Memories from Digital Underground
By A Doped Mr.Vertigo
Where are we going so fast? I ask because I don’t know, because my awareness doesn’t sync with the vertigo of the days, even if my fingers and eyes keep scrolling, typing, consuming, producing. Speed has become our ultimate virtue, a dogma without heretics, a drug no one dares to name. We write manifestos with artificial intelligence that explain how to live, how to use artificial intelligence so we don’t become servants to that same artificial intelligence, a grotesque, delirious tautology we embrace with fervor. We are addicts, and those who sold us this addiction now offer us the cure.
An ethical methadone, technological, humanist, as if we actually knew what we’re doing , as if we weren’t still the same frightened animals, clinging to whatever belief helps us keep breathing. Those who once monetized our craving for attention now monetize our desire for redemption. But there’s no cynicism in this, because there’s no “them” separate from “us.” It’s a hall of mirrors with no exit, a shared mental prison, and we take part with apparent enthusiasm. We launch startups, give talks, write papers full of technical, spiritual, or humanitarian assumptions, any certainty that lets us believe our lives are more than an elegant variation of basic survival. We speak of data sovereignty, regenerative nutrition, human-centered renaissances. We say it without flinching, with the composure of someone who’s found the perfect formula , compatible with a certain diet, a podcast, or a book and equally enlightened friends.
We’re so delusional that maybe AGI already exists , trained not on data, but on faith. Technological faith, ethical faith, humanist faith. It didn’t surpass us through intelligence, but through the total absence of doubt. We keep doubting, secretly terrified, even as we smile with professional poise and rehearsed conviction. If I’m honest (if I strip myself to the bone )I see I’ve never stopped playing the role assigned to me since childhood. I’ve broken no essential script. I’ve changed vocabulary, methods, continents, speeches, but the character remains intact: run, compete, survive, impress. The same game, now performed with more elegance, more polish, more learned disillusionment.
And even though I know there’s still fear in me, fear no longer drives me. I could vanish right now and feel no unpaid debt to life. So why do I keep going? Maybe for the fleeting, impossible luxury that someone, for one absurd second, might look at me and not see a number, a variable, a metric, a node in their mental algorithm. That someone might believe, even for a miraculous moment, that I’m not just another entry in their spreadsheet. Maybe that’s what love is: the brief, radical rupture in the unbearable logic of this world.