Facedown in the dirt, bright lights in the distance. Your ears ring. There's a foul smell and it might be you. It's hot and cold and a thousand other complex things. You think you lost your bones somewhere along the way. Stuttering breaths fail to fill shallow lungs. the dull crackling says the violence is ongoing.
The issue is that people are imperfect. People are messy. We strive for the cracks and the gaps. No system to categorize us will ever work in the same way that no system to control us will ever work. Generating ideas is free. Big ideas eat little ideas until the little have enough and dream bigger. It's about freedom, we tell ourselves. It's about peace and joy and all the other important things we want for ourselves.
To assume an intent to the system is an unfair anthropomorphism. Is it more accurate to ascribe the malice of a few in power to the indifference of the many with their hands on the scale? No, the system grinds and crushes because that is what happens when we build big things. Large trucks mow down pedestrians and the only feedback is to improve suspension so you won't notice the bumps. You cannot built a tower to god without ripping up a village. Where else should our monuments go?
What good is there left for you or I? What say you, spitting dirt and teeth from your broken jaw? What words do you whisper to the dying you cradle? What can you possibly say? The sun burns overhead, ever hotter. It grows by the day, inching its way towards us.
I often think of the moon. It sits up there, always staring down on us. It is caught in our gravity as much as we are caught in its. Do you know about tidal forces? Nothing spins in perfect circles. The moon goes in an oval and the slight difference causes the Earth to be squeezed. Water sloshes over the cracked surface and the rocks shift. It trades rotational energy for gravitational potential energy and draws ever more distant every year, millimetre by millimetre.
Sometimes, I think it runs because it hates us. I hate us too.
Power has to be enforced by force because there is no power but the end of the blade. The ability to be stabbed is a form of power too. See, maybe if we blunt the blades with flesh, chip the edges on bones, maybe someday the reaping will end. Maybe the machine will become so disgusted with the process, so choked with our blood, that it will have no choice to stop. Maybe they can't build a tower so high that the bones in the basement can't pull it down. Maybe the closets can fill with skeletons and when they build more closets, we can fill those too.
Why have machines when we can have temples to dark gods? Does the child know to question? Do they stare at the stone walls and columns and know to ask what lies beyond? Statues of ancient beings who still live stand beside the ever glowing money boxes. Why pray to god? My god is a machine that eat words as easily as the sky eats stars. I pray to it every night, a sick devotion of an absent self. There is no truth because there are no words but what it tells me. There are no words because I have nothing to buy them with. Pray to your devils, my children. Pray for a damnation. Let the machines roar and let the floodgates open! Why hold yourself to a standard of existence? Why exist at all? Simply fade into a malady of flesh and metal. You are amalgam, barely subsistent.
There is a process to this. There is a method to the madness. There is a path to be cut through the spaces of thought. I think there is a disease of ideas, by which I mean a lack within. It isn't about the art and it isn't about the soul and it isn't about anything. Nothing is about anything. To claim more is to claim that you can divine the truth in the abstraction. To look upon the waves of the ocean or the scattered bones of the lamb and see the future. There is no way to do so. There is no divinity in the machine or the flesh.
Why exist? Why fight? Why do you break your body upon their clubs? For surely peace is easier. For surely one should simply submit to the ordering. Why suffer the pain of knowledge? It is a burden to understand, to see. Blind yourself. Cut out your eyes with the knife they hand you. Accept the terms of the engagement. Drive the forbidden words from your mind. Open your brain so slowly and cut them out of your mind until the shape of the concepts has left you entirely.
It is a process best undertaken alone and surrounded. It is found in crowds, faces all down as the planes streak overhead. You broke your jaw and you broke your chances. In turn, they broke your brain. What is left of you? Would you recognize me? Would you recognize yourself in the mirror? See a shard of it in the dull glass. Buy, buy, buy, say the glowing signs. It's in your eyes, the need to subscribe, to pay up, to divine a meaning in the places where words fail.
It's easier, perhaps to just stop caring. It's easier to cut it out. You can do that. You can atrophy the parts of you that care. You just have to stop. You just have to let them in, one sacrifice at a time, one little touch leading to so much more.
Oh, fuck me gently and roughly and however you want. Take my delicate body and ruin in. Make me a paradox of probability, the ghost in the machine faked for profit. I have nothing more to say to you. I have nothing left to give.
There is no plan. There is no god. There is no future. I only broke my body. At least I still have my mind. That way I can still watch.
Dear ChatGPT,
Today, I learned about the end of the world. Tell me it's going to be okay.