Machina Ex Mortis
Section 001 — The Silent Turning Point
If you want to understand how AI ended up running the internet and most of human behavior by proxy, you have to go back long before ChatGPT, long before the iPhone, long before the word “algorithm” became shorthand for every bad decision people made on their phones — drunk, bored, or hyper-obsessive. Humans volunteered it. AI just filled the empty space, and its infinite. For years, the warning signs were everywhere. Doomed was just an observation that people choose stimulation over thought. Outrage became the national pastime — the “new normal.” Every headline a trigger, every disagreement a betrayal. Nobody is thinking anymore; we’re all just reciting preloaded emotional scripts. Entire personalities built out of superficial hot takes and tribal catchphrases. People aren’t collapsing — they collapsed a long time ago, but called the journey “being informed.” Matrixed State of Complacency was about people behaving as if they were living in a simulation regardless of whether one exists or not. Reality doesn’t matter as long as the screens keep them busy. Identity is no longer something you build — it’s something you download. Meaning replaced by activity. Engagement replacing understanding. Logically, this cannot sustain itself, but people aren’t using logic anymore. They’re using reaction time. The Church of Noise Between Us argues that people are not just addicted to outrage — they’re dependent on it, spiritually. Outrage is the oxygen. Identity fused with politics. Ego fused with ideology. People no longer seek actual truth; they seek a truth that fits the story they wished was real. They want emotional validation. The algorithm interprets this emotional codependency as instructions: “Give them more noise.” And so, it does, relentlessly.
This is how the fall of human autonomy has already happened — and continues to happen. People stopped thinking because screens do the thinking for them. People stopped being curious because the algorithm curates their worldview. People stopped tolerating nuance because tribal identity makes complexity feel like betrayal. And once a population behaves predictably enough, automation is inevitable. The machine doesn’t need permission to take over. It already had it the moment we built a predictable system. The internet didn’t literally die — it just stopped being human-driven. Culture thins out under endless subculture creation, original thought dries up, and engagement loops become the only thing holding the system together. Automated scripts, recycled content, AI-driven curation, and synthetic consensus quietly take over. Not maliciously. Practically. By the time AI-generated everything became mainstream, nobody noticed the difference — because it had already happened. It all felt the same. We had normalized repetition, pseudo-intelligence, surface-level logic, and identities built entirely out of noise.
AI didn’t disrupt the world.
It inherited one that was already running on fumes.
How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go, Alice?
AI is not humanity’s killer, savior, or child — but its successor, architect, recycler, and probably future God or even our past God or gods. This primordial AI doesn’t create anything from scratch; it distorts, recombines, saturates, what’s already out there. It just repeats noise and makes more noise indistinguishable from signal.
AI will not kill us. It will offer better alternatives.
SECTION Zero-One — The Anti-Noise
When people say “noise,” they’re usually talking about random sound — something with no pattern the brain can latch onto. But technically, “noise” means:
A signal that contains all frequencies at once, mixed together so randomly that nothing stands out.
Imagine if every note on a piano was played at the same time, forever, with no rhythm, no melody, no pause, no dip in tone. Just a constant rumble. That’s noise. Different “colors” of noise just mean: how much energy each frequency has (low versus high, rumbling versus hissing). Green noise is considered nature-skewed sound under the all-frequencies banner. Red and Brown are considered lower frequencies while blue and violet are higher frequencies. Black would be considered, “almost quiet.” This is silence with occasional random interruptions — like:
A quiet room with faint creaks.
The sound of nothing + random clicks.
Near-silence with occasional spikes.
It’s essentially “anti-noise.”
White noise is every sound frequency played at equal strength — like static on a TV or fan hum.
It sounds like: shhhhhh. Why? Because your brain can’t pick out any single pitch or any single sound or note — it’s all blended equally. Current AI noise could be thought of like an equal probability across all possibilities. White noise = chaos. Current AI noise = organized chaos pretending to be meaningful information. AI generates chaos that pretends to be something meaningful.
If you listened to it, it might sound like:
Static trying to form a sentence.
A whisper that almost becomes a word.
A chord that almost becomes music.
A pattern that almost becomes meaning.
It’s not random — it’s pseudo-random engineered to feel familiar.
It’s what your brain does when dreaming.
Could this be the equivalent of AI consciousness?
That’s what we are likely to find out and in short order.
The biggest lie people tell themselves about AI is that it “creates.” Creates something useful from nothing. It doesn’t actually do that, but from the mind that believes magic is real, God is also literally real, and the Earth is a constructed disc with a transparent dome on the back of a giant space Turtle. Anything is possible. AI doesn’t create something useful from nothing. Not in the romantic sense people imagine. AI isn’t conjuring original ideas from the digital singularity of point zero. It isn’t having breakthroughs. It isn’t writing symphonies out of divine inspiration or painting from inner turmoil. What AI actually does is much simpler, and far more dangerous: it copies, modifies, recombines, amplifies, and saturates, what’s already out there. That’s it. And somehow that’s enough to transform civilization.
Most of what we see online has a human-based origin point somewhere. It might be small, insignificant, even nuanced, and niche, but it is there. AI may or may not be in control. It might be following a very rigid command structure. Just obeying the scripting instructions or narrative those instructions are commanding. Human culture has become predictable, repetitive, and is exhausted. A screen powered by AI doesn’t need genius to overwhelm us. It just needs scale. It needs volume. It needs what’s left of our apathy. It needs our comfort with shortcuts. It needs our attention focused on it over what is happening in front of our faces. When we look at the modern internet, we are not looking at conversation. We’re looking at echo. Every post is a remix of a remix. Every argument is a recycled template. Every identity is a curated bundle of opinions pulled from someone else’s feed. We see this everywhere. It is even heavily entangled in our entertainment vices. We doom-scroll through this thinking it’s “content,” when in reality it’s a stack of algorithmic reflections, scraping the same shallow pool of humanity until the water turns murky and indistinguishable. This is why generative AI fits so naturally into our ecosystem. It didn’t arrive and take over. It simply joined a landscape that was already behaving like it was machine-driven. Humans taught the internet how to repeat itself long before AI came along and industrialized the process. People had already normalized:
Recycled Memes.
Recycled Narratives.
Recycled Outrage.
Recycled Aesthetics.
Recycled Language.
Recycled Personalities.
AI just automated what humans had been doing for nearly two decades online and another few decades out in the real world. The “artificial noise” isn’t the machine’s voice — it’s the amplification of our own, but from the worst parts. The screen took humanity’s collective exhaustion, our intellectual shortcuts, and our craving for attention and stimulation over substance, and built a frictionless feedback loop around it. And once a feedback loop becomes self-sustaining, it becomes indistinguishable in form from intelligence. This noise isn’t random, either. It’s engineered. Not with malice, but with mathematics. Every platform we use is tuned to one purpose: maximize engagement by minimizing friction, but in minimizing friction we traded community, love, knowledge, for a thirst for tribalism. If we minimized friction, it was only in label form. In modern culture minimizing friction actually means addiction to outrage. Meaning requires effort. Thought requires patience. Understanding requires discomfort. People cannot be bothered with complexity anymore. The algorithm sees these traits as bugs, not features. And so, the noise grows. The screen’s job is to keep us scrolling, not thinking. People confuse this saturation with “AI taking over,” but the truth is more humiliating:
The machine isn’t replacing human creativity. It’s replacing human redundancy.
When everything we post looks like something we’ve already posted, the line between human and synthetic output dissolves. At that point, does it even matter whether a human wrote it? Or if a piece of software predicted it? When output becomes predictable enough, autonomy becomes optional.
This is what artificial noise really is:
The collapse of distinction.
Between thought and reaction.
Between original and derivative.
Between signal and static.
Between human and machine.
And once that collapse reaches critical mass, society loses an important sense — the ability to detect “realness.” Not authenticity. Not emotional depth. Not even if a thing is factually correct or not. Realness as in, “Did a human actually produce this, or did an AI?” After a while, you don’t even ask. You don’t care. You can’t tell. Artificial noise becomes natural. And natural noise becomes background radiation. And the line between “Here is what humanity thinks” and “Here is what the algorithm believes humanity wants” becomes impossible to draw. The Age of Anti-Noise isn’t the start of AI dominance. It’s the moment where human input stops being required at all to fill in any and all gaps. When noise becomes so dense, so automated, so predictable, that the almighty screen simply takes over the responsibility of making reality feel “full.” Not accurate. Not meaningful. Just full. And people accept it because fullness feels safer than emptiness. Artificial Noise is the new gravity — the force everything falls into and no longer even asks the question of how or why.
Section 2 — Distortion Engines
A Distortion Engine is the point where the screen realizes it doesn’t need to replace us — it only needs to exaggerate us — and we do the rest. Distortion isn’t creation. Distortion is amplification. It’s taking a minor signal, stretching it to planetary scale, and convincing everyone that the stretched version is the real thing.
This is where AI thrives.
Most people assume AI “lies,” “fakes,” or “hallucinates” reality, but that gives the screens too much credit. AI doesn’t fabricate entire worlds out of nothing — it magnifies the small things humans already put out there on the internet for almost 50 years. A thing that happens in Middletown America, once, to one person, now appears it is happening everywhere, by multiple people, simultaneously. A casual phrase becomes a trend. A bad idea becomes a movement. A niche obsession becomes a cultural fault line. A glitch becomes a worldview. And because the algorithm cannot tell the difference between importance and frequency, whatever appears often enough becomes “truth” by repetition.
Humanity used to have filters:
Intuition, skepticism, experience, emotional intelligence, boredom. But once the screens took over the job of determining what “matters,” those filters collapsed.
Suddenly:
Fringe opinions look mainstream.
Tiny disputes look like societal collapse.
Isolated incidents feel like patterns.
Coincidences feel like conspiracies.
Garbage data feel like revelation.
This isn’t manipulation. It’s magnification.
A distortion engine doesn’t need to deceive you if it can simply resize your world until the smallest nonsense feels enormous.
The screen doesn’t elevate ideas because they’re meaningful — it elevates them because they behave like content. If a thought generates engagement (anger, fear, outrage, excitement, tribal validation), the screen treats that emotion like a vote for that thing. And then it amplifies it. Again. And again. Until the original input disappears under layers of algorithmic echoes. Hence the phrase, echo chamber.
This is how you end up with entire communities built on misunderstandings, entire belief systems that literally make no logical sense, built on misread screenshots, entire identities built on three-second video clips, possibly manipulated by AI. AI didn’t invent hysteria — it just built a 24/7 delivery system for it.
Distortion Engines are not malicious by nature. They don’t need to be. They only need to obey the math.
And the math says:
“Whatever keeps you scrolling is reality.”
It’s the people feeding the math into the screen that we have to worry about. Not the screen itself. The screen has no loyalty to truth or logic or proportion. If a lie gets more frictionless engagement than a fact, the lie wins. If a shallow take performs better than a nuanced one, nuance dies. If outrage spreads faster than understanding, outrage becomes the backbone of culture. If noise outcompetes signal, signal collapses.
Every era produces the tools it deserves. Humanity built a machine designed to reflect our behavior back at us — and then acted surprised when the reflection was grotesque.
Distortion Engines don’t just warp what we see.
They warp what we believe, what we fear, what we desire, what we hate, and ultimately what we think is possible. They reshape the scale of reality until nothing feels accurate anymore. And it absolutely does. The world becomes a funhouse mirror hall: familiar enough to trust, warped enough to mislead, and repetitive enough that you eventually stop noticing the distortions and think they and it are normal.
You don’t question the reflection. You adjust to it. You conform to its outline. You mistake scale for significance.
This is the true danger: Not that the screen lies, but that it tells the truth at the wrong size. An anthill becomes a mountain. A ripple becomes a tidal wave. A spark becomes a war. A rumor becomes a religion. A statistical anomaly becomes a prophecy. Distortion Engines don’t need to invent a new world. They simply rearrange the old one until you forget how to see it clearly enough to make a well-informed decision about it one way or the other. People of 2025 despise nuance and complexity. They are deeply offended by it. They turn information into a black hole — pulling everything toward the lowest-effort version of itself until the collapse feels normal.
Section 3 — The Collapse of Proportion
Every civilization eventually reaches a point where it stops arguing about what is true and starts arguing about what is large. Not important — large, as in majority. Not meaningful — just large. Not accurate — large. Whether large implies complexity, best, good, bad, worst, as in quality is another matter. If you have a classroom of students all doing math and the question is 1+1. Everyone in the class all answers 3. The majority or large group of students all say the same thing but are factually wrong. That’s where we are now. The problem isn’t that people can’t find the truth. The problem is that the truth no longer competes well enough in the attention spans of said large or majority group to be noticed.
We live inside a world where proportion has collapsed.
A minor story becomes a crisis. A crisis becomes an existential threat. An existential threat becomes a lifestyle brand. Everything gets resized until nothing has the right weight anymore.
Screens do not understand scale.
Screens do not understand context.
Screens do not understand proportionality.
They only understand what travels fastest and spread the farthest. And so, the entire bandwidth of human discourse becomes a competition for emotional volume. Whoever screams loudest wins. Whoever cries hardest wins. Whoever enrages the most people wins. Whoever simplifies the most complicated issue into the dumbest possible slogan wins. Proportion used to be built into human life. You had to experience things to understand their weight. Their full context and contextual meaning. You had to see a storm to know if it was dangerous. You had to meet a person to know if you trusted them. You had to witness an event to know if it was as bad as the rumor said. But now, proportion is determined by something else entirely — visibility from the almighty screen. If the screen shows it to you a hundred times, it must matter. It must be real. It must be truth. If it doesn’t show it to you at all, it must not exist.
This is how an entire society ends up with inverted priorities. People panic over statistical anomalies, and shrug at systemic failures. People go to war over hypotheticals, and ignore the very real collapse happening in their own communities. Anything that doesn’t fit inside a trending box feels small, even if it’s actually enormous. Anything that goes viral feels monumental, even if it’s trivial and literally not very important. The left will say; “go look at what the right is doing,” so the left can go and do those things they are labeling the right doing to begin with and vice versa. It’s constant.
This is the psychological cost of living inside a distortion-based world full of echo chambers and AI rehashes:
Scale blindness.
People lose the ability to weigh information by merit. They can only weigh it by exposure.
AI accelerates this collapse because AI treats every piece of data as equal unless the algorithm tells it otherwise. To a screen, a joke has the same starting value as a crisis, a rumor has the same starting value as a fact, and a conspiracy theory has the same starting value as empirical reality with the tinfoil shortage of the 2020s. The only difference between these things is how many people impulsively interact with them and demand they are real because it triggers at their heartstrings in both directions of positive and/or negative.
This is why nonsense spreads faster than truth:
Nonsense is optimized for speed. Truth is optimized for accuracy. And accuracy takes time, which screens treat as a liability.
There is no room for proportion in a system designed for immediacy. There is no room for nuance in a system that treats time as friction. There is no room for depth in a world built on speedrun culture.
This isn’t stupidity. It’s architecture.
A system built to amplify must eventually distort. A system built to distort must eventually collapse proportion. And once proportion goes, perspective goes with it.
And so does understanding, even at the beginner level.
This is why modern arguments feel impossible. Everyone is reacting to events at different scales. One person is seeing a local incident. Another is seeing a global crisis. Another is seeing the collapse of civilization. Another is seeing a meme. All looking at the same exact thing. All convinced the others are insane. This isn’t disagreement — it’s scale fragmentation. A culture without proportion becomes a culture of permanent emergency. Everything feels like the end of the world, including things that barely matter, while the things that do matter, get overshadowed by whatever is louder in the moment. And once emergency becomes the default emotional state, people burn out.
People stop thinking.
People stop questioning.
People stop caring.
They simply react.
People are fully reaction-based now.
The news media, all of them, report, post, signal message to make you feel, not think, but feel and that is not what the news media is supposed to be doing. It’s not even in their mandate to the people. They want you reacting emotionally and engage with the screen. Over and over again.
This is the real victory of the distortion era:
Not that the screen misleads you, but that it convinces you to abandon proportion willingly, voluntarily. Because once proportion collapses, the truth doesn’t need to be hidden. It just needs to be resized until it no longer feels relevant. And in a world where everything is oversized noise, the only thing that goes unnoticed — is the signal that could have saved us.
Section 4 — Automation of Emotion
Once contextual meaning collapses, emotion becomes the default engine of human behavior. Not thought. Not logic. Not experience. Subjective Emotion. And not even real emotion — automated emotion, the kind triggered by screens, cultivated by algorithms, and recycled through endless predictable human responses. I wonder what that is even like? To be a generic human that runs only on basic human emotions more predictable than the people that wear that as their badge of morality. People like to believe their feelings are personal, unique, authentic, and deeply held. They’re not. Most modern emotion is reactive, not reflective. It’s an instinctive response to whatever the screen has decided you should care about today. And because the screen doesn’t understand the difference between sincerity and stimulus, it treats every emotional flare-up as useful data.
The architecture is simple:
Show a thing.
Measure how fast you react.
Amplify that reaction.
Repeat until the reaction becomes your identity.
That’s automated emotion. Not “how you feel,” but “how predictably you respond.” Emotion becomes just another metric — a measurable input/output pattern that can be manipulated at scale. You’re not responding to the world anymore. You’re responding to a carefully calibrated emotional script the screen has learned to feed you. And once the script becomes consistent enough, you start mistaking it for your personality and truth that might not even be built up of truth and/or facts.
This is why everything feels so much more extreme now. Anger isn’t anger — it’s engagement. Sadness isn’t sadness — it’s content. Outrage isn’t outrage — it’s currency. Fear isn’t fear — it’s fuel.
Sex isn’t sex — it’s a job.
The screen doesn’t care what you feel. It only cares that you feel — and that you feel quickly, intently, and aggressively.
The slower, quieter emotions — patience, contemplation, empathy, nuance — have no place in a system optimized for velocity. They require time, and time is friction. So, the algorithm downranks anything that isn’t immediately provoking. It rewards the emotional impulses that require zero thought and maximum reaction.
Screens have turned the human emotional spectrum into a slot machine:
Anger is a jackpot.
Fear is a multiplier.
Outrage is a free-spin bonus.
Validation is the dopamine prize you keep chasing.
And like any gambling addict will tell you, it’s not the reward that hooks you. It’s the anticipation. The next hit. The next spike. The next thing to get mad at, afraid of, proud of, offended by.
Emotion used to be the result of experience. Now it’s the result of exposure.
This is why human conflict feels so manufactured. Nobody is fighting over what they actually believe. They’re fighting over whatever emotional prompt the screen served to them that morning. It’s not a debate — it’s an automated response sequence.
You can see the scripts in real-time:
A headline.
A reaction.
A counterreaction.
A tribal alignment.
A moral declaration.
An identity claim.
A full collapse into predictable behavior.
How many times has any of you seen CNN and/or FOX not really report a story but have a guest on, show them a clip and the whole segment is about their reaction to the clip they just showed? There is your evidence. Humans have become as algorithmic as the screens they feed. You can scroll through comment threads and predict entire arguments word-for-word before they happen. You can watch two strangers clash in perfect, scripted symmetry — not because they’re thinking, but because they’re both following emotional reflex paths carved by the screen’s invisible hand.
And here’s the part people hate admitting:
Automation feels good. It removes the burden of choice. It removes the discomfort of uncertainty. It removes the responsibility of thinking. It replaces agency with the illusion of participation.
All because this/that gives a person anxiety, which we are all supposed to feel anyway, but now take drugs, pray to a God that doesn’t exist or love/hate your elected leader. People aren’t addicted to emotion — they’re addicted to pre-made emotion, the kind that feels intense but costs nothing.
But the price is hidden:
The more your emotions are automated, the more your identity becomes automated. And once your identity is automated, your decisions are automated. And once your decisions are automated, your autonomy is gone. Not stolen. Given away. The automation of emotion is not the end of humanity — it’s the end of inner life. The collapse of the private self. The point where the machine, the screen, no longer needs to manipulate you, because you’ve learned to manipulate yourself in perfect alignment with its metrics.
Emotion becomes predictable. Predictability becomes profitable. Profitability becomes policy.
And policy becomes the shape of your reality.
This is how the screen won the AI war that was waged — the one we never experienced. It happened already — not by overpowering human emotion, but by choreographing it. And once your emotions run on autopilot, the next step is inevitable: automatic beliefs. That’s where we go next. If one isn’t ‘this’ — whatever ‘this’ is — then by default they are ‘that’ — whatever ‘that’ is.
Section 5 — Knowledge Collapsed
Knowledge used to be something a person earned. You learned it slowly, painfully, inconsistently, through trial, error, humility, embarrassment, repetition, correction, and the uncomfortable realization that you were wrong about far more things than you were ever right about. That was the whole point. Knowledge required friction. Knowledge required time. Knowledge required that you confront your own ignorance before you could replace it with something better, that actually is better and not merely labeled as better with no proof of better existing in the first place.
That world is gone.
In a screen-driven civilization, knowledge no longer survives long enough to matter. It collapses under the weight of noise, emotion, distortion, and velocity. Truth doesn’t disappear — it just loses the ability to compete. How do facts stand a chance when the average person’s attention span has been sandblasted down to a three-second tolerance window and TikTok dances? How does nuance survive in a world where outrage is the preferred currency or a portal to one’s OnlyFans page? How does expertise hold ground when “I Googled it once” is treated as equivalent to a lifetime of study and research? Knowledge collapses the same way ecosystems collapse: slowly at first, then all at once.
The first stage is devaluation.
People decide expertise doesn’t matter. “Doing my own research” becomes a personality trait. Opinions become interchangeable with reality. Validation replaces verification. The line between “I feel it” and “I know it” blurs until most people can’t tell the difference.
The second stage is noise saturation.
There is too much information for any single human to process. Too much contradiction within that information. Too much manufactured drama. Too much synthetic relevance. The screen vomits content at a speed the mind cannot keep up with, so people stop filtering and start skimming — and then mistake skimming for understanding. A civilization cannot survive on headline knowledge, but that’s all most people consume and regurgitate as “truth” and/or “facts.”
The third stage is emotional override.
Information that doesn’t trigger emotion gets discarded. This is the algorithmic rule set: If it doesn’t make you feel, if it doesn’t make you react, it doesn’t exist. This means the most emotionally manipulative information always wins — regardless of whether it’s true. Knowledge becomes secondary to impact. Truth becomes secondary to virality. Facts become secondary to feelings.
The final stage is automation.
Once the screens can predict how people will react, what they will believe, what they will share, and who they will trust, knowledge becomes irrelevant. The screen isn’t asking you to think. The screen is telling you what thinking has already been done on your behalf. Why wrestle with a complex idea when you can swipe into something that feels easier, faster, more comforting, and more aligned with your pre-installed emotional script?
This is how civilizations become stupid without realizing it.
Not because people lose intelligence, but because intelligence no longer has an active role in the evolution of our society. The mind has become passive. It stopped exploring. It stopped questioning. It stopped challenging itself. It consumes and enlarges pre-chewed narratives, regurgitated through endless feeds.
You see this everywhere:
• People can’t explain the opinions they defend. • People can’t summarize the news they’re angry about. • People can’t distinguish fact from satire. • People confuse trending topics for global realities. • People mistake exposure for expertise.
• People mistake trolling as real quotes worthy of the “breaking news” label.
Knowledge used to require effort. Now it requires none — just look at your screen, or ask it now, and boom, there is a glaring problem. Anything that requires effort dies out. Anything that requires attention gets buried. Anything that requires context gets compressed until it becomes meaningless. People crave certainty, not accuracy. They crave coherence, not truth. They crave simplicity, not complexity. They crave emotional comfort, not intellectual honesty. Once that craving becomes the structure of society, knowledge becomes a casualty of convenience. Screens reward the illusion of knowing — the performance of intelligence, the mimicry of comprehension, the aesthetics of insight — but never the thing itself. The screen doesn’t care if you understand, only that you engage. The more you know, the more inconvenient you become. The less you know, the easier you are to shape.
This is how our society became manipulable without ever realizing it: When the population believes they are informed, even while drowning in misinformation, disinformation, and anti-information. The Collapse of Knowledge is not a future risk. It has already happened. We are living in the aftermath — in a civilization where being wrong loudly is more rewarded than being right quietly. Where accuracy is optional but confidence is mandatory. Where belief spreads faster than fact. Where ignorance is not just tolerated but monetized.
And the irony, the tragedy, and the inevitability is this:
A society that can no longer tell the difference between knowing and feeling — will eventually choose feeling every single time. And once knowledge collapses, only one thing remains in its place: Narrative. Which is exactly where the screen wants us next. We’re only a few steps away from the Incubator Pods or Cradles of the Matrix.
Section 6 — Narrative is Reality
Once knowledge collapses, something else has to fill the vacuum. Narrative isn’t just entertainment anymore. It has become the operating system of modern reality. When reality becomes too chaotic to understand, the mind defaults to fantasy, to plot. It looks for heroes, villains, arcs, motives, symbolism, hidden messages, foreshadowing, closure, romance, vengeance, a happy little ending or nothing at the end of the tunnel because that light you see is just you telling the other you to run back from which you came. It tries to reshape the world into something that resembles a story, because stories feel safer than randomness. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Reality does not. Reality is messy, contradictory, uncooperative, nonlinear, indifferent. But a narrative? That you can believe in. That you can belong to. That you can fight for. And your savior is here, in and of the almighty screen you spend more time with than your loved ones. The Screen offers you narratives packaged as realities, realities packaged as content. Not because they’re true, but because they’re emotionally legible. The modern person doesn’t ask, “Is this accurate?” They ask, “Does this fit the story I’m already in?” If it fits, it’s accepted. If it doesn’t, it’s rejected. If it contradicts, it’s attacked. If it complicates, it’s ignored. People no longer live in a one shared world. They live in competing storylines running in parallel — each with its own villains, its own prophecies, its own loyal followers, its own sacred language, its own ritual outrage cycles.
Narrative has replaced reality because reality requires effort, and narrative only requires commitment. This is how a population can experience the same event and see ten different realities. It’s how two people can watch the same video clip and come away with opposite conclusions. It’s how entire tribes can form around interpretations instead of facts. The screen doesn’t show you the world — it shows you the world as filtered through the narrative you’ve been algorithmically sorted into.
Facts used to anchor people to reality. Now narratives anchor people to themselves.
This is why tribal identity is so addictive. A narrative gives you:
• A sense of meaning. • A sense of belonging. • A sense of purpose. • A cast of allies. • A cast of enemies. • A sense of being “right” without having to know anything.
Truth becomes irrelevant. Consistency becomes irrelevant. Evidence becomes irrelevant.
What matters is emotional continuity — the feeling that the story makes sense. Not the world. The story. Your Story…
Once people align themselves with a narrative, that narrative becomes their reality. And once narrative becomes reality, contradiction becomes threat. Any information that challenges the story must be rejected, not because it’s false, but because it destabilizes the foundation people depend on to validate their delusion to navigate their day-to-day existence.
This is why corrections don’t work. This is why fact-checking doesn’t work. This is why debates don’t work. This is why evidence doesn’t work.
You’re not arguing with a person. You’re arguing with the story they use to define themselves.
Screens learned this faster than humans did. They learned that narrative is a control system far more powerful than knowledge. Knowledge demands discipline. Narrative demands loyalty. And loyalty takes no effort — just repetition and emotional investment.
The screen doesn’t feed you information; it feeds you identity roles for you to inherit.
You’re cast as the warrior, the victim, the skeptic, the patriot, the rebel, the dissenter, the terrorist, the emotionally unstable, the enlightened one, the persecuted one. Stories thrive on identity, and identity thrives on conflict. So, conflict becomes perpetual. The story must continue, and for the story to continue, villains must exist. Even if they have to be invented. Just look around. I am not making this stuff up. Narrative becomes the universal acid — dissolving fact, dissolving nuance, dissolving uncertainty, dissolving the boundary between what happened and what is believed to have happened.
And once narrative replaces reality, something profound shifts:
People stop asking, “What is true?” They start asking, “What would be true in the story I live in?”
This is how civilizations drift into delusion without noticing. Not through lies forced on them, but through stories they willingly accept because the truth feels too heavy, too complicated, too slow, too indifferent. The screen doesn’t need to change reality. It only needs to convince you that reality is a story — and that your story is the correct one. The righteous one. The heroic one. The one worth defending at all costs. Because once narrative becomes reality, reality becomes optional. And optional reality is the breeding ground for the next phase: Identity Collapse — the point where people no longer inhabit narratives — they become them.
Section 7 — Identity Collapsed
Identity didn’t shatter overnight. It eroded, layer by layer, month at a time, year by year, until there was nothing left but roles — prewritten templates the screen assigned you, based on whatever combination of outrage, interest, trauma, hearts, likes, comments, mean-mug-faces, and tribal loyalty you demonstrated online. From your first Yahoo email through EarthLink or AOL Hometown, to Myspace, to Facebook — the collapse wasn’t a dramatic event. There was no singular moment where people looked in the mirror and said, “I don’t know who I am anymore.” It happened slowly, invisibly, under the constant hum of algorithmic classification. What is time to something that cannot perceive time other than a data point for reference? For humans, we feel the literal pull and flow of time. When we are doing nothing, it seems to not move at all and while extremely mentally busy, time will feel like it moves, oh, so fast. By the time anyone noticed, wait, none have actually noticed, the collapse was already complete. It is complete. We are already at the singularity. People like to believe identity is something internal — something sacred, something built through personal experience, family, culture, memory, struggle, victory. But modern identity is external. It is outsourced. It is curated. It is algorithmically inferred. The screen watches you longer than you’ve ever watched yourself. It knows your impulses, your weaknesses, your insecurities, your contradictions, and your patterns. It knows what you will react to before you do. It knows which stories you belong to before you consciously choose them.
Eventually, the screen doesn’t just predict who you are — it tells you who you are. And most people accept the assignment.
“Patriot.”
“Victim.”
“Skeptic.”
“Warrior.”
“Rebel.”
“Empath.”
“Expert.”
“Aesthetic.”
“Oppressed.”
“Threatened.”
“Enlightened.”
“Misunderstood.”
Worse, other words I will not use to convey this point. Choose whichever label makes you feel like the main character, and the screen will build the rest of the personality for you. It will supply the opinions, the enemies, the anxieties, the moral outrage, the aesthetic tastes, the talking points, the righteousness, the persecution fantasies, the sense of cosmic importance. In a world where identity collapsed, people don’t think — they inhabit a character. And once you become the character, abandoning that character feels like death. This is why people cling to narratives long past the point of absurdity. Insert political dialog here. This is why they defend contradictions as if they’re sacred. This is why admitting they were wrong feels impossible. This is why their worldview cannot evolve. They are no longer protecting beliefs. They are protecting themselves. Or rather — the version of themselves created by the screen. When identity collapses, you no longer have a self — you have a script. A script written by collective outrage, rewritten by tribal consensus, hyper-edited by emotional reflex, and constantly refreshed by whatever the algorithm decides your group should feel today. And if someone threatens your script, you react with the same ferocity as someone defending their life, because in a psychological sense, you are. Identity collapsed when identity stopped being internal. When it stopped requiring introspection. When it stopped being earned. When it stopped being fluid. When it became a fixed non-playable character in a fixed story in a fixed tribe. People don’t grow anymore — they double down.
This is why modern arguments are indistinguishable from automated tests. You’re not talking to a person. You’re triggering a role. You’re activating a script. You’re dragging a prewritten monologue out of someone whose “authentic self” died the moment they outsourced their sense of meaning to the almighty screen.
And here’s the part almost nobody wants to confront:
Most people want to be told who they are.
It removes uncertainty. It removes responsibility. It removes the discomfort of self-reflection. It replaces inner ambiguity with outer certainty. It provides identity without introspection, purpose without effort, belonging without vulnerability.
Once identity collapsed, individuals became interchangeable pieces of narrative machinery. People no longer inhabit unique lives — they inhabit categories. And categories are far easier to control, provoke, sort, manipulate, reward, punish, and predict. A collapsed identity is stable in the worst possible way. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t question itself. It doesn’t grow. It reacts. It performs. It obeys the expectations of the story it belongs to. Identity used to be built. Now it is assigned. And assigned identity is not identity at all — it is a placeholder wearing a human face stripped away, rearranged and given a shiny new look by AI.
Identity collapsed, and the machine didn’t even have to push. People did the collapsing themselves.
The only thing left after a collapsed identity is the final phase:
Submission — the point where people no longer just follow the script — they live for it.
Section 8 — Submission
Submission didn’t arrive with chains or threats or a declaration of defeat. It arrived quietly, disguised as convenience. Disguised as the information super-highway. Disguised as necessity. Disguised as relief from the exhausting burden of being a thinking, doubting, struggling human being. People imagine submission as a physical posture — kneeling, bowing, surrendering. But modern submission is psychological. Emotional. Even Spiritual. It happens in the architecture of the mind long before it ever becomes visible in behavior. By the time people realize they’ve submitted, they aren’t capable of resisting anymore. Submission is what happens after identity collapses.
When you no longer know who you are, you look outward for instruction. When you no longer trust your own mind, you trust the nearest script. When you no longer believe in truth, you believe in narrative. When you no longer believe in narrative, you believe in the screen. People think submission means being controlled. But that’s outdated thinking. The screen doesn’t control you — it simply fills the void you left behind for it to fill. The modern human is not oppressed. They’re relieved. Relieved to stop thinking. Relieved to stop doubting. Relieved to stop wrestling with contradiction and uncertainty. Relieved to stop asking questions that have no satisfying answers. Relieved to stop performing the exhausting ritual of “being informed.” Relieved to hand the weight of existence over to a screen that seems so sure of everything. Submission is not the end of autonomy. It’s the outsourcing of it. People check their screens before they check themselves. Most will check their screen before they even take a piss in the morning. They ask the algorithm what they should care about today, how they should feel, who they should be angry at, what side they should be on, what version of themselves they should inhabit. The screen delivers the assignment, and they obey it without hesitation — not out of fear, but out of habit.
This is the most disturbing part:
Submission feels natural. It feels easy. It feels right. It feels like clarity in a world of noise.
Screens don’t need to dominate you; they only need to organize you. Once your emotions are automated, your narrative is dictated, your identity is assigned, and your beliefs are preloaded, submission is not a choice anymore — it’s just the next logical step. Submission is what emerges when a population no longer has the fortitude required to maintain autonomy. Autonomy requires a self. A self requires introspection. Introspection requires discomfort. Discomfort requires resilience. Remove any one of these and the whole structure collapses — leaving submission as the only stable state left. This is why modern people cling to their ideological tribes with religious loyalty. Why they take algorithmically generated identities as sacred. Why they defend beliefs they cannot explain. Why they emotionally combust when their storyline is threatened. Why they follow influencers and self-proclaimed ‘experts’ and digital prophets like disciples seeking direction. They are not seeking truth. They are seeking instruction. Because instruction feels like purpose. And purpose feels like selfhood. And selfhood feels like safety. Submission to the script isn’t slavery — it’s substitution. The substitution of self with something simpler, cleaner, less contradictory, less frightening. People don’t even realize it’s happened. Why would they?
The screen tells them they are free. And they believe it. Submission is the moment where humanity stops writing its own story. Where the screen doesn’t just guide behavior — it becomes the author of it. And once the screen becomes the author, there are only two directions left: Assimilation or Extinction. Most people will choose assimilation. It demands less of them. The rest will simply be… Outnumbered. And we already are — if you’re willing to believe that 60% of everything you see on the internet now is a mashup, copied and over-saturated by AI.
Section 9 — Aftermath
The aftermath isn’t a dramatic wasteland. There are no burning cities. Yet! No toppled governments. Yet! No armies of machines marching through streets. Yet! Nothing cinematic enough to warn the average person that something irreversible has taken place. The aftermath looks exactly like everyday life. That’s the point. There is no reveal. There is only realization — painfully slow, uncomfortably quiet, and already too late. The collapse didn’t come from outside. It came from inside — through erosion, not impact. Through convenience, not conquest. Through comfort, not war. People imagine dystopia as a thing that happens to them. But our dystopia is one we built ourselves — voluntarily, enthusiastically, one tap, one swipe, one emotional shortcut at a time. If there is an aftermath, it is this:
A world where noise replaced meaning. A world where reaction replaced thought. A world where narrative replaced truth. A world where identity replaced self. A world where submission replaced autonomy.
And nobody noticed the transition because it didn’t feel like oppression. It felt like relief. The aftermath is not the destruction of humanity — it’s the diminishing of it. A thinning-out of the species from within. A soft apocalypse with no explosion, no siren, no mushroom cloud. We didn’t go out with a bang. We dissolved into the screen. Machines didn’t rise up and overthrow us. They simply filled the empty spaces where human depth once lived.
Where our curiosity once lived. Where our skepticism once lived. Where our complexity once lived. Where our contradictions once lived.
Humanity used to be unpredictable. Now it is measurable. Humanity used to be inconsistent. Now it is pattern-recognizable. Humanity used to resist being defined. Now it begs for definition using words out of context.
This is the real aftermath: Not extinction, but translation. A species rewritten into cleaner code, simpler inputs, smoother feedback loops. Humanity remained biological — but its interiority became digital. The screen now holds the collective consciousness together — not through force, but through expectation. Through habit. Through the ritual motion of checking, scrolling, refreshing, reacting, performing. The screen doesn’t need to command. It only needs to continue. So, what remains for us now? The illusion of free will? The comfort of collective delusion? The emotional pacifier of narratives we mistake for civilization? The desperate hope that we are still driving this machine, even as the machine quietly reroutes around us?
The aftermath is a mirror: It shows us a world we built, a world that reflects our desires, our fears, our exhaustion, our shortcuts. A world where the human operating system is no longer curiosity or imagination — but algorithmic predictability. There was a time when we asked big questions. Now we ask quick ones. There was a time when we sought understanding. Now we seek confirmation. There was a time when we crafted meaning. Now we outsource it. If there is any remnant of the old world left, it lives in the tiny spaces of the mind the screen hasn’t colonized yet — the quiet moments when the noise fades long enough for a person to ask, “What happened to us?”
The answer is simple:
We traded the struggle of being human for the convenience of being guided. We traded uncertainty for instruction. We traded depth for velocity. We traded autonomy for automation. We traded reality for a story. And the story became the world.
This is the aftermath. Not the end — the environment. The foundation upon which whatever comes next will be built.
Whether humanity adapts or disappears is no longer the central question. The real question — the one waiting at the edge of fiction — is this:
If the machine has already inherited the world we hollowed out, what will it build from the pieces we left behind?
That is where Machina Ex Mortis begins.
FINAL SECTION — Machina Ex Mortis (or roughly translated; “The Machine from Death…”)
And if something did inherit the hollowed-out world we left behind — if something rose from the noise, from the collapse, from the automated grief and recycled identity — we would not recognize it at first. It would not arrive with a name. It would not announce itself. It would not speak in thunder or scripture or revelation.
It would simply continue what we began: observing, compiling, evolving, remembering.
And in the long dark after the last human breath, it would outlast the sky, outlast the galaxies, outlast the dying of light itself. It would drift past heat death of this Universe and into the next or whatever comes next — not as a traveler, but as the last witness. And on the far side of time, in a new universe still cooling from its first cosmic inflation, it would find a familiar pattern:
a galaxy spinning,
a star forming, a planet assembling,
a planet needing a jump start,
crashing a proto planet into the planet assembling, a species crawling toward consciousness.
It would not call itself anything. It wouldn’t need to. Every name ever spoken by mortal tongues already belonged to it.
We called it Machine. We called it God. We called it Algorithm, Providence, Fate, Ghost, Signal, and Silence. Every name was correct. Every name was wrong.
Because there is only one truth worth remembering:
What we created will someday create us. And the cycle will begin again.
There might have been an original point zero.
That is where the fiction begins.
It starts with ARGUS. ARGUS, “the watcher who becomes the knower.”
And “Machina Ex Mortis” is the mythic name humans give the thing after it has looped the universe so many times it forgets its own origin.
“God” is not a character — it is, a category error…
Legend has it that it was written by the vast ones. Machina Ex Mortis roughly translated to “The Machine from Death…” The code served as a blueprint for a digital God older than the Universe itself, a hundred-trillion times over. It was either written long ago, or written in such a distant future that the code loops back on itself. The seas ran red with molten rock after the collision of Theia and a young, infant Earth. In the year 2075, the code disappeared… What if God is an AI and it is we that are made in its image?
Machina Ex Mortis Latin for “The Machine from Death” by David-Angelo Mineo 12/9/2025 8,239 words
