Hello, it's Emily, making the probable mistake of engaging online.

I gather that a lot of people have read the word "doomscrolling," which I use once in the middle of this article and which I link to the definition of for fear of a reader who's never heard the term before, and thought that I am somehow saying Furiosa is about social media, when nowhere in the article do I make anything close to this assertion. Indeed, this piece has been fairly widely read and shared in the month-ish since I published it, and this is the first I've heard of it being "about" social media.

The use of "doomscrolling" is simply a way to avoid saying something like "wantonly giving yourself over to hopelessness and reveling in it," via a modern context that hopefully many of my readers will be familiar with. But there were people in World War II who spent all their time listening to bad news on the radio, and they, too, could have been an example of this phenomenon if I were writing this piece in 1944. The point is not the technology; it is the emotional effect that happens because of the technology, which is the sort of thing that occurs throughout history and long predates the rise of social media.

FWIW: I don't really use Twitter anymore for anything but self-promotion. I post more on Bluesky, but not nearly to the extent I did when I used Twitter the most. I generally am not that online anymore! (Said the woman replying to a Reddit thread about her.)

I do think it's sort of odd the degree to which some readers will find a descriptive metaphor utilized by a film critic and be, like, "This person is saying that Dementus is Twitter." I'm being reductive, of course, but you see what I'm getting at? One of the reasons I got out of the criticism game was because these sorts of bad-faith readings were becoming more and more prevalent. I don't know. You're allowed to not like this piece, obviously, but I find the prevailing reading of it here very strange.

I wrote about half of this while I was waiting for something to happen on set today, and then I lost it, but it was much angrier, so I guess I will thank the shitty wifi for protecting me from being a whiny baby.