Hi Brendan, you may remember me as @Jaraparilla on Twitter. Since 2011 I’ve been quite critical of some of your online positions, especially in support of the Guardian’s anti-Assange media bullshit, but I think this post of yours is very important.

I am 51 years old now. I was one of thousands “blogging against Bush” since 2003. Over the past 13 years I have seen far too many people succumb to despair and stress and anger. As an old friend warned, quoting Nietsche: “He who battles monster must seek to ensure that he does not become a monster himself.” Right wing Iraq War bloggers always found solidarity in groupthink, but those who opposed them were usually on their own. So it goes.

Soldiers who returned from the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan were treated for PTSD, but those who suffered mental anxiety while waging war on the new online information front were ignored. We all saw daily horrors like dead babies, IED explosions, etc. To some of us, it was hugely distressing. To others it was mere entertainment, and fodder for the online information cannons. I long ago learned to block anyone who posted such images, even if I was sympathetic to the cause I espoused, simply because witnessing them would throw me into a spiral of depression.

Psychologists have not even begun to contemplate this new and depressing online reality, probably because there is no corporate funding to validate it. Have any PhD students even addressed it? If so, their efforts have probably been bought out and silenced by the same tertiary education bloc that helped kill Aaron Swartz.

So thanks for posting this, good luck, and hopefully we can find some common ground going forward. Those were heady days back in 2010–11.