts to urgency: “You won’t see this anywhere else.” By framing their paid content as exclusive knowledge, they tap into a scarcity mindset. Missing out feels risky, especially when the stakes are portrayed as existential.
4. Recurring Revenue Through Fear: Monthly subscriptions ensure a steady stream of income, creating a system where continued earnings depend on maintaining high levels of anxiety among subscribers.

Doom is a powerful emotional hook. Subscribers feel a mix of loyalty to the creator and fear of missing vital information. This creates a dynamic where people are not just consuming content — they’re buying a sense of preparedness, even if the “preparedness” is vague reassurance or additional layers of fear.

The more dire the prediction, the more likely it is to drive subscriptions. Moderation or nuance, on the other hand, doesn’t sell.

The Feedback Loop of Profit and Panic

Once a doom prophet achieves a stable subscriber base, the stakes change. They can’t afford to stop being alarmist — it’s their brand. A few predictable patterns emerge:

• Escalating Predictions: If yesterday’s warning was about financial instability, today’s must hint at total economic collapse.
• Broad, Vague Threats: Specific predictions are risky; general forecasts keep the fear alive without the risk of being proven wrong.
• Perpetual Crisis Framing: Every piece of news is reframed as a symptom of the larger collapse. Stability is never an option — only delayed chaos.

The result is a cottage industry of paid pessimism, where creators profit from their audience’s escalating anxiety.

The monetization of doom reinforces the entire Doomscroll Industrial Complex. As more creators join the ecosystem, the competition to craft the most engaging, fear-driven narratives intensifies. For subscribers, the cost isn’t just financial; it’s emotional and psychological.

When doom becomes a product, fear becomes the price we all pay.

A Coordination Problem

We’re dealing with a coordination problem where individuals are behaving rationally (for their own interests, at any rate) within an irrational system. The answers are varied:

1. Changing incentives: Build engagement metrics that reward constructive solutions and nuanced analysis instead of emotional manipulation.
2. Developing better mental models: Teach people how to critically evaluate apocalyptic predictions.
3. Building resilience: Find ways to insulate ourselves from the dopamine-driven feedback loop.
4. Or, of course, we could all move to small farms in Montana.

The first three options are hard but not impossible. They require intentional design and collective effort. The fourth option? I can see the appeal. But there’s a degree of doomerism in the desire to switch off and disconnect from it all, a sense of fait accompli. Not to mention, I’m not exactly the outdoorsy type.

Beyond the Doom

The most dangerous thing about the DIC is how it distorts reality. Like a funhouse mirror, it reflects real issues, but warps them into unrecognizability. Real threats become harder to distinguish from performative panic, leaving us either paralyzed or numb.

And here we are, scrolling through the end of the world before breakfast. Again. And again. And again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It’s not as easy as just avoiding doom content — it’s relearning how to see the world as it is, not as our phones tell us it should be. We need places where you can say “things might be okay” without someone calling you a damned fool, and “things might be bad” without trying to sell you something.

The world has always been ending, in one way or another. What’s different now is how we metabolize that knowledge, how we carry it with us through our days. The solution isn’t to look away from difficult truths, but to learn to see them clearly — to distinguish between actionable information and algorithmic amplification, between genuine concern and manufactured outrage.

The most radical act is to step back and ask: What if the world isn’t ending, but changing? What if our role isn’t to be perpetual witnesses to doom, but active participants in whatever comes next?

There’s a difference between being informed and being consumed.

Finding that line — and holding it — may be the defining challenge of our digital age.