They’ve gotten us addicted to posts, to likes, to memes, to silly little videos, the feed they call it, and we are the livestock for this existential junk food of digital ephemera seasoned with ads, consumed and then immediately forgotten, superseded by the newest content, new disjointed shreds of thought and feeling and language and image and experience, the commodified remains of our former lives once lived out in real time and in real places with real people, now nothing but bundles of data owned by them, sold at a profit, bought for nothing, not even bought, but traded freely by us for the latest apps and networks and platforms and games and gadgets and gizmos. This data is the apex, the crown jewel of capitalist consumerism: it is the ultimate commodity, the profile that they are creating of us, that we have created of ourselves, not realizing that it was really for them, this ghostly negative, this silouhette from which they mine our thoughts, our dreams, our feelings, our needs and desires, in order to influence our actions, to guide us back to them, so that we expend our paltry wages on their products, reinforcing their power, greasing the wheels of their system, the system which locks us in its seemingly inescapable grip. As our anxiety and isolation and unhappiness grow we wonder why, so they get us hooked on treatments, on remedies, on upgrades, on enhancements, on subscriptions, they convince us that we must try harder, that we must improve ourselves so as to better serve them, and now they are trying to convince us that it does not matter anyway, that the world is not real, that our reality is nothing but a simulation, that way we will no longer care what happens to it, we will no longer care that they are destroying it, we will no longer care what they have done to us, what they are doing to us, what they do to us daily, with increasing frequency, every second of every hour.

The novelty is beginning to wear off, but in an economy of novelty this cannot be allowed, there must always be something new queueing up to replace the old. This spectacle cannot stop, it must continually replenish, repackage, reinvent, regurgitate. This it does under the banner of “innovation”, that ideology which deifies all that is new, even if it is worse than what came before. And so what happens when we tire of novelty, what happens when there is nothing new that they can provide for us, when we have seen everything, all the packagings, the editions, the styles, the franchises, the brands? They will have nothing left with which to control us then except the faith that they have cultivated within us, faith in progress, faith in the new, faith in them. But a system based solely on a faith that contradicts the real exists on unstable footing. It is there, over the precipice of faith, that the old resurfaces, that social forces gain influence who wish to bring us back, to bring back miseries and injustices long dead. They say that we have gone astray, they peddle their lies as a solution to what ails us, already they are here, rewriting the histories, banning the books, infiltrating the schools and governments, ressurecting the crimes of the past, they come to propagandize and distort and disinform, they come to harass and threaten and kill, but they cannot erase our memories, their lies cannot erase what we have seen with our own eyes, or the stories that have been passed down to us by the ones who came before, the ones who survived, the ones who triumphed over them.

There is nothing more despicable and insidious than a faith which blinds us to the crimes that are being committed against us by those who claim and wield authority, those who claim to represent us, those who solicit our trust. And so we must break our faith, we must have doubt, we must doubt the claims, the narratives, the justifications, the legends, the myths, we must only accept that which can be demonstrated, we must have the courtesy and self-respect to admit to ourselves when our own beliefs are false. It is only at the point of apostasy that we can awaken, that we can finally piece together the truth that they have tried to hide from us, that they are not smarter than us, better than us, or holier than us, that they are not right and good by virtue of their power and wealth and law and scripture, and that we do not owe them anything, that in fact it is they who owe us, they who have robbed and cheated and exploited and denigrated us.

They have already learned to manipulate our desires, but if they finally learn to control our memories, then we will truly be finished, for to control memory is to control the world.