The link between tearing down hostage posters and the pandemic

As someone who considers himself a realist, if not a cynic, I’m not really surprised by any of the blatant antisemitism we’ve seen in America in the wake of the horrific terror attack in Israel. This sentiment very rarely spilled out in public before, but it existed, simmering just beneath the surface. It’s disappointing, but not a shock.

That said, the one truly incomprehensible offshoot of the increase is visible antisemitism has been people tearing down the posters of Israeli hostages. These people are often young and female. They seem almost gleeful. These incidents have been reported in blue cities, like New York and Philadelphia — and that’s telling.

What makes someone act out like this in public, in front of other people, in this delusional and disgusting way? It’s completely unnatural — foreign to how a normal functional adult typically behaves. The odious ideology is familiar — it’s the same brats chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” But ripping down posters of innocent children? That’s normally where some level of shame and embarrassment should kick in.

I have a theory. This is a symptom of our post-pandemic world, where people who became accustomed to a daily life devoid of IRL (in real life) interaction, endlessly scrolling, becoming radicalized by social media, are no longer able to carry themselves in public like normal human beings should. They’ve been infected by something deep — a brainwashing of the digital world — and simply never emerged on the other side of Covid with the ability to adjust back into a society that exists in the real world.

The diseased digital experience is simply now playing out in public.

This certainly correlates with what we’ve seen in a variety of polls. Survey after survey has found that social media use has increased post-pandemic, with teens younger and younger starting to scroll endlessly. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, “pro-Palestinian” hashtags are used exponentially more than “pro-Israel” ones, meaning the content these users are getting skews heavily in one direction. Meanwhile, loneliness has reached epidemic levels, when looking across the globe, especially among younger people.

These factors would have likely led to this moment and these problems in an alternate universe 2023 where the pandemic never happened. We were already a society increasingly disconnected from each other through social media and dating apps and delivery apps that make human interaction less frequent, or at least more distorted.

The monoculture of entertainment and information consumption is gone. There’s less community, actual in-person and even virtual, as every part of our lives keeps getting both more algorithmically tailored to our precise interests and more separated from each other and a common set of ideals, interests and principles. We’ve seen continued declines in community engagement, civic participation and religious services attendance.

And looking ahead to what’s coming with AI, with the metaverse, with automation — it’s only going to get worse.

These trends were already there in 2019 and early 2020, but then the pandemic hit. “Long Covid” is a pretty murky diagnosis that science still doesn’t understand. But the actual “Long Covid” — the real lasting pandemic effect — is how it’s made some of us even less connected to each other and less able to function in the real world.

We are more reliant on the digital and the virtual. Work-from-home was never fully retired in favor of back-to-office. There’s a rise in using restaurant drive-throughs rather than going out to eat or even simply walking inside and daring to interact with another human.

And this goes to the highest levels of society. The head of HBO, Casey Bloys, was forced to apologize earlier this month for instructing staff to use burner Twitter accounts in 2020 and 2021 to argue with TV critics who didn’t give his shows favorable reviews. Bloys specifically cited the pandemic to explain his actions, attributing it to “spending an unhealthy amount of time scrolling Twitter.”

Of course, Bloys is part of the industry that has contributed to this shift away from shared experiences, with the push to streaming and endless niche choices. Meanwhile, physical media has disintegrated as a viable business in many ways. The New York Times is as much The Daily podcast or The Morning email newsletter, and certainly the website, than the physical paper. But tangible media and tactile interaction are necessary to give us some connection to the physical world. Losing the ability to touch — in fact, the dulling of several cultural senses — has had serious negative societal effects.

All of this contributes to the way people are increasingly less able to function like normal adults IRL, as they are relegated to staring at screens and “doom-scrolling.” It can manifest in depression and loneliness. Or going to the coffeeshop and finding people less able to make eye contact with you, or act slightly off during in-person interactions.

And it can also play out as young people ripping down posters of children being held hostage by Hamas because their ideology du jour tells them this is an action that is justified, no matter how bizarre it may seem. It’s almost a rejection not just of Israel and Jews, but of the physical world, by those who now function better away from humans — without stepping back to think how monumentally inhuman it appears.

We must fight this instinct. Touch grass, as they say. Don’t buy into the false premise that what happens on social media has a bearing on real life. If you do use social media, don’t let yourself become obsessed, addicted or let it bleed into — and often overtake — your actual, physical life.

We need to collectively make a much bigger push through our media, our culture, our politics, our entertainment and our daily lives — especially in our local, physical communities — to overcome the “Long Covid” of pandemic fatigue, and the bad habits of the lockdown culture that has stunted the growth of so many, particularly younger Americans. We need to focus on a return to, at a bare minimum, being a country of fully functioning humans.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.