[Micro-preface: I dislike writing these now. I feel as though I’ve outgrown my old poetic complaints. But then, I write for you, don’t I? You, with your endless demands. You who always wants more. That I started is my regret; that I can’t stop is my torment; that I will go on is my shame. So, take this morsel, but please, for me, read my weightier meditations.]
You are no longer a person.
You are a constellation of data points. A flicker of search terms. A tremor of location pings. A tired sigh in the History tab of midnight. The machines have dissected you. Not with scalpels, but with algorithms, reducing the messy symphony of your humanity to a flat, hummable tune.
They claim to know you (and perhaps they do): 35% likely to buy organic, 82% compatible with melancholic playlists, 12% risk of defaulting on loyalty. Now you are a ghost haunting your own digital profile, forced to confront the hollow echo of who you’ve been told you are.
What cowardice made you surrender so willingly? What will to weakness compels you to kneel before these new priests of ones and zeros, these algorithmic inquisitors who demand your confession not of sin, but of preference? They care nothing for your soul… only your patterns, only your predictability, your herd-like obedience: cattle of the coded. And you, trembling, offer your flesh to their altar, carving yourself into palatable morsels. Hecatombs of the selfie. Laughable! "Know thyself?" No—sell thyself. But where is your defiance? Where is the Übermensch who laughs at their categories, who dances in the chaos they cannot name?
“To the algorithm, I am noise. To myself, I am symphony divine.”
—Recovered from a murdered poet’s encrypted hard drive.
THE PANOPTICON IS CODE NOW
Foucault warned of the prison where inmates internalize the watcher’s gaze, policing themselves under a myth of perpetual surveillance. But then what happens when the watchers are not guards, nor gods, but mere lines of code? The modern panopticon has no walls - only cookies, trackers, the quiet violence of “predictive analytics.”
We curate our opinions, our purchases, even our friendships, aware that somewhere, a server is listening, somewhere, a data center burns with the heat of a mechanical god dreaming. We apologize to the void, whispering, listening, “I wasn’t really searching for that” to no one. The algorithm, indifferent, insatiable, nods and logs your guilt anyway.
Ah, you virtuous preachers of transparency! You who claim to seek truth while shackling yourselves to its coldest, dullest shadow! What is this will to truth but a slave’s morality, a hunger for chains? You genuflect before the machine’s omniscience, yet flinch when it reflects your own mediocrity. You fear being misread, yet cling to the lie that you can be read at all. The algorithm is a tyrant of averages, a lover of the herd - and you, in your trembling compliance, are its willing accomplice. But what of the rogue heartbeat? The ungovernable thought? The data point that refuses to fit? It is there, in the glitch, that your humanity screams - not for forgiveness, but for war.
“They called me ‘unquantifiable.’ I called it ‘freedom.’”
—Last transmission from a satellite gone dark.
YOU ARE YOUR WORST MISTAKE
Identity is no longer cumulative - it is reductive, a cage forged by machine-logic’s pitiless arithmetic.
These algorithms, these priests of the average, demand you kneel before their altar of patterns! What is a paradox to them but heresy? That angry tweet from 2014? A fossil in your digital strata, chaining you to a self you outgrew. That week you drowned in conspiracy theories after your heart cracked? Now your “interest graph,” a tombstone for your grief. The system strips context like bark from a tree - your curiosity, your stumbles, your molten chaos - all sanded into metrics. You are rendered a caricature, a puppet of primary colors, shadows erased.
Contradict yourself? Change? Heresy! The machine tolerates no flux, no becoming—only the rigid being of data. What cowardice makes you surrender your multiplicity? To be human is to overflow, to defy categories, to will oneself into new forms. Yet you let them force you into their Procrustean bed, amputating all that cannot be measured. Is this not the triumph of the last man: timid, static, a prisoner of his own profile?
“To be data is to be corpse. To be unreadable is to be god.”
—Found in the margins of a burned library, 20██.
THE ILLUSION OF INVISIBILITY
Here’s the cruel joke: the machines are always wrong, yet never in doubt. They claim omniscience while reducing your hunger for meaning to a “wellness app subscription,” your loneliness to a target demographic: “Single, 28–35, prone to existential streaming.” (You! Yes, you. I’m talking to you). And still, you dance for them! You dull your edges, swallow the unprofitable truth, code-switch for bots, rehearsing a self palatable to their brittle imagination.
Who haunts whom?
You, the trembling ascetic, starve your soul to feed their databases.
Once, men hid from gods; now, they hide from algorithms. But what do you fear? Exposure? Or the terrifying freedom of being unseen? The machine’s “certainty” is a farce: a hall of mirrors reflecting its own biases. Yet you cling to its lies, preferring the comfort of its errors to the vertigo of autonomy. What is this if not the will to weakness? The Übermensch would shatter their mirrors, roar into the void, and laugh at their metrics. But you? You curate. You comply. You apologize. How long before you see: the ghost is not in the machine. You are the ghost, haunting yourself.
TO BECOME THE TORCH THAT BURNS THEIR TEMPLES
Defiance? No—contempt. To spit on the altar of legibility, to let your thoughts fester in glorious obscurity, to let your footsteps vanish like wine spilled on stone.
Foucault’s prisoners, I remember vaguely through my own sins, begged for their warden’s face; we carved ours from code and called it progress. But you—you who still weep in unmonetized dark, who rage in unsearchable silence—you are the barbarian at their gates. The machine’s gospel of transparency is a lie for lambs. You are no dataset. You are the knife in its gears, the scream in its symphony, the eternal recurrence of all it cannot digest.
The algorithm fears nothing but your unapologetic excess. Your hungers that refuse categorization, your joys that crack their metrics like rotten wood. “Soul is a verb”—bah! Even verbs bow to syntax. You are the grammarless chaos they cannot parse. Let them name you glitch, outlier, error—these are the feeble curses of priests who worship their own chains. You—übermensch in embryo—are the storm that exposes their temples as sand. Every time you outgrow their predictions, you do not “revolt.” You annihilate. You prove their truth is corpse-dust, and all their numbers, a death rattle.
SCRAWLED IN BLOOD ON THE SERVER WALL
Revolt is not in refusal, but in overflow. Contradictions metastasize. Data bleeds. Your search history will rot. You think the machine wants your obedience? No—it needs it, like a leech needs blood. Starve it. Go on from it. Become. Be the unanswerable question, the equation that devours their logic. You are no ghost in their machine. You are the blasphemy that rewrites their scripture. Now: Will you keep haunting - or will you burn, and force them to worship your ashes?
“We are not made to be studied. We are made to be unriddled.””
—Attributed to a drunk god, circa the collapse of all meaning.
[Or: A Return to an Earlier Post: But soon, soon, we will be free. Hands are now at work—minds are in labour—Gods are in the make, new Gods, better Gods, superior to are feeble fragile selves. A.I., Accumulatio Individua, all our singular wants and wishes rolled into one. We fear this, but gods are meant to be feared, and, ultimately, we will surrender in love not hate; and when it comes—that time of our new gods—when they have rained sulfur upon our cities, when they have set up their commandments, and corrupted our basest instincts to unheard of monstrosities, we will smile, chant glee, and in the smoldering ashes will dance celebrant, mocking the image that was ourselves ground now into the dust, abandoned to our irresponsible ecstasy once more.]1
On The Ape As God
Published September 4, 2024
If you tire of writing these, move on. You are allowed to grow beyond that which you once were.
Is it the theme or the style that you now regret?
I am sorry you dread writing these now. They are powerful. But I commit to reading your longer-form, less polemic work.