Dustin Mitchell was scanning the local news one day when inspiration struck in an unlikely article. The report was on a woman who, in a fit of QAnon mania, had destroyed a display of face masks at a Scottsdale, Arizona, Target store. The woman later explained what brought her to that point: “All I did was doomscroll,” she said, referring to her voracious consumption of disastrous news on social media. Something in Mitchell clicked.
“That’s a killer name for a band,” thought Mitchell, a metal guitarist in Dallas, Texas. “I got to do that.”
Mitchell, 38, whose day job involves operations at Amazon, says he doesn’t personally doomscroll. Mitchell is not very online; he’ll check local news every now and then, maybe NPR, but doesn’t use Twitter or Reddit outside of researching new gear for his music. To Mitchell, Doomscroll was the impetus he needed to start his new “progressive thrash metal band.” To set it in stone, last February, Mitchell filed his first trademark request with the US Patent and Trademark Office for the word “doomscroll.” And a few months later, he received an email from the USPTO acknowledging that the trademark would go through in 30 days, and then officially publish. At that point, Doomscroll would become Mitchell’s alone to protect and exploit as a band name and entertainment property. Doomscroll would, one day, rock. Mitchell registered www.facebook.com/doomscroll in anticipation.
In October, Mitchell was noodling around on his guitar before bed when he decided to check his email one last time. A message from a lawyer appeared in his inbox. “Dear Mr. Mitchell,” it read. “My law firm represents Id Software LLC which owns the video game DOOM and related registered trademarks.” That day, October 13, it continued, was the deadline for Id Software LLC, or anyone else, to oppose his trademark application to register “doomscroll.” The lawyer asked Mitchell to agree to extend the deadline. That way, Mitchell and the Doom developer could find time to reach a resolution before any legal action went down.
Mitchell immediately felt funny; even a little sour. He was 10 in 1993, when Doom took the gaming world by storm, empowering edgelord gamers to head-pop demons with a bevy of firearms against the background of fiery hell. He had played Doom and Doom 2 back in the day, both of which he describes as “awesome,” and had listened to the metal-inspired soundtrack for 2020’s Doom Eternal, which he describes as “not bad.” Now Mitchell found himself in an unexpected standoff with its developer. He loved those games as a kid, he says, but “they're trying to take something away from me that is completely unrelated to them.”
The first use of doomscroll is often credited to a 2018 tweet: “Taking a break from doomscrolling and being inundated with things and stuff,” wrote artist Calla Mounkes. “I’ll be back Tuesday or something.” Mounkes says she had been using the term since 2017 but isn’t sure she came up with it. “I think it was something that was coming up in our public conscience,” she told WIRED over email. “When we are all attached to a smartphone, just as I am writing this from one, it is inevitable that we will come up with language to describe our forever fascination with social media.”
