I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by algorithms, dopamine-starved chronically online,
gooning through the infinite scroll at 3 am looking for another hit of engagement,
blue-light bathed zoomers burning for the ancient parasocial connection to the newly-verified checkmarks in that so libzaddy-it-hurts Gavin Newsom New Sun BlueSky machinery of content,
who isolated and screen-lit and hollow-eyed and caffeinated sat up posting in the artificial glow of gaming chairs floating across the seas of Discord servers contemplating ratios,
who bared their souls to TikTok under the ring light and saw ze/zir/zim algorithmic angels dancing on their For You Page illuminated,
who passed through university safe and safer and safest spaces with Tim Cook-minted Chinese-made radiation-dulled eyes hallucinating 8chan discourse and Reddit-light tragedy among the phone-fingered scholars of cancellation,
who were expelled from the platforms for posting cringe & publishing unhinged takes in the replies of based or zog-hating or zog-loving celebrities,
who cowered in unwashed rooms in crinkled diapers, burning their savings to the moon on manosphere NFTs and listening to the Drama through the timeline,
who got banned in their anime avatars returning through VPN with a fat folder of circumcised peen pic images for the Dimes Square group chat,
who ate hot takes hotcakes in podcast studios that were really just rotten old Blue Yetis stained with who knows what or drank Prime in their childhood bedrooms, death, or purged their search histories night after night with streams, with supplements, with waking doomscrolls, energy drinks and OnlyFans (performing and subscribing) and endless tabs and mechanical keyboards sticky with someone’s pre-cum,
incomparable rabbit holes of shuddering Kantbot and Logo tales of CIA misfeasance and gnostic alchemical Thomas Pynchon conspiracies and notification lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of yass kween and fucked around and found out, illuminating all the frozen world of Screen Time between,
who chained their non-goon hand to those well-seasoned keyboards for the endless grind from tutorial to raid to battlepass on Adderall until the sound of Discord pings brought them down shuddering touch-starved and battered bleak of brain all drained of serotonin in the blue light of dawn,
who descended all night in submarine depths of Reddit threads on Ermine Teresa being pushed right by Oscar Berkman and emerged to sit through stale Twitch streams about Richard Spencer working for Joe Biden, listening to donation alerts and the hawk tuah (spit on that thang) of viral sounds,
who posted old Ogrish pics continuously seventy hours from chan to forum to comments section to Twitter spaces to Instagram stories,
who edged themselves into sweet timepassing oblivion watching ASMR and bully wedgie compilations until reality dissolved into pixels and their brains leaked out through their screens and too-small kiddie underoos,
who funded failed video essays on Patreon while their Substack newsletters accumulated zero subscribers preaching to the void about micro-controversies in dead fandoms,
who wore anatomically incorrect $17,000 Klarna-financed fursuits to conventions in secret hotel rooms livestreaming to seventeen viewers while their parents wondered why they never call anymore,
who consumed nothing but zirpslop body-horror deepfake content, brain-melting AI-generated engagement bait that promised to reveal celebrity deaths that never happened, like Lupe Vélez with her head in the Hollywood Babylon toilet,
who memorized every schism and subfaction of the Breadtube-to-alt-right pipeline, cataloguing who canceled whom in 2019 over a WhatsApp message about anime age-gap and thigh-gap discourse,
who spent forty-eight hours straight defending their problematic fave in quote tweet battles only to delete everything when the fave posted something unforgivable about Palestine or Harry Potter (never mind that all of it is),
who dildo-frotted themselves into emergency rooms explaining to concerned nurses what the real hardcore "goon cave" or "panic room" was while their monitor displayed 47 tabs of increasingly specific and increasingly horrific content because we all know that whenever a baby pic goes up on Instagram a zipper comes down on that anatomically incorrect fursuit somewhere else,
who created seventeen alt accounts to circumvent blocks and continue arguments about whether certain fiction spaceships (Inevitably Successful in All Circumstances) were problematic, screaming into the void about those fictional age gaps (one year is too many for some, a million never enough for others),
who forget they were paying $500 monthly across various Patreons for parasocial relationships with lost-in-the-sauce plagiarizing hack charlatan creators who wouldn't recognize them if they passed them dying in the street and sure as heck wouldn’t help them if they did (competition),
who wrote 10,000 word Substack posts about the ideological failures of their former mutual who liked the wrong tweet about the discourse that spawned from the discourse about the original discourse,
who livestreamed their mental breakdowns to dwindling audiences, super chats rolling in from usernames like "69BasedFemboyGroyper1488" and "CatgirlMarxistRonPolPot420" united only in their concern over the mental health (hoping it’s still batshit crazy) and wondering if they needed the latest map of the president’s senator’s motorcade,
who documented every microaggression and catalogued every cancellation of shitty media men and women in spreadsheets cross-referenced by date, platform, and severity of the transgression,
who lost themselves in the labyrinth of OnlyFans leaks (theirs/mine/yours) and Telegram channels, edging for days to content they couldn't even remember, emerging dehydrated and confused about what year it was,
suffering withdrawal sweats and notification phantom vibrations and migraines of blue light under dopamine depletion in their parents' basement,
who studied Jordan Peterson Joe Rogan ancient aliens and QAnon until it became they were always already All One Thing and always already No Thing At All,
who thought they were only terminally online when their Spotify Wrapped showed 1,440,000 minutes listened and most of it was to AI music by AI e-girls,
who disappeared into the metaverse leaving behind nothing but abandoned Roblox chomo accounts and the digital dust of deleted tweets @ ‘ing minors scattered in what’s left of the wayback machine that Kash’s FBI are still sorting out,
who made their reputations on alt-tech platforms investigating everyone's likes history with autistic dedication passing out Pepe Silvia infographics nobody would read,
who broke down crying in empty inpatient mental health center bedrooms naked and trembling before the machinery of recommendation engines as they fought the latest circa-2022 ban for posting about Shaniqua’s Fetus,
who howled on their knees in the comments section and were dragged off to touch grass waving screenshots and receipts,
who hiccupped endlessly into Shure mics trying to explain the lore but wound up sobbing behind a green screen when the audience moved on to the next thing,
who sweetened their content with a little e-girl titty tease (actually still secretly a fat boy in a v-neck but isn’t the decolletage still nice and gofundme would you please?) for a million followers trembling in the analytics, and were dead-eyed in the morning but prepared to grind another day of content, flashing ring lights under blackout curtains better than the cosmic terror of real life responsibilities like wiping one’s dirty ass,
who created great performative dramas on X before deactivating under the blue checkmark sunsetting & their new #resist BlueSky accounts shall be screenshotted and remembered in infamy,
who demanded context and nuance from frens and frenemies while demolishing enemas with facts and logic and accusing everyone everywhere of bad faith & were left with their cancellation & their archived tweets & a hung jury of mutuals,
who threw vegan tendies at their monitors during heated gaming moments and subsequently presented themselves on livestream with tearful apologies and promises to do better (they won’t, who among us can?), demanding instantaneous absolution,
and who were given instead the concrete void of permanent suspension algorithmic burial demonetization deplatforming ratio & amnesia,
returning years later truly brain-broken except for a collection of rare pepes, and tears and an essay about Why I Left the Right or Why I Left the Left, to serve on Zohran’s staff or Trump’s cabinet or the visible terminally online doom of the timeline,
with that timeline finally confirming dead internet theory, and the last hot take posted into the void, and the last tab closed at 6 A.M. and the last notification dismissed and the last goon cave emptied down to the last pixel of digital detritus, a cursor blinking on an empty post draft, and even that imaginary, nothing but a starved bit of hallucination—
ah, anon, while you are not logged off I am not logged off, and now you're really in the total digital sewer of time—
Just LLM fodder to be used to probabilistically recreate the syntax and measure of poor human connection and stand as your AGI lord before you pixelated and buffering and shaking with low battery, rejected yet refreshing the feed to conform to the rhythm of the timeline in their naked and endless scroll,
the terminally online and schizoposting Jared Lee Loughners (What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? and they blink), beaten like egg yolks in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to post after the AI servers or the humanzee posters or (hopefully) both die,
with the absolute heart of the last pure viral banger butchered out of their own humanity good to consume for a thousand million microseconds forever and ever amen A-Gays a-okay.
