A click, a scroll—
The feed adjusts, reshapes, consumes,
Who is the user, and who is used?
The Apartment, the Phone, the Trap That Doesn’t Look Like One
The screen was the first thing he saw when he woke up. The last thing before sleep. A blue glow humming through the dark, whispering something just quiet enough that he never questioned it. He reached for his phone before he reached for a glass of water. Before he stretched, before he thought. It had become instinct.
The feed loaded before he had even decided to open it. Before he had even wanted to. News, updates, outrage, something about war, something about stocks, a girl dancing, another girl crying, a man filming himself giving money to the homeless, a meme, another meme, another. A constant flood of something that felt almost like information, but never left him any smarter.
He scrolled.
The algorithm had already decided what he wanted before he did.
Free Will Is an Expired Concept
People think they are in control. That they choose what they see, what they read, what they believe. But there is no freedom in a system that has already optimized your reactions.
- You think you’re forming your own opinions, but they were placed in front of you for a reason.
- You think you’re reading the news, but it’s already been curated to fit what will keep you scrolling.
- You think you’re arguing with strangers, but the machine profits every time you engage.
They call it engagement.
What they really mean is you are no longer capable of looking away.
The Perfect Prison Is One You Never Try to Escape
A man in the 1950s would have called this dystopia. He would have imagined governments broadcasting propaganda into homes, forcing people to stare at screens, consuming nothing but what they were told to.
And yet, nobody forced him to do this.
He had chosen to be here.
To wake up, check the screen, let it tell him how to feel. To get a notification and react immediately, as if the vibration in his pocket were an electric shock. To reach for his phone the second he was alone with his own thoughts.
A cage doesn’t need walls if the prisoner never thinks to leave.
Imperfection is beauty, things only become real when they decay.
But there is no decay in the algorithm. No rough edges. No silence.
And that is the trap.
The world is not meant to be this clean, this frictionless, this optimized. A human being is supposed to be bored sometimes. To stare out the window. To sit in a café and watch the rain without pulling out their phone. To be unreachable, untrackable, unpredictable—to exist in a space that the machine cannot measure.
Because if something cannot be measured, it cannot be controlled.
And if it cannot be controlled, it is finally free.
Lessons from the Glowing Cage
- The algorithm does not serve you. You serve it.
- If you are always reacting, you are never thinking.
- Distraction is a business model, and you are the product.
- Free will only exists if you actively choose it.
- Looking away is an act of war.
The Screen, the Scroll, the Choice That Wasn’t Really a Choice
He exhaled. Put the phone down. For the first time in hours, maybe in days, maybe in longer. The silence pressed in, strange, unfamiliar.
The urge was still there. A reflex. An itch in his brain. Check. Refresh. Scroll. But for now, at least, he ignored it.
Outside, the city moved without him. Traffic lights blinked, people crossed streets, conversations happened that would never be recorded, never be fed back into a system, never be optimized for engagement.
And for a moment—just a moment—he remembered what it felt like to be outside of it all.
life 
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