Notes on media narratives and doom deprogramming

When you picture the future , really picture it, what do you see?

Not your future. The future. The collective one. In one, two, three generations from now. Close your eyes for a second.

What’s there?

Now ask yourself: where did that image come from? Who furnished it?

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You might say it came from the people around you, from lived experience, from what you know to be true. And some of it did. But our collective vision – the shared story we carry about where things are headed – that comes from what we’ve been shown. The films we’ve watched. Headlines we’ve scrolled.Conversations we’ve overheard. All shaped by the same media ecosystem we’re all swimming in.

And that ecosystem has never had any interest in showing you a hopeful future.

We tested this recently. We asked our community a simple question: What media have you seen that shows a utopian future? 

Almost every answer that came back was a dystopian story – The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror, The Last of Us. Dark, The Compound . But when I pointed it out, they realized,  “Wait – you said utopian.” They’d misread the question entirely. They had assumed ‘dystopian’ before they even finished reading it….

That’s not an individual glitch. That’s an installed worldview.

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And it didn’t get there by accident. “If it bleeds it leads” is the oldest rule in the newsroom. Negativity bias – tension, threat, conflict – has always been the engine of storytelling, from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to Hollywood. These aren’t new leanings. What’s new is the delivery system.

The algorithm learned to surface the most alarming content, continuously, into a device in your pocket, engineered to be as frictionless and addictive as possible. What used to be a campfire story, a nightly news broadcast, a film you watched once and then left the cinema – is now a relentless, immersive feed, drawing you in at every waking hour, filling every empty moment.

And the more time we spend inside these narratives, the less time we spend in the real world – where people actually help each other, where communities hold, where ordinary human decency happens regularly and without an audience.

These frightening narratives don’t just serve as warnings or possibilities any more. At this dosage, they feel like a certainty. They feel like that’s all there is or ever will be. 

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What gets installed over time is something deeper than anxiety. It’s a nihilistic worldview. Everything is wrong. Systems are failing. We are probably, definitely doomed. There’s no hope left. 

But this, like everything else that hasn’t happened yet, is still a story. You absorbed it – the way you absorb anything you’re immersed in long enough, without realising it’s happening.

So  what have you stopped imagining because it started to feel naive? Not just naive – embarrassing. Like you’d sound foolish saying it out loud.

Clean waterways? Walkable cities? Peace-keeping politicians? Non-extractive economic systems?

When did those stop feeling possible? And who benefits from the abandonment of these beliefs?

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Did you know we healed the ozone layer?

In the 1970s and 80s, scientists discovered that CFCs – the chemicals in refrigerants and aerosol sprays – were tearing a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Without it, UV radiation would have made significant parts of the planet uninhabitable. It was a genuine planetary emergency.

In 1987, 197 countries signed the Montreal Protocol, agreeing to phase out ozone-depleting substances. Industries changed. Regulations held. And it worked. The ozone layer has been slowly recovering ever since. Scientists now expect it to be fully restored by mid-century.

It is one of the most successful examples of coordinated global action in human history.

You’ve probably barely heard about it.

That’s not an accident. A story about humans identifying a catastrophic problem and collectively solving it through regulation and international cooperation doesn’t perform well in a media ecosystem built on activation and fear. It got solved – and then it disappeared from the cultural conversation, leaving only the template of catastrophe behind. What gets filtered out isn’t evidence that doesn’t exist, but evidence that doesn’t perform.

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Stories like this don’t surface because your fear has a market. It keeps us watching and there are industries waiting at every emotional exit of a frightened population: the urge to defend and control, to numb and distract, to distrust the people around you and solve it alone. 

Frightened people buy readily – anything from supplements to scapegoats to the inevitability of existing systems.

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To be clear about where we stand: things aren’t great. Climate change is real and already here. The economic systems we’ve built contain their own self-defeating logic. Authoritarianism is on the rise. AI is largely unregulated. The era of ever-increasing convenience and creature comforts cannot continue. This is not denial of any of that.

But the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world. On the other side of failing systems are always other possible systems. What gets built there depends entirely on what people were able to imagine before and during the transition. The ozone layer recovered because enough people could still picture a world where it did – and then built the political conditions to make it happen.

Is it too late? Who knows. But at the very least, a better vision of the future creates a less paralyzing present.

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There is also something in being forced to witness the scale of injustice that’s now visible to us – the cruelty, the corruption, the failures of institutions we were taught to trust.

None of it is new. It has been here, in some form, for a long time. It was just hidden behind closed doors and implicit trust of the majority.  And you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge – however gut-wrenching, however maddening, this visibility is what makes real, systemic healing possible.

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This is the one thing we know for certain: there is no path to a livable future that doesn’t begin with the ability to picture one. You cannot be what you cannot see. 

We’re not the first to levy a critique against the media’s bleak bias. But we can’t wait for Hollywood or publishing houses to catch up.

What’s needed isn’t more content that makes us feel better inside the same system. Hopecore, nostalgia, uplifting compilations – these offer relief, which has its place. But relief inside the same feed that made you afraid is a palette cleanser, not structural change. It doesn’t touch the underlying script.

The underlying narrative is the problem. And narratives can be rewritten, healed.  But only if you first notice you’ve been handed one.

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Doom deprogramming is the practice of unraveling the hopeless stories we’ve inherited. 

This is not hopecore or positivity. Not nostalgia or sentimentality. Not a longing for bygone eras where things were still deeply inequitable and extractive. Those things offer relief or fantasy, which has its place. But relief inside the same feed that made you afraid is a palette cleanser, not structural change.

This is the active, ongoing work of identifying the script you’ve been handed about the future – questioning where it came from, who benefits from it, and replacing it, slowly and deliberately, with something you actually want to move toward.

Not a feeling or a wish, but an intentional practice.

The antidote is in exposure. Deliberately, repeatedly seeking out visions of a future that works – in fiction, in history, in community, in your own imagination – until the doom story stops feeling like the only possible ending.