Fear of a broke planet

David Carr on the bad news:

The other day, I got in a cab and there was a news report on the back seat television about soaring unemployment in New York. An info-screen on an ascending elevator ride in Manhattan suggested that we were all only going one way -- down. The news zippers in Times Square were full of reports of crumbling consumer confidence even as people streamed in to the stores beneath them.

Once I made it to my office, it got worse. An RSS feed from Reuters was waiting on my desktop saying, "U.S. employers axed 533,000 jobs from payrolls in November, the most in 34 years." My e-mail inbox not only included a note from a friend that she had been laid off, but it was flanked by contextual ads from Google labeled "Unemployed?"

I have a pal who is persistently I.M.-ing me because he is at loose ends after being laid off, and my social networks are rife with digital fretting and various versions of, 'Did you hear about so-and-so?' Why, yes I did. Over and over.

Every modern recession includes a media séance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in. The same digital dynamics that drove the irrational exuberance -- and marketed the loans to help it happen -- are now driving the downside in unprecedented ways.

The recession was actually not officially declared until last week, but the psychology that drives it had already been e-mailed, blogged and broadcast for months. I used to worry that my TiVo thought I was gay -- doesn't everyone enjoy a little "Project Runway" at the end of a long, hard week? Now I worry that my browser knows I am about to lose my job.