Every day someone wakes up and decides this—this is the final straw. AI art. Rap made by kids who don’t play instruments. Glasses that record video while you pretend to make eye contact. And what do they do with that holy rage? They don’t go after the trillion-dollar necro-engine of capitalism, or the generational scaffolding of broken incentive structures. No. They go online and scream at the nearest metaphor. “This tech is the end of everything good.”
It’s theater. Sad, predictable, sometimes hilarious theater.
Because it’s never the tech. It’s the system. But god forbid we say that out loud—then you’ve got to open the trapdoor and crawl down into the basement of the world where the real rot lives. And down there? No easy villains. No shiny object to cancel. Just the slow, grinding truth that the machine works exactly as designed, and it doesn’t give a shit about your soul.
We’ve made a religion out of blaming tools. It’s easier. Simpler. Makes you feel smart at dinner parties. But tools don’t make systems. Systems make tools. Systems teach you how to use them, who gets to own them, and who gets turned into mulch underneath them. We didn’t lose our way because Midjourney made a pretty picture. We lost our way when we decided that every act of creation had to be monetized, trademarked, optimized, and sold back to us through five layers of corporate mediation.
But sure, let’s talk about how ChatGPT is killing writing. Let’s pretend that centuries of class-gated access to publishing, a marketplace allergic to risk, and a global attention economy shaped like a drainpipe had nothing to do with the erosion of creative culture. Let’s all gather ‘round the bonfire and sacrifice another pixel demon so we can avoid asking who built the fucking altar.
The real boogeyman is the system. The one that trained you to be a customer instead of a citizen. The one that replaced collective imagination with productivity software. The one that taught you to mistake nostalgia for safety and change for apocalypse. It wants you blaming the wrench. It loves when you blame the wrench. Because as long as you’re throwing rocks at Siri, nobody’s looking at the ledger books or the property lines or the blacksite where your data dreams go to be dissected.
You can feel it, right? That low hum under everything? It’s not just the hum of servers. It’s the system purring. It’s the comfort of predictability, wrapped around your neck like a weighted blanket made of 401(k)s and algorithmic playlists. And the minute you question it—really question it—you get that look. “Why are you being so negative?” As if clarity were a threat. As if naming the pattern were an act of war.
And maybe it is.
Because the truth is, we don’t need better gadgets. We need a full-blown, system-melting, worldview-shattering reckoning. But we don’t want that. We want upgrades. We want the same death spiral with better UX.
So we blame the paintbrush for the lack of meaning. We blame the mirror for the shape of our face. We keep yelling at the puppets while the strings tangle around our necks.
And all the while, the system smiles. Not because it’s winning—but because it knows we’ve forgotten how to see it.