When Your Phone Shows You Death - Navigating Witness in the Digital Age

You wake up on a Saturday morning and check your phone. Suddenly, you're watching a man die in the streets of Minneapolis while your daughter asks for pancakes in the next room. This is life in 2026—where the distance between witnessing state violence and making breakfast has collapsed to the width of a screen.

Charlie Warzel's latest Galaxy Brain podcast episode captures something many of us feel but struggle to articulate: the psychological whiplash of living with a "window to the world" that can drop us into graphic, real-time violence without warning. Through conversations with digital strategist Amanda Litman, the discussion reveals both the trauma and the power of our hyperconnected moment.

The Accidental Witness

The recent footage from Minneapolis—showing Alex Pretti's final moments as ICE agents shot him while he knelt on the street—exemplifies our current predicament. These videos didn't stay contained to news outlets or political circles. They broke through to spaces typically insulated from politics: golf influencers, knitting communities, even a "Gravestones of New England" Facebook page.

Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, noticed the shift immediately. "What I have seen over the last three weeks is people feeling like the shooting of Alex Pretti is the last straw," she observes. "This is the thing where you cannot stay silent."

The algorithmic nature of our feeds means these moments of witness are often unplanned, uncontextualized, and deeply jarring. A colleague of Warzel's described accidentally seeing Pretti's death while at an aquarium with his daughter—the cognitive dissonance of processing state violence while surrounded by families enjoying a weekend outing.

The Documentation Dilemma

Yet this same traumatic exposure serves a crucial democratic function. The multiple angles of Pretti's shooting, captured by observers who kept filming despite the danger, immediately countered official narratives labeling him a "would-be assassin." Without this documentation, the administration's version might have stood unchallenged.

This creates what Warzel calls our "unanswerable and essential question": What do we do with this window to the world? The footage is both evidence of injustice and a source of secondary trauma. It's both crucial civic information and potentially harmful content that platforms struggle to moderate appropriately.

The complexity deepened when TikTok users reported their anti-ICE content receiving zero views following the platform's ownership transfer to American investors including Larry Ellison. Whether due to technical glitches or algorithmic manipulation, the incident highlighted how our information diet depends on platforms owned by billionaires with their own political agendas.

Beyond Performative Posting

Litman offers a framework for navigating this landscape without losing your sanity: "Only take the poison I have the antidote for." This means engaging deeply with issues where you can take meaningful action—whether through voting, donating, volunteering, or community organizing—while scrolling past problems beyond your sphere of influence.

This selective engagement challenges the common dismissal of social media activism as "virtue signaling." Litman argues that virtue signaling is actually valuable, especially when the alternative is "vice signaling"—the normalization of cruelty and bigotry online. "We should be proud of being good people," she argues.

Research suggests that political content shared by typically non-political creators carries more influence than posts from explicitly political accounts. When a golf influencer breaks their usual silence to comment on state violence, it reaches audiences that political operatives never could.

The Right Amount of Online

The conversation extends to how politicians should navigate these platforms. Litman identifies a sweet spot: leaders who are "online enough" to understand the tools and formats without developing what she calls "brain rot"—the inability to distinguish between internet discourse and real-world priorities.

Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxwell Frost demonstrate this balance, using contemporary formats authentically without getting lost in meme culture. Meanwhile, others either remain stuck in "dial-up thinking" or become so terminally online they lose touch with broader constituencies.

Zohran Mamdani's recent campaign videos exemplified this balance—using familiar "man on the street" interview formats while maintaining genuine curiosity about voters' perspectives. The content felt native to the platform while serving traditional political communication goals.

Building Real Community

Perhaps most importantly, both Warzel and Litman emphasize that online engagement must connect to offline action. Litman's experiment of hosting 52 dinners in 2025—welcoming over 100 people into her home—became what she calls "the most political thing I did."

These gatherings weren't explicitly political, but they built the social infrastructure necessary for collective action. "When ICE comes to New York," Litman reflects, "who are the people I'm gonna text? It's the folks who've come over to my home for dinner."

This points to a broader truth about surviving our current moment: the antidote to algorithmic isolation isn't better content curation—it's stronger real-world relationships. Whether through neighborhood cleanups, local government meetings, or simply bringing dinner to someone in need, civic engagement requires showing up in person.