On Twitter, people appear to identify objects and phenomena with “cursed energy” every hour of every day. It’s not just creepy images: the word has acquired new valences, has come to signify increasingly generalized feelings of anxiety and malaise. “The way I use ‘cursed’ has a connotation of being trapped, i.e. a sort of Greek Mythology Ironic Eternal Punishment vibe,” Alex Pareene, a writer for The New Republic, told me.
We must be cursed, one would think, to spend so much of our day walking around with our eyes glued to a device that provokes bad feelings. Ashley Feinberg, a writer at Slate, wrote, in an e-mail, “To me, cursed energy is about any number of bad or dystopian things finding each other and congealing into something that is somehow more stupid than the sum of its parts.” She included a link to an image of an Instagram meltdown queen appearing on a leftist reactionary podcast whose hosts are best known for denigrating #MeToo and valorizing anorexia. Sam Biddle, who writes about tech for the Intercept, told me, “I think so much of the Internet feels like hell now that it just makes sense to blame it on the devil.”
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