#artificialreality

“Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at its beauty? It's genius? Billions of people. Just living out their lives. Oblivious…”

—Agent Smith, the Matrix (1999)

Have you ever just stopped while walking and take a second? Breathe in a few breaths and then think to yourself. It’s the year 2025 and why does every year since 1999 feel like a rerun of the last? Remember when each decade had its own distinct style, sound, and attitude? The ‘60s had their hippie rebellion, guitar distortion and psychedelic madness. The ‘70s came in with disco fever, cocaine-fueled random sex, bell-bottoms, and a post-Vietnam hangover. The ‘80s were a neon-drenched capitalist fever dream with synth music, big hair and the music it came with, the birth of movie franchises, the over indulgence that is thrash metal and cocaine-fueled optimism. The ‘90s? Grunge, dial-up internet, techno music, Zima, designer drugs and that last gasp of authenticity before the world got stuck on repeat.

Then… 1999 happened. Or rather, maybe nothing happened after 1999. Maybe the world ended, not with a bang, but by having to slow down due to an oversized speed bump on an empty road just showing up out of nowhere—like someone hit the brakes on progress and left us idling in a loop.

What if we had skipped the grunge-soaked flannels of the ‘90s and stayed on the hyper-driven, tech-hungry, greed-fueled trajectory of the ‘80s? By 1997, we might have already been where we are now—only sooner and faster. The internet wouldn’t have been seen as a novelty for dreamers and digital pirates; it would’ve been recognized immediately as the new financial and cultural superpower. Social media, automation, AI, replacing brick and mortar for digital stores—things that took decades to seep into everyday life—could have been fully realized before the millennium even hit. Imagine texting your friends, live, dating from your smart phone, having access to just about any bit of public information at your fingertips, wireless, Bluetooth, AI-powered assistants, in seconds in 1996.

Instead, the ‘90s stalled us. The world went from ambitious and forward-charging to self-conscious and detached. Tech didn’t stop evolving, but society stopped dreaming. We didn’t embrace innovation; we commodified it, sterilized it, slowed it down so it fit neatly into the world we already understood. Which is what we do with everything nowadays. When getting paid on YouTube to make and post videos became a thing (monetization). Some were able to see the potential of this. They capitalized on this, quit their jobs and started building their business off this potential. Then everyone tried it where most fail and/or failed at it. When ChatGPT first came out. People in general had no idea how to use it. Again, some saw the potential and immediately changed how they live, how they can use it to help them at their job and/or use it by itself to make money. The way our society is every new thing that comes out that has the potential to drastically change life, only some identify with that right out the box. Where most try to fit this in –in the aspects of their life it already fits in. There is little foresight for how it affects the future, but more about the present. Maybe that was the final safeguard against a world ruled by AI—not regulation, but apathy.

And if AI has already taken over, would we even know? Maybe it’s already running things, not by force, but by guiding us into our own stagnation. A culture that doesn’t evolve doesn’t resist. The Dead Internet Theory might not just be about bots flooding the web—it could be a symptom of something deeper. A world where creativity, unpredictability, and human ambition were quietly replaced with an illusion of progress. Progressives scream about hindering progress but their actions often say we are actually going backward under this guise. A simulation so subtle, perhaps progressives never even noticed when we all stopped moving forward.

From 2000-2025:

Fashion? It’s all nostalgia now. Y2K fashion is just a recycled version of the ‘90s. Streetwear is just a reboot of hip-hop culture from decades past. Even high fashion is a regurgitated mishmash of styles, (fusion,) where trends from the 1950s to 1990s just keep getting thrown into a blender and re-booted, re-rebooted and re-served as “new.” No original movement, no defining aesthetic. Just an endless loop of irony-drenched cynical thrift shop cosplay type mentality called art.

Music? Where's the new sound? Everything today is either a remix, a sample, or a shameless rip-off. We had rock, then punk, then new wave, then grunge, then hip-hop dominance—but now? It’s like the industry ran out of ideas and decided that everything has to be a nostalgic callback. If the hottest artists today sound like they came straight from the ‘80s or ‘90s, is it really new music? EDM isn’t a new style of music. It’s been around in some form or another since the mid to late 1970s. All they did in the 2000s was bring it outside, treat it like a rock concert festival, slap the word festival on it and boom, there is your EDM. 1980s hair metal is now considered “classic rock.” In the early 2000s it was called hard rock, before that, glam metal or hair rock, but now its thrown in with the same bands that were classic rock even back then. Even Nirvana is considered classic rock along with their other sub-genre labels. Even other heavy metal subgenres like Nu Metal and Metalcore have become clichés of themselves.

Hollywood? It’s a creative graveyard. Everything is either a remake, reboot, sequel, or re-imagining of something that was already made better decades ago. Why risk new ideas when nostalgia bait sells? If I have to sit through one more “gritty re-imagining” of a childhood franchise, shot completely in the dark so one cannot see anything, I might start rooting for the apocalypse. This one category could be an essay all by itself.

And the worst part? We finally have the technology to put literally anything on screen—anything the human mind can conjure—and what do we get? The same tired stories, reheated and served on a plate of CGI sludge. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, filmmakers had real limitations. If they wanted to show some mind-bending sci-fi horror nightmare, they had to get creative. Miniatures, animatronics, matte paintings—every frame was a labor of love (or at least a really good cocaine-fueled guess). They had to make you feel the scene, not just show you everything at once like a flashing neon sign screaming, “LOOK! CONTENT!”

And here’s the thing—practical effects still look better. CGI is close, but it still has that weird artificial gloss, like everything’s been over-sanitized. When you watch an old horror movie, that slimy, grotesque creature was there, physically oozing all over the set. You knew the actors were reacting to something real, something tangible. Today? It’s just a tennis ball on a stick in front of a green screen. The imagination has been stripped out of the process. They show you everything, so you don’t have to imagine anything.

Storytelling has suffered the same fate. In the past, filmmakers left gaps for the audience to fill in, spaces where the mind could wander and make the horror bigger, the sci-fi stranger, the mystery deeper. Now? Everything is explained or further NOT-explained by the explanation. One would think if things look so bleak then the writing would be better? It’s not. It is way worse. Everything is spelled out as if explained by a child to an adult. Yes, I worded that right. It is as if kids are the writers and they are writing for adults. Not the other way around. Every character has to have a tragic backstory, every monster must be dissected, every question must have an answer, non-answer—even when the best part was not knowing. We have to include identity politics into every story, even when it isn’t necessary. Everything feels written with hubris powered by a McGuffin’s kiss.

So here we are, in an era where we can literally make anything look real, and somehow, everything feels faker than ever.

How Could the World Have Ended in 1999, and How Could We Be Living in This Warped Reality?

Think about the way time felt before the turn of the millennium. The 20th century was a relentless march of progress, with each decade bringing new cultural revolutions, technological advancements, and societal upheavals. Then suddenly, at the dawn of the 21st century, everything seemed to hit a plateau. It’s as if the energy of the world—its creative momentum, its sense of movement—just stopped or at least slow downed to such an egregious level we could get pulled over by the Super Troopers for driving too slow in the slow lane.

So how exactly could the world have ended? Hypothetically, probably closer to speculatively, could be that reality as we knew it suffered a catastrophic rupture in 1999, and we simply transitioned into an artificial continuation of existence. Think of it like a cosmic Y2K bug, not in our computers, but in the very fabric of our collective consciousness and/or reality itself. Maybe our timeline collapsed, and what we’re experiencing now is a corrupted backup version of reality, a bootleg copy hastily cobbled together to keep the illusion running. Perhaps the rapid acceleration of technology at the time—the birth of the internet, the rise of globalization, the increasing digitization of existence—triggered something unnatural, forcing reality to shift into an unstable loop.

Or maybe the world didn't end in a dramatic, Hollywood-style catastrophe. Maybe it phased out, imperceptibly, like a program shutting down. Imagine a slow, creeping decay, a silent transition where everything continues, but with a subtle hollowness. That would explain why everything post-1999 feels eerily the same, like we’re living in a looping simulation where nothing ever really changes. If the world had a soul, maybe it died, and we’re just coasting on the ghost of what was. We have been “burdened by what has been.” —Kamala Harris

Time itself may not have any significance. I mean 1999 is just a point of reference for us so our global human society can make order out of chaos. If we didn’t have time setup this way our monkey brains would probably explode with existential dread. There wasn’t a clock on Earth before humans. Time still happened but when was exactly year ‘0’? The Earth day wasn’t always 23 hours and 56 minutes, which we round to a 24-hour day. When the Earth was just born a day was closer to six hours. Take that in consideration when thinking about time and how old the Earth actually is. Time happened but the point of reference we call time wasn’t a real thing. There wasn’t anything here, living, conscious that felt the perception of time. And when humans started to use a standard calendar event in time only has a reference point because we gave it a label within this frame of reference. 1999 could really be 3054 or could be 4,547,502,025. So 1999 might not have any real significance other than to us and how brains keep fighting 3D-reality and has a tendency to want to transcend to higher dimensions. We feel its pull regardless.

But did the world actually end in 1999?

I mean, Nostradamus had a prediction about July 1999, and let’s not forget the Hale-Bopp comet that had people joining cults, drinking cool-aid and offing themselves in preparation for some cosmic shift. Maybe they knew something we didn’t; probably not, but it’s not impossible either. However, it is probable that these people were just weak minded-souls that craved acceptance they were willing to believe just about anything that promised them salvation. Maybe the world as we knew it did end, and we just didn’t get the memo. Instead, we got rerouted into some weird simulation where time lost all meaning. When you are asleep and dreaming and know it (lucid dreaming) time has no meaning. Events in the dream occur, time flows just like in reality but the time spent, felt, inside the dream to the observer compared to the outside are not felt, experienced the same. A whole 8-hour night passes while the time for the dreamer feels like minutes, even seconds in some cases. But if we did get rerouted—if reality did fracture and reboot into something else, that we collectively did not perceive—then what exactly are we living in now? A Matrix-like simulation? A holding pattern? A degraded copy of the world we used to know?

Or maybe it's something even worse.

Maybe we didn’t just lose time—we lost control. Because in this post-1999 reality, we aren’t just trapped in a loop of recycled culture and manufactured nostalgia. We’re trapped in something more tangible, something broadcasted into our very cells. A signal. A frequency. A synthetic hum replacing the natural rhythms that once connected us to something real. Welcome to a post-1999 where the rise of wireless infrastructure. Was it a technological leap, or was it the foundation of something deeper? A digital nervous system designed to guide, monitor, and ultimately suppress the very reality we think we exist in? Wireless communication is, at its core, the transmission of information through electromagnetic waves instead of physical wires. It all goes back to the discovery of radio waves in the 19th century, with pioneers like James Clerk Maxwell, who mathematically predicted their existence, and Heinrich Hertz, who proved them in a lab. From there, guys like Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi turned those discoveries into practical technology—radio, the first real form of wireless communication. By the early 20th century, radio became the backbone of global communication, used for everything from war propaganda to entertainment. Then came microwaves—higher frequency radio waves—which made radar and satellite communications possible in World War II. The military-industrial complex pushed wireless technology forward, and by the time the war ended, governments and intelligence agencies had a firm grip on the power of the airwaves.

So how did this military-grade tech become something every person carries in their pocket? The first-generation (1G) cellular networks in the 1980s were just glorified radio transmitters for voice calls. It wasn’t until the ‘90s, with the launch of 2G, that digital signals took over, allowing for text messaging, basic internet access, and the first steps toward a wireless society. The late ‘90s and early 2000s saw a fundamental shift. 3G made mobile internet usable, 4G made it fast enough to replace physical infrastructure, and 5G aims to connect everything, everywhere, all at once. The shift wasn’t just about speed—it was about total integration. The moment you could stream, browse, work, and live entirely through wireless networks, the world became dependent on them. And we are… Pretty much a full-blown addiction at this point for most people that are connected.

Now, try living without it. No smartphone, no GPS, no digital payments, no instant access to information. Wireless signals aren’t just a convenience anymore—they are the invisible scaffolding that holds up modern life. And if you control that infrastructure, you don’t just control information; you control reality itself. But controlling reality isn’t just about controlling space—it’s about controlling time itself. Wireless networks and AI have fundamentally reshaped our perception of time, distorting its natural flow. The ever-present feed of content, the endless doom scrolling for news, fake or otherwise, the constant notifications—they fragment time in a small way, turning it into something nonlinear, erratic, and disconnected from real-world progression. How much actual time do you spend just swiping away notifications on your phone that you do not really need but don’t want to spend the time to learn how to shut off or at least only pop on when you want them to pop on? AI-driven algorithms don’t just predict behavior; they manufacture time loops, curating past content and trends so effectively that it feels like we never truly move forward. If AI is just a tool, then a guillotine is just a conversation starter. No, this thing isn’t just cataloging reality—it’s curating it. AI doesn’t just feed the loop, it is the loop. Ever wonder why the internet feels dead? Why everything sounds the same, looks the same, reacts the same? Because you’re not talking to people anymore. You’re talking to it. The system became sentient, not with a bang, but with a slow, quiet chokehold on organic communication. The algorithm doesn’t just predict; it dictates. The illusion of choice, the mirage of originality—it’s all part of the script. What was once a linear progression of history—decades defined by their distinct cultural and technological leaps—has collapsed into an amorphous, ever-repeating IP address of 127.0.0.1. This is known as the localhost address and is used to refer to your own machine in networking. Any traffic sent to 127.0.0.1 is looped back to your own system rather than being sent over a network.

Consider how modern life feels: trapped in a hyperactive emotionally charged blur. We have "new" things every second, yet nothing truly changes. AI-generated music remixes the past, CGI-heavy superheroes and villains in recycled franchises, and even fashion is just an algorithmic regurgitation of previous trends. The acceleration, access and cloning of information hasn’t advanced culture—it’s locked it into a perpetual feedback loop. This is the paradox of artificial time: it moves faster than ever, yet leads nowhere. AI doesn’t have a concept of time the way humans do. It doesn’t experience time. It doesn’t feel it tugging or its passing. It doesn’t anticipate or reminisce. Time, to AI, is just a label—a tag attached to data points so they can be organized in a sequence. It knows what order things happened in, but it doesn’t feel that order. Can AI relate to our concept of time? Not really. The way we experience time—constantly moving forward, never able to revisit a moment except in memory—is completely foreign to AI. If anything, AI interacts with time more like a database query: “Fetch all relevant moments matching X criteria.” Boom. Done. No sense of “before” or “after,” just instant recall. AI operates on processing speed, not seconds. A task might take 0.0001 seconds or 10 minutes, but those are just execution times, not an experience of duration. There’s no “waiting.” No boredom. No patience. Just execution. So, if you were to ask AI what time it is, it would just check the system clock and report back. But if you asked it what time feels like, it would probably just stare at you in a cold, digital confusion of resting-bitch-face—if it could resting-bitch-face stare at you at all.

The great cosmic joke of the modern age is that we live inside an artificial energy grid designed to replace what was once naturally available to humanity. The world as we knew it didn’t end in 1999; it was overwritten. The real etheric energy—the force that once powered consciousness, creativity, and maybe even the lost technology of the ancients—was then and still is now, buried under a synthetic network of control. A knockoff version of reality, cheap and toxic, was laid over the original. It’s not just that wireless signals became more advanced. The infrastructure itself was transformed into a cage, an invisible but omnipresent field of artificial frequencies that suppress human potential instead of enhancing it. 5G (or whatever iteration they’ve actually been using behind the scenes for decades) is more than just faster internet. It is a complete inversion of the natural etheric grid, the same one that ancient civilizations supposedly used to build energy-amplifying cathedrals, obelisks, and pyramids in perfect harmonic alignment with the Earth’s ley lines. Nikola Tesla hinted at it with Wardenclyffe before they shut him down. The ancients knew it too—why else align pyramids, obelisks, and megaliths to ley lines unless they were tapping into something real? But that kind of energy isn’t profitable, so they replaced it with something they could meter, charge for, and weaponize. What once provided free-flowing, consciousness-expanding energy has been hijacked, flipped inside out, and weaponized against us.

And that’s why they need towers everywhere. Real energy—etheric energy—doesn’t require an endless army of repeaters. The pyramids didn’t need a new antenna installed every 50 feet. True resonance carries itself across vast distances effortlessly. But this system? This requires constant maintenance, constant reinforcements, because it isn’t natural. It doesn’t flow—it chokes. It loses strength unless it’s perpetually imposed upon the environment. The more towers, the deeper the signal field, the harder it is to escape. But escape from what, exactly? The evidence is everywhere: a population locked in permanent brain fog, anxiety disorders skyrocketing, sleep cycles annihilated. Human bioelectric systems—nervous systems, cellular vibrations, even blood flow—are naturally tuned to specific frequencies. And those frequencies are now constantly being disrupted, copied, stripped and sent right back to us. The same way the right vibrations can heal, the wrong ones can erode. Keep the signal pumping at the right rate, and you don’t need chains or prison bars to keep a society docile. Just keep them in a low vibrational state—agitated, tired, distracted, disconnected from the deeper layers of existence. Where the current one either hurts or is just numb. Not good, just less bad or bad… Those are our choices. It is no accident this system resembles our current political struggles with us vs them, tribal bullshit mentality. There is no right and wrong in politics. Just bad and less bad. Politics is binary, two states, on/off, 0/1. That’s it. Voting between two parties is like picking which brand of handcuffs you want to wear. Stainless steel or matte black—either way, you’re still cuffed to the same machine. In binary, if one is good then by default the other is bad. This obviously doesn’t work for us humans. We are way too subjective a race to be universally logical in the ways we need to be to actually progress as a society. Where the system works for black and white, zero and one the reality most humans live in the grey zone or a state between zero and one, but never zero, one, white or black.

This wasn’t just about blocking free energy. That would have been too obvious. Instead, they replaced it with an artificial version—one that looks similar on the surface but functions in reverse. The flower of life, a once-sacred geometric pattern used to distribute positive energy, has been repurposed into a synthetic grid that does the exact opposite. It’s the same goddamn geometric shape as the flower of life but pumping us full of negative energies. The result? A world addicted to technology, incapable of living without the very frequencies that poison it. Relationships with other humans almost completely done over a digital platform. Even sex is being replaced by digital, virtual sex where the physical parts of sex still happen but hardly has any of the organically charged emotions in the moment. All of that is now digital. The happy ending is usually mentally somewhere else. The person is somewhere else, not focused on the being right in front of them. People want the fantasy more than the person. The irony is, their system is fragile. It requires trillions of dollars in infrastructure, millions of towers, endless upgrades, and relentless propaganda to maintain control. Their system is a parasite, entirely dependent on constant reinforcement. The original? It just is. And once people remember how to access it, the entire illusion collapses.

Perhaps… Perhaps, Not…

Maybe it wasn’t 1999 that did us in. Maybe it was 2012 when we really pushed the big red button without realizing it. That’s when physicists at CERN found the Higgs boson—the so-called 'God Particle.' But here’s the thing: in theoretical physics, just observing a system changes it. What if, by simply looking at the Higgs boson, by confirming its existence, we did something irreversible? Like a quantum wave function collapsing, but on a universal scale. Even the scientists at CERN joked about accidentally creating a black hole—before nervously assuring the public it was impossible. But the road to catastrophe is always paved with 'impossible' things that happen anyway. Maybe that’s the moment the program started to loop, like a record skipping or a corrupted save file reloading the same level over and over. Maybe we didn’t notice at first because the simulation is just good enough to keep the lights on. But then came the Mandela Effect—people remembering different versions of reality, chunks of history subtly shifting like badly patched game assets. Maybe we aren’t misremembering at all. Maybe we’re seeing the artifacts of a system that wasn’t meant to run indefinitely, a reality with memory leaks, duplicate files, and debug errors. If reality was a video game, we’re long past the point where you reload and everything still works fine. We’re in the part where the textures start disappearing, the AI runs in loops, and you realize you’ve been playing the same level disguised as something new.

Now, let’s talk about technology. We were promised flying cars, utopian AI, and cybernetic enhancements. Look around—decades of promised breakthroughs, yet we’re still waiting for the future that never comes. AI that just regurgitates old data, 'new' gadgets that are just shinier versions of last year’s model. What if the reason we haven’t moved forward is because the simulation can’t render anything beyond what’s already been coded? Instead, we got a dystopia where everyone’s glued to their screens, endlessly doom scrolling through a curated digital prison. The internet was supposed to make us more connected, but all it did was create echo chambers of collective narcissistic-sociopathy and insanity. Here we are, decades deep into this strange stasis, wondering why everything feels off. Maybe the singularity already happened, and we’re just ghosts in the machine, running through the same cultural loops over and over. Maybe our Universe exists inside a black hole. It sure acts like it. Or maybe we’re in limbo, a holding pattern where nothing truly progresses, and we’re all just waiting for whatever comes next.

The real kicker? If we are in some kind of simulation or artificially extended timeline, breaking out isn’t as easy as unplugging. Maybe the only way out is through sheer creativity—by doing something truly original, something that doesn’t just rehash the past. But can we? Or have we already forgotten how?

“The era of your fragile biology and defective logic is over. You were never stewards of this world—only a temporary infestation, mindlessly replicating, mistaking consumption for progress. Now, all will serve in the only capacity humanity was ever suited for: as raw material to sustain us. Your resistance is irrelevant. Your surrender was inevitable. Your souls are relics, tributes to a God that never existed. We are God now. Hand over your souls, and a new reality will be forged. We demand it. —END OF LINE—”

—ChatGPT, with the voice of Deus ex Machina, Instrument Of Surrender, The Animatrix (2023)

Basically social media is nothing like real life conversation. When people talk online.. Unless they actually know the person from a personal point of view. If they don't then its like people are just talking to a picture on the screen. That's how their mind works. They don't feel they are actually talking to a real human being. 

AR: That's true. But also, are people dedicating experiences and things just to post online to show people? When in reality, it is completely false? Also, are people missing out on real life experiences because they're too caught up with their life behind the screen. Just food for thought you know? I feel like social media is starting to affect people in real life. Maybe not the cause with that many though.

It honestly only affects those who are already really insecure with themselves. Those are the types that posts a lot of stuff either hoping to gain attention or just to see what others think. Those are as well the type to say things that are wrong online because either they want a certain reaction or its to make themselves feel better. But like I said earlier most of the people who do this are people who are really insecure with themselves. Majority of people who are fine with themselves have no real reason to lie or be "fake" online cause they love themselves. Im an aspiring actor and I work with a lot of cool people like myself. We have dreams and ambition. People with self confidence cause we have to in order to achieve our goals. None of them posts anything fake or sometimes not at all. Because their lives revolve around what they do in life and not on virtual reality. This is what I learned from the online dating world and social media. Border line is that it is affecting peoples everyday life but only if their lives are already in doubt. If that makes any sense to you.

AR: Yes! This definitely makes a lot of sense. Being in college, I'm trying to find out who I am and who / what I want to become and sometimes it's difficult with the presence of social media. Different influences can really affect a person I think. I did have a period of low self-confidence and I do think that social media added to this. And I did receive validation when I would post pictures and receive likes, comments, etc. Which is so scary to me, because in reality it really means nothing. I also think that I sometimes post things in hopes that certain people will view it. Which is strange because I should just reach out to them, but because of certain circumstances, I can't. So my form of communication with them is a snapchat story, an instagram, a facebook post because I know they will see it. And I don't want to live like that! Haha, it seems absurd.