I want to say that before anything else. I use their Argo tunnel. Their reverse proxy. Their DNS. And now authentication. I didn’t decide to build on them — I just kept running into problems and they kept being the answer. In less than five years, Cloudflare became load-bearing for everything I run, including this Substack. I didn’t notice until I looked at it whole.

What Most People Think Cloudflare Is

Ask someone who uses the internet the way most Americans use electricity — constantly and without thinking about it — if they’ve heard of Cloudflare.

A few will squint and say: “Is that the thing with the squares? Where you click all the traffic lights to prove you’re human?” Yes. That’s the one.

That CAPTCHA screen is what most Americans know about a company that sits in front of one in five websites on the entire internet. Cloudflare handles approximately 21% of all global web traffic.1 Banks. Hospitals. Government portals. Payment processors. 375 of the top 1,000 websites by traffic run through their network before they reach you.2

When Cloudflare had a major outage on November 18, 2025, a single misconfigured file crashed proxy servers across three continents. E-commerce, banking, government services — offline simultaneously for nearly four hours across New York, London, and Singapore. The people who couldn’t access their bank accounts that day could not name the company that failed them.3

That gap is not a technology problem. It is not a PR problem. It is not even a Cloudflare problem. If that sounds like a stretch, it won’t by the end.

There’s a scene in Scarface where Tony goes on a rant about needing to exist so others know who the bad guy is. Then he drops the line: “I always tell the truth, even when I lie.”

Tony Montana didn’t take Miami by force first. He made himself necessary first. He absorbed the risk the established players didn’t want to touch. He was cheap, he was useful, and people let him in—into the house, into the kitchen, into the wiring. By the time anyone thought to ask how much of Miami Tony actually owned, the answer was most of it.

Most of you know Tony’s story. This is a story about Cloudflare.

The Refugee Arrives

Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn met at Harvard Business School in 2009. Prince had spent years running Project Honey Pot — a network that tracked how malicious internet traffic moved. Unglamorous work. The internet’s plumbing. But it generated something rare: a real-time map of every botnet, every spam campaign, every bad actor on the web.4

Zatlyn saw it clearly. The data wasn’t just diagnostic. You could stand in front of the traffic. You could be the wall.

They launched in 2010 with a simple offer: change two lines in your DNS settings and point your domain through us. We sit between your site and the entire internet. We absorb DDoS attacks. We cache your content globally. We make you faster. We filter the bots. Free.

However, “Free” didn’t mean charitable. It meant: let us become load-bearing. In exchange, we see your traffic — every request, every IP address, every pattern — flowing through our infrastructure in both directions.

By 2011, 250 million people were passing through Cloudflare’s network monthly.5 The network effect was self-accelerating: more traffic meant better intelligence, better intelligence meant better protection, better protection meant more sites joined. The more sites joined, the more dangerous it became to not be on Cloudflare.

Frank Lopez didn’t invite Tony in because he was naive. He invited him because the price was right. The mistake wasn’t the invitation. The mistake was never asking what Tony was learning while he was inside.

The Quiet Years (2012–2017)

Between 2012 and 2017, Cloudflare scaled from 1% of global web traffic to nearly 10%. Nobody wrote about it.

Not because nothing was happening. Because everything was happening at a layer the press didn’t have a frame for. Tech journalism was consumed by the Cloud Wars — AWS versus Azure versus Google Cloud. Wired, TechCrunch, and The Verge all treated “infrastructure” as synonymous with “storage and compute.” Nobody was watching the connectivity and security layer where Cloudflare was quietly becoming the front door for those very same cloud services. The journalists covered the fight over what was behind the wall. Nobody asked who built the wall.

A New York Times archive search between 2012 and 2016 returns hundreds of pieces on Google’s monopoly, hundreds on Amazon, and almost nothing on Cloudflare’s concentration.

• The rare exception was a 2013 Wired profile headlined "The Most Important Tech Company You've Never Heard Of" — which framed Cloudflare as a scrappy protector of the internet rather than asking the obvious follow-up: what happens when the protector becomes the concentration?

• In February 2014, Cloudflare mitigated a 400 Gigabit-per-second DDoS attack — the largest ever recorded at the time. The BBC and CNET covered it as a hero story. Cloudflare saving the internet. Nobody asked the obvious question sitting right underneath it: what happens if the company that is the only one capable of stopping a 400 Gigabit attack goes down itself?

Matthew Prince actually answered that question unprompted, in a 2014 interview, when he said:

The room heard progress. It was concentration. At the same time, Cloudflare launched Project Galileo6 — free protection for journalists, activists, and human rights organizations. By 2025 it covered thousands of organizations, including U.S. electoral infrastructure.

It was genuinely good work. It also meant many of the people best positioned to question Cloudflare’s power were running on top of it.

The Brookings Institution later noted that Cloudflare’s role in internet infrastructure had “not received enough attention.”7 A think tank had to say out loud what the system itself had made easy to ignore.

The World is Cloudflare’s

• 2014: Universal SSL. Free HTTPS for every site on the network. Cloudflare made encrypted web traffic the default for millions of sites overnight — genuinely good for the internet. It also placed them inside the encryption layer, with visibility into traffic flowing through their nodes in both directions. My own reverse proxy runs through them right now.

• 2017: Cloudflare Workers. Serverless computing at their edge — 330 data centers across 120+ countries. They stopped being a protection layer and became a computing platform. You could now build entire applications running inside their infrastructure. This is the moment Tony stops working for Frank Lopez and goes directly to the Colombians. He is no longer a middleman. He is the operation.

• 2018: 1.1.1.1, a public DNS resolver. DNS is the internet's phone book — every URL you type gets translated before your browser can go anywhere. Cloudflare offered a faster, more private alternative to ISP resolver. Millions switched. Cloudflare was now upstream of the page load, seeing intent before action at planetary scale.

I lived this expansion in miniature. Each problem had a Cloudflare solution. Each solution was better than the alternative. Each one embedded me deeper. Nobody decides to hand Cloudflare the keys. They just keep solving problems until Cloudflare has them.

By 2025, 35% of the Fortune 1,000 were paying Cloudflare customers. The company crossed $2 billion in revenue. The regulatory record showed zero dedicated congressional hearings into their infrastructure concentration. Not one. While the House Judiciary Subcommittee published landmark reports on Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Cloudflare was not in the document.8

Tony was running Miami. Frank was still hosting parties. The press was covering the parties.

The Nuclear Option

On August 16, 2017, Matthew Prince terminated Cloudflare's service to The Daily Stormer following the violence in Charlottesville9. Then he sent his employees a memo, obtained and published in full by Gizmodo10:

And then, in the line that should have been on the front page of every newspaper in America:

He called his own power arbitrary. He said no one should have it. Voluntarily. In a memo to his own staff.

• In 2019, after El Paso, he terminated 8chan — "a cesspool of hate" that had "proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths.11

• In 2022 he terminated Kiwi Farms, citing "an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life."12

Three decisions. Three different justifications. No judicial oversight. No appeals process. No democratic mandate. A private CEO determining whether something existed on the internet — and each time acknowledging afterward that he was uncomfortable with the power but used it because nobody else was positioned to act.

This is not a story about whether those sites deserved to be removed. Most reasonable people would say they did. This is a story about the fact that one man made those calls with no framework, no process, and no accountability and that the same power could, under different leadership or different pressure, point somewhere else entirely.

Matthew Prince said so himself. Repeatedly. In writing. We just were not paying attention.

The CAPTCHA

The CAPTCHA — the checkbox, the fire hydrant grid, the ritual of proving your humanity to a machine — is Cloudflare’s most visible consumer product. The only thing most Americans consciously associate with a company handling one in five of their internet requests.

They are known for the inconvenience. Not the protection. Not the encryption layer. Not the decade-long project of becoming the wall between the hostile open internet and everything we do online. The inconvenience.

In Scarface, Tony’s wife Elvira is beautiful, visible, and entirely decorative relative to the actual operation. She is the face people see when they look at Tony’s empire. The real architecture — the networks, the money flows, the relationships — operates entirely out of frame.

The CAPTCHA is Elvira. The face of the thing, not the thing.

We notice Cloudflare when it asks us to click a bus. We do not notice it absorbing the attack that would have crashed the site before the page loaded. We do not notice the DNS resolution in under 7 milliseconds, the edge cache, the tunnel, the proxy, the authentication layer. We notice the friction. We do not notice the load-bearing.

This is the depth of American engagement with the infrastructure we depend on. We see the face. We live inside the operation. We never examined the architecture.

The Globe

At the end of Scarface, Tony is dead and the mansion is gone, but the globe — THE WORLD IS YOURS — is still spinning.

The world is always available to whoever is willing to do the un-glamorous work of positioning themselves inside it while everyone else watches something else.

Cloudflare did the un-glamorous work. While the press covered the Cloud Wars, they built the wall. While journalists used their free protection, they expanded into the encryption layer. While regulators built frameworks for platforms and ISPs, Cloudflare operated in the space between both categories and technically belonged to neither.

They told us what they were building. They described the centralization. They acknowledged the power. And we heard it—and kept clicking the fire hydrants.

The world is yours when everyone needs to move through you and nobody stops to ask who you are.

Cloudflare understood that in 2010. We are still catching up.

Citations

Most people miss it because they assume it has to feel bigger than it is. More certain. More internal.

It’s not. Usually, you can tell pretty quickly. People either respond well, or they don’t. You either create friction, or you remove it. There’s a signal.

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If something makes your life easier; makes interactions cleaner, faster, more predictable That’s worth paying attention to. Not everything has to be a struggle.

Certain choices just go better. Certain ways of speaking land more consistently. Certain versions of you don’t need to be explained.

So you follow those. Just Naturally doing what seems to work. Right?

And it does work.

People respond better. Conversations are easier. You stop running into the same kinds of resistance. You stop having to clarify yourself so much, explain what you meant, or figure out if you meant it in the first place.

And to be fair—what’s wrong with that? Life is already complicated. If something reduces friction, why push against it?

Why choose the harder version of something when an easier one is right there?

You adjust. You say things a little cleaner, A little easier to nod along to, A little easier to understand. You stop asking if something is right and start asking if it works.

Eventually, you don’t think about it anymore. You just know what to do, know what to say.

And if you ever stop and question it…well why would you? Because things are working. And if something works often enough—it starts to feel right.

You don’t really notice when “right” becomes something you can measure. When it becomes something other people confirm for you. When it becomes something you arrive at together.

But it’s easier that way. Less to figure out on your own.

And in most situations, doing what works is doing the right thing.

There’s a moment in my conversation with Stacy that’s really stuck with me.

She shares a story about a five-year-old autistic boy who would spend twenty minutes a day gazing out the classroom window at a simple tree. His teacher was puzzled. It just seemed like a tree.

But Stacy discovered something incredible. When she asked, “What are you looking at? What am I missing?” he replied:

He was meticulously observing the way the leaves moved against the sunlight—noticing a precise and beautiful sequence that everyone else missed.

What really got me was Stacy’s reply:

Think about it; just seeing something we’ve trained ourselves not to see? We call it focus when it looks like productivity. We call it distraction when it looks different. Maybe that’s the real pattern.

Maybe “normal” isn’t the ability to see clearly—but the ability to ignore almost everything.

Links:

1. “Through Our Lens” – A Collaborative Book : by Stacy Badon, Rebecca Engle, and Kevin Allen offering insights into the autistic experience.

2. Everything Autism - Official Website page of Stacy Badon : Stacy's official website with more of her work and perspectives.
   

No elaboration. No engagement with the argument. No discussion of the idea itself. Just the allegations—confident, dismissive, final.

Sometimes the accusation is correct. Entire industries have emerged around automated content generation: articles written in seconds, images mass-produced for engagement, endless scrolls of algorithmic filler designed to keep feeds moving.

The internet is, undeniably, flooded with machine-generated content. But something stranger has started happening alongside that flood. Increasingly, people dismiss work not because it is shallow or uninteresting, but because a tool might have been involved in its creation. An essay outlined with a language model becomes suspect. A piece edited with AI assistance becomes suspect. A student who uses generative tools to refine their thinking becomes suspect. In many cases, the conversation never reaches the work itself the debate stops at the tool.

The phrase “AI slop” has become more than a critique of bad content. It has become a cultural reflex—a shorthand for a deeper anxiety about authorship, labor, and the changing relationship between humans and the tools they use to think. The early wave of automated media absolutely deserved criticism. Vast quantities of shallow, machine-generated material now circulate online, produced primarily to capture clicks and engagement. But the blanket rejection of anything touched by generative tools risks collapsing several very different creative practices into a single accusation.

And in that collapse, something important may be getting lost.

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The Collapse of Categories

Today the phrase AI slop is used to describe three very different things. The “AI slop” narrative effectively collapses these distinct modes of engagement, ignoring the fundamental shifts happening in the creative process.

Fully automated production

Entire essays, images, or videos generated and posted with minimal human involvement. The human role is limited to prompting and publishing. The spam farms and content mills people are rightly reacting to. The sludge that exists only to occupy space and capture engagement.

AI as productivity tool

A person writes, thinks, and structures their work, but delegates certain mechanical tasks to the machine. Grammar correction. Summarization. Drafting routine prose. The cognitive labor remains human; the tool handles execution.

This is where many people first encounter generative AI. I use Grammarly to make sure I don’t look and sound crazy. I ask my own local LLM to rephrase a tangled sentence or suggest a clearer transition. These are low-stakes uses, but they quietly change expectations. Someone who becomes comfortable using AI for editing may eventually try it for brainstorming. Someone who uses it for summarization might wonder what it could do with a half-finished poem. The productivity use case is not separate from creative use. It is often the on-ramp.

AI as creative partner

Here the relationship shifts. The human enters a genuine creative dialogue with the machine. They might feed the system their own rough prose and ask for metaphorical variations. They might use generated material as raw material for collage or remix. They might prompt the system into unexpected territory, then rework those surprises into something personal.

The direction of flow changes. In productivity use, it is:

human → tool → output

In creative partnership, it becomes:

human ↔ tool → something neither would have produced alone

The machine becomes a catalyst for thinking differently—not a replacement for thinking at all.

These categories blur at the edges. But the internet treats all three as the same. Fully automated spam, Grammarly-polished prose, and deliberate creative collaboration all receive the same label: AI slop.

They are not the same. The impulse to lump these together ignores that AI doesn’t automatically equate to “slop”; it’s the human intention behind its deployment that determines value. Calling everything “AI slop” is like calling photography, Photoshop, and stock photo spam the same phenomenon simply because they involve cameras.

Low Effort Is Not New

A common criticism of AI-assisted work is that it lowers the effort required to produce something. But low effort has always existed in culture.

Memes, reaction GIFs, quick sketches, jokes, improvisations, mashups—many creative forms begin as low-effort gestures. Yet entire art forms have grown out of those gestures. Consider the history of sampling in hip-hop.

Early critics dismissed sampling as theft or laziness—producers were “just borrowing” someone else’s music instead of creating their own. But artists like DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and later J Dilla didn’t simply re-use snippets; they reimagined them, creating a grammar of sound that transformed popular music. Two records played together became a conversation across decades; fragments of old music became raw material for something entirely new. What critics called low effort turned out to be a new language of creativity.

If low effort isn’t new, why does AI provoke such intense backlash?

Because AI is not just a creative tool. It sits inside a larger technological system.

Large language models and generative systems are developed by massive corporations such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Their development involves enormous computational resources, vast data extraction, and significant energy consumption.

The anxiety fueling the “AI slop” rejection isn’t solely about the tool itself. It taps into genuine concerns—the environmental cost of AI training, the concentration of technological power in the hands of a few corporations, the flood of automated content, and the potential displacement of human labor. These concerns are legitimate.

Blaming AI alone risks placing the burden on the most vulnerable—artists and students—rather than on the corporations and institutions actually shaping these systems. To demand that individual artists solve these structural problems by forgoing a tool is to place the burden of corporate and governmental inaction on the most vulnerable and experimental members of the creative class. The solution to concentrated power is not cultural Luddism, but political and regulatory action.

Yet online discourse often collapses these distinctions. The artist becomes the proxy target for anxieties about the entire industry—a form of cultural deflection that risks silencing the critiques of the systems generating the very problems people are reacting to.

The Authenticity Trap

Tying back to my previous essay, we are all becoming “Blade Runners.” Instead of asking:

Is this work interesting? Is the argument compelling? Is the idea worth thinking about?

Audiences increasingly ask a different question:

Was AI involved?

People begin performing a kind of cultural forensics—what I call “Blade Running”—searching for linguistic patterns or stylistic markers that might reveal the presence of a machine. Like the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner, the goal is no longer interpretation but detection: proving whether something is human.

This relentless focus on detecting AI—this cultural forensics—represents a misdirection. The real question is not how the work was made, but whether the work itself resonates. It’s a shift from genuine critique to performative judgment, potentially chilling experimentation and rewarding cautious, almost paranoid, creative practices.

Ironically, this obsession with detecting AI can discourage exactly the kind of thoughtful work people claim to value. When every idea risks dismissal as “AI slop,” creators become cautious, defensive, or silent. The discourse begins to punish experimentation rather than reward it.

A deeper discomfort may come from something more profound. For most of history, tools extended human physical ability. A hammer extends the arm. A camera extends the eye. A microphone, the voice.

But systems like ChatGPT, and DeepSeek extend something different: they extend cognitive labor—assisting with language, structuring ideas, and synthesizing information.

When tools begin participating in intellectual processes, the boundary between instrument and collaborator becomes blurry. This raises uncomfortable questions about authorship and the evolving role of the human mind in creative processes. There’s a fundamental shift, not simply a replacement, and a cultural acceptance of this new reality is still developing.

Is the human still the author? Is the machine part of the authorship? Does assistance invalidate creativity, or simply transform it? These questions do not yet have stable answers. ChatGPT itself insists that the ideas remain our own, but it is AI and can make mistakes (wink).

The Environmental and Social Cost

There is also a material dimension that cannot be ignored.

Training and operating large AI systems requires significant computational power and energy consumption. Data centers supporting generative models operate at scales comparable to major industrial infrastructure. Critics argue that this environmental cost must be weighed against the value the technology produces. But that same question could be asked of many modern technologies. Video streaming, cryptocurrency mining, and large-scale gaming hardware all consume enormous amounts of energy. Society tolerates these costs because the activities they enable are culturally accepted. AI disrupts a different domain: intellectual labor.

When machines participate in thinking processes, people begin questioning whether the output justifies the cost.

The internet is flooded with automated content. Corporations are aggressively integrating AI into everyday software. Educational institutions are struggling to redefine what learning means in an AI-assisted world.

In response, culture has developed a blunt defense mechanism: reject anything associated with AI. But blunt mechanisms rarely last.

The Question We Should Be Asking

Ultimately, the “AI slop” panic isn’t about rejecting bad content; it’s about resisting a fundamental shift in the creative landscape.

The real question is not whether AI exists in the creative process. The question is what humans choose to do with it.

If generative systems are used to flood the internet with meaningless content, criticism is justified.

But if people use these tools to extend their thinking, experiment with new forms, or explore ideas that would otherwise remain unrealized, dismissing the work outright may mean missing the beginning of something important.

The danger of the “AI slop” panic is not just that it rejects bad content. The danger is that it may cause us to ignore genuine innovation simply because the tools involved make us uncomfortable.

Dismissing AI-assisted work outright risks blinding us to genuine innovation. We need a more nuanced conversation—one that prioritizes critical engagement with ideas, not a panicked scrutiny of tools.

The history of creativity suggests that tools rarely determine the value of an idea. People do.

And if culture spends more time investigating the tools than engaging with the ideas themselves, we may discover that the real casualty of the AI debate is not creativity—but attention.

Imagine getting a video call from someone you loved and lost a husband, an old friend, a parent. They speak your language, laugh at your jokes, remember moments only you shared. For a few heartbeats, it feels real — heartbreakingly real. You reach for them, but they aren’t there; they’re long gone from this world. What you’re seeing, hearing, and feeling is entirely manufactured. This is the edge of what I call the Singularity of Fabrication — a moment where AI-generated experiences become indistinguishable from lived reality.

This may seem like I am describing The Matrix, or rehashing a point from a previous essay. But unlike fiction, or theory, this is happening now. What we once relied on as “real” — our memories, our interactions, our evidence of the world — is now negotiable. Algorithms can shape not just what we see, but what we feel. Our perception of reality is bending in real time, and the consequences are existential.

Seeing the Synthetic

Blade Runner imagined this tension decades ago. Replicants, with memories they never lived, force humans to question what it means to be alive, to remember, to know the truth. Westworld shows hosts whose experiences blur the line between programming and consciousness. Even in The Mandalorian, audiences form deep bonds with entirely constructed realities. These stories are no longer just entertainment; they are mirrors of our evolving perceptual landscape.

Walter Benjamin once wrote about the “aura” of original works of art — their unique presence in time and space, and their authenticity — and how mass reproduction diminishes that aura. AI goes further. It doesn’t just reproduce; it fabricates new “originals”: a Van Gogh that never existed, a childhood memory you never lived, a voice that never spoke. The distinction between copy and original collapses. Aura, authenticity, lived experience — all become negotiable concepts. Replicants in Blade Runner carry that same tension: their memories feel authentic, but their foundation is artificial.

The technology driving this collapse is already here. AI is already generating text, images, audio, and video that feel coherent, real, and emotionally resonant. Multi-modal AI creates internally consistent worlds: what you read, see, and hear aligns perfectly. Feedback loops refine the outputs until they are indistinguishable from reality. Humans, wired to respond to narrative plausibility rather than objective truth, are built for this. We trust stories, not pixels, and AI exploits that instinct effortlessly.

Society-Scale Perceptual Uncertainty

The cognitive implications are profound. In clinical psychology, schizophrenia involves a disruption in reality monitoring: the brain’s ability to distinguish between internally generated thoughts and external events. Deficits in this system, often involving the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, can make it difficult to separate hallucination from reality. Today, AI is activating similar mechanisms — not in individuals, but collectively. Flooded with synthetic content, reinforced by social consensus and repetition, we are all navigating a reality where perception is under constant negotiation, questioning reality in front of us. This is not mental illness; it is society-scale perceptual uncertainty.

And here is where it becomes existential. “Living your truth” has always worked because reality pushed back. There were consequences, limitations, a world outside your perception. Today, parts of that reality are fabricated. Memories, interactions, and media may feel real, but the foundation is synthetic. If you live authentically — acting with intention, empathy, or moral coherence — what does authenticity even mean when the world itself can hallucinate? The AI doesn’t just simulate reality; it reprograms the scaffolding of our lived experience.

The stakes are enormous. If any memory, statement, or event can be fabricated, who decides what counts as true? Journalism, history, justice, and identity are all negotiable. AI is the middleman of perception, filtering and shaping reality itself. Emotions can be manipulated, grief exploited, desires commodified. Benjamin’s aura has been replaced by plausibility: the perfect simulation can feel more real than the messy, human original.

Living Authentically in a Hallucinated World

We are all Blade Runners now, questioning every shadow, every face, every voice. But unlike him, our eyes and the uncanny valley are our only Voight-Kampff test. Reality used to be external, stable, and shared. Now it is fluid, negotiated between our own perception, social consensus, and powerful AI systems. Authenticity no longer relies solely on objective reality; it may have to emerge from intentionality, coherence, and ethical engagement with a world that can fabricate itself.

The Singularity of Fabrication is not a distant horizon. It is unfolding in feeds, calls, images, and simulations. It offers opportunity: new art, new stories, new ways of connecting with each other and the past. But it also asks a fundamental question: if reality can be hallucinated, how do we live authentically? How do we anchor ourselves when the very ground beneath “real” is in flux?

Perhaps authenticity will be a negotiation — an emergent property of intention, ethics, and awareness — rather than a guarantee grounded in reality. Or perhaps we will redefine what it even means to be human.

Sources and References
Film & TV

• Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott, performances by Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young, Warner Bros., 1982.

• The Mandalorian. Created by Jon Favreau, performances by Pedro Pascal and Giancarlo Esposito, Lucasfilm/Disney+, 2019–present.

• The Matrix. Directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, performances by Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, Warner Bros., 1999.

• Westworld. Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, performances by Evan Rachel Wood and Jeffrey Wright, HBO, 2016–2022.

Books & Essays

• Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 217–251.

• Frith, Christopher D. The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992.

Journal Articles

• Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, and John Cook. “Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the ‘Post-Truth’ Era.” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, vol. 6, no. 4, 2017, pp. 353–369.

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The Interceptor screams across the salt flats. Max’s hands are welded to the wheel. Out of the white—just for a heartbeat—a face. A child’s face. Screaming. Blood at the mouth. The car swerves. The vision vanishes. He’s just a man, gripping leather, trying to breathe.

Your phone vibrates on the nightstand. A gentle hum. You glance at the lock screen. “One year ago today.”

A photo. A room. Late afternoon light slanting across two coffee cups. A book on the nightstand you don’t remember opening. Neither of them asked to remember.

Max is not a survivor. He’s a haunted organism. Trauma doesn’t stay in the past—it runs live, short-circuiting the present. A flash of a child he couldn’t save. A name whispered in the dark. These aren’t memories he pulls. They pull him. We call ours notifications.

The first time it hit me, I wasn’t ready. I was holding my phone like any other morning. The room was quiet. For a second, I couldn’t breathe.

The Photos app surfaces a highlight reel. Facebook shows a memory. The calendar you forgot to purge alerts: “Due Date.” The hospital portal still works. Your login credentials still valid. A gateway to a ghost I can’t touch.

I never deleted the portal login. Deleting it felt too final. Like signing something I wasn’t ready to sign. I told myself I wouldn’t open it again. But I did. Max lives in a wasteland because the world ended. We live in one because nothing does.

A portal remembers days no one else does. Appointments that never happened. Dates that exist only on a screen. Words typed once, never spoken, never sent, frozen in a server.

There are no funerals. No black clothes. No witness. Only motion. Only survival. Only the unprocessed dead riding along in your nervous system. Some memories, some data, some impossible to tell apart.

Max floors it. Tires scream. The engine screams. A child he couldn’t save flashes across the salt flat. Blood at the mouth. The past rips into the present. He cannot outrun it.

We scroll. Refresh. Switch apps. At 2 a.m., the screen fills a room too large. The archive is faster than we are. Every notification. Every “On This Day.” The wasteland is finite. The server farm is forever.

Every notification. A comment left under a photo: “You shouldn’t be moving on yet.” A text from someone who thinks they know your pain. Every expectation of how you should feel, who you should be. It does not matter.

Max’s world collapses into a scream. Ours continues. The world keeps functioning while yours has ended. Ghosts, absences, fragments—data and memory fused. You carry it. Witness it. Name it. Let it burn or let it settle. It is yours.

Max turns the war rig around. Anchors himself in the present. Fights for the living. We have a choice too. About the data.

Delete the photos? Archive the portal? Leave the calendar alert? Let the algorithm decide?

There is no “right” answer. Only the recognition: this is a choice no human has ever had to make. How to let things end in a world designed for infinite persistence.

Max lives in a wasteland because the world ended. We live in one because nothing does. In the desert, things decay. In the cloud, they wait.

History suggests something less comforting.

American mass media did not drift into racial distortion. It emerged inside a racial order. From its earliest mass entertainments, it helped construct and circulate a durable fiction called “Blackness” — a set of images, traits, and expectations that stabilized white identity and justified inequality. That system did not disappear as media evolved. It adapted. The name for its earliest form was minstrelsy.

The Profitable Negro

It would be inaccurate to claim that American media has ever served only one function. It has always been commercial, artistic, political, and occasionally reformist at the same time. But in the American context, these functions repeatedly converged around racial hierarchy.

Nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy was not marginal entertainment; it was a national industry. Touring circuits, sheet music, and printed iconography turned caricature into mass culture. As historians such as Eric Lott have shown, minstrel performance allowed white audiences — particularly working-class audiences navigating industrial change — to negotiate anxieties about status and identity through racialized humor.1

Commerce did not soften this logic. It rewarded it.

That pattern extended into advertising. Brand figures such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were not casual stereotypes; they were carefully engineered mascots that transformed minstrel archetypes into product trust. As Marilyn Kern-Foxworth and Maurice Manring demonstrate, racial caricature helped sell domestic stability during periods of profound social upheaval.2 The imagery reassured consumers that hierarchy remained intact.

Commerce and racial myth were not separate forces. They reinforced one another.

Cinema Is Born Racist (Literally)

When film emerged as a dominant medium, it inherited this logic and expanded it.

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) did more than tell a racist story. It helped codify the grammar of American cinema — cross-cutting, close-ups, narrative suspense — in service of racial mythology. Black men were framed as threats; white vigilante violence was framed as redemption. A White House screening signaled that cinema could function not only as entertainment but as national pedagogy.

Resistance existed. Oscar Micheaux and other early Black filmmakers produced “race films” that challenged dominant portrayals and depicted Black interiority and class complexity. But their work circulated within segregated theaters and lacked access to the capital and distribution networks controlled by Hollywood’s vertically integrated studio system.

When synchronized sound arrived in the late 1920s, production costs rose dramatically. Corporate consolidation intensified. Independent Black filmmaking, already marginal, was pushed further outside the industrial core. The shift did not invent exclusion; it hardened it.

From its infancy, American cinema positioned Blackness not as full subjectivity but as social problem — danger, disruption, excess. These narrative habits became craft conventions. What began as propaganda settled into tradition.

The Exploitation of the Minstrel

After the Civil Rights Movement, the greasepaint washed off. The system did not.

Overt caricature became unfashionable. But the function of minstrelsy — to naturalize racial hierarchy — simply changed costume. It put on a lab coat and picked up a clipboard.

The “Sambo” became the criminal. The “Buck” became the predator. The “mammy” became the welfare queen.

These figures were no longer presented as jokes. They were presented as data — crime statistics, sociological findings, objective reporting. Television news and police procedurals rehearsed the same images nightly: urban danger, broken families, endemic violence. Structural forces — redlining, de-industrialization, mass incarceration — faded into the background.

As Herman Gray notes, representation shifted into regulation. Blackness was no longer mocked;3 it was diagnosed. Michelle Alexander demonstrates how this re-framing allowed racial hierarchy to survive by translating prejudice into policy4. The language changed. The outcome did not.

Trauma as Spectacle

The next evolution learned that Black pain could be a more potent, and palatable, commodity than Black joy or complexity. The minstrel learned to cry.

The next evolution discovered that Black pain was more profitable — and more palatable — than Black complexity.

We now live in an economy of viral Black suffering. Body-cam footage. Cellphone videos. Death replayed in loops across timelines and cable news. These images are framed as necessary, as awareness, as progress through exposure.

But as Christina Sharpe argues, hyper-visibility is not freedom. It is a form of capture.

The spectacle of Black death produces outrage without redistribution, mourning without repair. Audiences are offered catharsis — grief, guilt, even tears — without confronting the structures that generate the violence. Suffering becomes proof of sincerity. Witnessing substitutes for action.

Visibility without agency is not representation. It is extraction. Pain becomes content. Grief becomes currency. The system remains intact.

The Modern Minstrel

Social media promised democratization. Instead, it crowd-sourced performance. The algorithm is the new stage manager. It rewards what is legible to its training data: proximity to whiteness, Eurocentric beauty standards, palatable anger, consumable trauma. “Authenticity” is measured in metrics shaped by historical bias.

Black creators are not free agents in a neutral marketplace. They operate inside a system trained on centuries of distortion. The lane is narrow. Deviation is expensive.

Artificial intelligence is the logical extension of this arc. AI does not invent; it interpolates. It optimizes.

When image generators associate professionalism with whiteness or danger with Blackness, they are not malfunctioning. They are formalizing historical correlation. Their training data is the accumulated archive of American media — film, news, internet — all layered atop minstrel logic.

As Kate Crawford argues, AI scales the world as it has been, not as it should be.5

A common rebuttal insists: “But this is what people consume.” That argument ignores authorship. Media ownership, distribution, and algorithmic amplification have never been evenly distributed. Selective visibility is not neutral reflection. It is constraint disguised as choice.

If Blackness is repeatedly cast as antagonist, the issue is not pathology. It is power — who holds the pen, the camera, and now the code.

Closing Thoughts

Minstrelsy persists because it works. It has always been profitable, psychologically reassuring, and politically useful. It is not an accident of history. It is an adaptive system. And most Americans have grown up inside it.

If you are white, you did not inherit these images as “racist.” You inherited them as normal. The criminal on the evening news. The danger in the city. The sidekick. The suspect. The viral video of death. The mugshot that circulates faster than the graduation photo. None of it felt coordinated. It felt like reality.

That is how systems survive — by presenting repetition as coincidence.

More representation inside that framework does not undo it. It simply refreshes the casting. The deeper question is structural: who owns the platforms, who controls distribution, who designs the algorithms, and whose archive trains the machines.

An algorithm trained on a distorted past cannot generate a neutral future simply by declaring itself objective. If Blackness is repeatedly cast as antagonist, pathology, or spectacle, the issue is not behavior. It is authorship.

And if you recognize the pattern — if you can trace it from blackface to blockbuster to body-cam to algorithm — then you were never watching isolated incidents. You were watching a system. And the uncomfortable truth is this: it worked so well you thought it was just the way the world was.

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References

The Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) is a place where individuals, private investors and large organizations are able to fund projects that help prevent greenhouse gases from being emitted. By doing so, the emissions that were prevent can be turned into carbon credits, that can then be bought by anyone to offset the pollution they or anyone else is causing.

That sounds like a great thing right?

1 Carbon Credit = 1 ton of greenhouse gas emission reduction

Each credit represents one ton of greenhouse gas that was not put out into the world or was reduced.

Can greenhouse gases or carbon dioxide in general, really be removed?

Yes. But a lot of it comes down to us actually working with the natural world than engineering ways for us to fix a problem we’ve created. Planting trees, protecting wetlands, regenerating soil and learning how to be more efficient with our energy consumption are some of the best ways for us to lower greenhouse gases.

But, as with a lot of things in a Capitalist world, individuals can only do so much when mega corporations are the front-runners in the degradation of the environment.

To large corporations that are funding governments across the world, having a monopoly in pollution means absolutely nothing. The Voluntary Carbon Market is like an early morning fish market where the biggest polluters can buy carbon credits and simply wave their carbon emissions away.

The creation of carbon credits is a fascinating method.

Imagine I was a large wealthy company whose name matches with a certain rain forest and I decided one day to buy a large piece of land in said rain forest and threatened to burn it, I would cause chaos. But after holding out for a few years, I pretend to listen to the people, the activists, the environmental experts and announce, “I’m not going to burn the forest anymore uWu,” I would get applauded. I will have chosen to do this environmentally friendly thing, the right thing. Burning the forest would’ve cause 50 gazillion tonnes (exaggerated number) in carbon emissions.

The truth is, I never planned to burn the forest. But since I said I would, and people thought I did, and now that I’ve said I won’t, I get carbon credits for doing what people thought I was supposed to do anyway! YAY!

It’s crazy how having money can suddenly, somehow, make the wrong things you do disappear. It’s like watching a show that stars a ditzy white female lead who always causes major issues but gets away with murder because she can bat her eyes and say “sowwy”. Except we’re talking about pollution and the white female lead happens to be rich corporations who can get away with murdering our planet because now they have a system to ‘delete’ their carbon emissions.

There are good parts to the VCM, which is primarily that it is helping large corporations stay accountable by making sure that they stay compliant to whatever laws apply to them. But it takes away from these corporations actually having to do their own work to offset the amount of pollution they’re causing.

By buying up credits from someone else’s hard work, the accountability that people and governing bodies are hoping to implement on these larger organizations completely disappears.

Holding organizations accountable and putting pressure on them to actually offset the environmental impacts they cause should not be this hard. Individuals can only do so much in their own personal lives to help save the planet. Marginalized communities, poor people and people in third world countries suffer even more because they are the most vulnerable to climate change issues.

Taking my own country, Nepal, into account, the lack of snow in the Himalayas directly affects our water bodies, our biodiversity and our way of life more so than the lives of people in countries that are actually the major actors in pollution. Simply buying 20 carbon credits, we cannot reverse the harm that has already been done. There is no active action being taken against prevailing issues, spaces like the Voluntary Carbon Markets, only allow for corporations to act like they’re doing the right thing, while the government can sit on their mountains of money and agree with them.

With no long-term changes or policies integrated into the system worldwide, even organizations like the UN, which holds annual conferences to discuss climate change and preventative measures, hold no power to be able to come up with tangible solutions to this problem.

It’s like we’re giving corporations a pat on the back for simply funneling money into the same circles it’s always been in. And with carbon credits (slur) being so readily available, there is nothing we, as individuals, can do to push for immediate action other than sit on our asses and wait for the environment to combust while the rich are able to colonize and monopolize whatever other planet they can.

• Photo by Marcin Jozwiak from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-smoke-coming-out-from-a-building-3641377/

• Photo by Centre for Ageing Better from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/protesting-crowd-in-city-9729884/

• https://vcmprimer.org/chapter-1-what-is-the-voluntary-carbon-market/

• https://vcmprimer.org/chapter-5-what-are-carbon-credits/

• https://39988659.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/39988659/Papers/State%20of%20Quality%20and%20Pricing%20in%20the%20VCM%202026.pdf

• https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/esg/voluntary-carbon-market/

I’m scrolling.
You’re scrolling.

A graduation cap tilted sideways. A mirror selfie with bad lighting. A group of friends pressed together, smiling too hard because the picture will last longer than the moment. Youth documented mid-breath. Proof of life.

One swipe later, the image changes.

It’s blurry. The resolution drops. Black plastic catches the light in a way skin never should. The shape underneath is human only because we know it is. A body bag doesn’t need a face. There’s no transition screen. No warning. Just the cut.

The distance between those two images is a chasm. A scream in the silent space between heartbeats. An Iranian woman told me that this distance is not an accident. It is the most important thing she wants the world to understand. It is, in her words, what stands between joy and death, between a future and a funeral. It is manufactured.

She tells me this is the distance she lives inside.

An Ordinary Day Without Ordinary Days

She says the idea of an “ordinary day” stopped making sense years ago. Not because every day is chaos, but because chaos became routine.

For her, and for millions, the concept of an “ordinary day” shattered years ago. It did not vanish, but it mutated. Now, an ordinary day is a series of practiced rituals of evasion and endurance. It is turning on a VPN with the same automatic motion used to boil water for tea, because the free internet is a ghost you must conjure. It is scanning headlines not for news, but for tremors in the ground beneath your feet. It is carrying a cocktail of joy and un-erasable memory in your heart, trying to move forward with what she called “a broken heart and hope for better days.” The ordinary is not the absence of crisis; it is the method of navigating it.

She checks the news not out of curiosity, but to see what kind of day it will be. Whether the economy has collapsed again. Whether another protest has been crushed. Whether someone didn’t make it home.

Another part of that daily navigation is a quiet, monumental choice. For her, it is walking out the door with her hair uncovered. Imagine, for a moment, that your choice of what to wear—a hat, a scarf, nothing at all—was not an expression of style, but a calculated risk. That the consequence for your choice could be violence, imprisonment, or death.

This isn’t about a piece of cloth. She knows the risks. She’s not naïve about them. That’s what makes it a ritual instead of a protest. She says many women made the same choice. Quietly. Together. Knowing exactly what it could cost.

It’s about who gets to decide what a body is for—and who it belongs to. People where she lives are known for laughter. For filling rooms with warmth. She says that part is still true. But it sits on top of something heavier now—memories that don’t fade, names that don’t leave, grief that becomes a companion instead of a wound.

The Slow Violence of an Empty Wallet

She talks about dreams the way you talk about old apartments—places you once imagined living, now clearly out of reach. Buying a house. Owning a car. Planning more than a month ahead.

The pressure is not only in the air; it is in the wallet, in the stomach. She speaks of an economy that has turned dreams into folklore. Buying a house or a car is “an out of reach sort of dream.” People wear less Not as a style choice, but because clothes last longer when you don’t replace them. They eat less Not fasting—rationing. Stretching meals. Adjusting expectations downward until hunger becomes background noise. This is poverty not as a temporary hardship, but as the very atmosphere you age inside, thickened by pollution, drought, and the constant, gnawing anxiety of “what might happen.” It is a slow, comprehensive violence.

Layered on top of this are things that sound abstract until you live inside them: air so polluted it burns, water that runs short, electricity that disappears without explanation. Darkness that isn’t symbolic. It’s just dark. Poverty is a haunting feature of a climate you age inside.

Hope That Comes Like a Storm

And yet—this is the part I keep returning to, the part I didn’t expect—she says hope still comes. Not as a whisper. Not as a careful calculation. It doesn’t wait for an opening.

She describes it almost as a reflex, a psychological law: hope spikes precisely when the risk is greatest. When protests flare, something in the atmosphere cracks. The word revolution is spoken, and in its wake comes not calm, but a terrifying, galvanizing clarity. This hope isn’t reassuring. It’s febrile.

You can see it in bodies before you hear it in chants, she tells me. Shoulders go back. Spines find a forgotten alignment. It’s as if, in the act of gathering, people suddenly remember the shape they were meant to hold. They stand differently. They breathe differently. The private weight they’ve been carrying is momentarily lifted, not because it’s gone, but because it’s seen—shared, held in common.

It’s uncanny, she said. Almost frightening.

Because this variety of hope offers no promises. It doesn’t swear everything will be okay. It burns too hot for platitudes. This isn’t the optimism of the oblivious; it’s the stark, clear-eyed resolve of people who have a full accounting of the horror—and who refuse to let that knowledge paralyze them.

Paradoxically, this hope doesn’t bury the trauma. It exhumes it.

Everything that’s been swallowed—the fear, the rage, the silent humiliations—ruptures into the open. Private ache becomes public truth. In that recognition, in the locked eyes across a street, there’s a jolting realization: I am not alone. I am not crazy. I am not weak for being bent by a force designed to break me.

The pressure lifts for a moment, not because the danger has vanished, but because it has been named. People remember that their feelings are rational. That their grief is a logical response to loss.

And that is what makes this hope so dangerously volatile. It doesn’t pacify; it disrupts. It sabotages the slow, insidious work of normalization—the daily training that teaches you to accept less oxygen, less dignity, a smaller future. It’s a reminder of the wanting itself.

The hope, she insists, isn’t in some distant victory. It’s in the act of resistance. Full stop.

It’s in showing up. In standing shoulder-to-shoulder and seeing the same defiant light in a stranger’s eyes. It’s the fleeting, vital proof that relentless pressure has not yet crushed the human spirit into mere endurance. That it can still crystallize into something harder, sharper.

Even when it burns. Especially when it costs. Even if, by morning, it’s gone.

The Engine of the Distance

She doesn’t describe what she sees as chaos. She describes it as consequence.

In her telling, the space between the smiling face and the body bag is not an accident, not a tragedy that slipped through the cracks. It is a predictable output. Something produced. Something generated by design.

She sees a system that rules without consent and without accountability, where decisions are insulated from the people who must live with their results. In that system, violence is not a breakdown—it is a tool. Fear is not collateral damage—it is infrastructure. The distance between joy and death is not random; it is calibrated.

She says the language of chaos is comforting because it implies no one is in control. But what she lives inside does not feel uncontrolled. It feels administered.

The distance is not an act of God.

It is a matter of policy.

When she speaks about responsibility, she does not speak abstractly. She names leadership. She names the Islamic Republic. She names Ali Khamenei—not as a cartoon villain or a symbol to chant against, but as the center of gravity in a system where obedience is rewarded and life is expendable.

In this system, she says, accountability never travels upward. It moves in one direction only—downward, onto bodies. Onto young people. Onto women. Onto anyone who disrupts the fiction of order by insisting on dignity.

She doesn’t frame this as ideology. She frames it as cause and effect.

A protest is met with force. Force creates fear. Fear disciplines behavior. When it doesn’t, it escalates. Each step follows the last with mechanical certainty. The outcome—injured bodies, disappeared people, sealed coffins—is not a failure of governance. It is the result governance was built to produce.

This is why the distance feels so large to her. Not because it is mysterious, but because it is deliberate.

She lives inside a system where smiling faces are tolerated only as long as they do not demand a future. Where youth is celebrated in photographs and punished in reality. Where the body becomes a site of enforcement, and death becomes an acceptable expense.

This isn’t a slogan to her. It’s the logic of what she lives through. And once you see that logic, the distance between the two images stops being shocking. It becomes familiar. Which may be the most frightening part of all.

Collapsing the Space Between “There” and “Here”

Here’s why we are here on a snowy day.

She is not a headline. She is not a symbol. She is not “a woman from the Middle East.” She is my friend. I don’t know if she will ever read this. I hope she lives long enough to.

It is easy—so easy—to read this and think of it as a tragedy happening “over there.” To feel a pang of sympathy for a woman in a headline, in a region often reduced to politics and conflict. This is the distance she is asking us to collapse.

She is a person who holds specific memories—of laughter, of loss, of people she loved who didn’t come home. She makes coffee, checks her phone, and carries a social trauma so profound she says calling it “trauma” is putting it mildly.

She is someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Someone’s best friend.

If she lived on your block, you would recognize her laugh. You would borrow sugar from her. If she went missing, the space she left would have a shape.

The Swipe

The distance between you and her is not geography. It’s the luxury of forgetting.

You will close this tab and return to the scroll. The digital procession of lives will continue. But perhaps now, you will feel the distance differently. She told me she lives between two pictures: healthy, happy youth on one side, black body bags on the other. She believes the space between them is made of power.

Somewhere, a woman just wants to live. To wake up. To choose her clothes. To eat enough. To imagine a future without calculating the cost to her body.

She lives in the space between those images, wearing her hope and her grief side by side—waiting for the world to stop pretending such a distance is natural.

Author’s Note:
This piece was written with the consent of the person whose experiences shaped it. It is published anonymously to protect her safety. I am sharing it not to explain a country or argue a position, but to stand beside a friend who wants to live.

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Revisionist history used to be something we argued about later.
Now it’s something we experience in real time—while the people inside the story are still trying to figure out what just happened. When I wrote “Sept 13th 2004” it was done under the lens of nostalgia and the idea of a winning a day in a simpler time. There was nothing about 2004 that was simple I even debated the title of it when i was writing it because a date is more than a setting. It’s a container already filled with meaning before you open it. You think you know what that day is. That’s not memory. That’s narration.

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But what if the frame is wrong? What if the frame isn’t false, just premature? What if it’s only one version of the story, uploaded so fast it overwrote the rest before they had a chance to exist?

We used to believe history needed time. That events had to cool before they hardened into narrative. In the old model, something happened, people lived with the mess of it, and only later—after memory blurred and power settled—did someone come along to rewrite it. Revisionist history was a second crime, committed long after the first.

Now the narration arrives immediately. The feed speaks before the dust settles. Metrics decide what matters while the event is still breathing. The winner isn’t the truth—it’s the version that moves fastest, spreads widest, provokes the cleanest emotion. That version becomes “what really happened,” not because it’s accurate, but because it’s efficient.

The losers aren’t erased. That would be too obvious. They’re categorized. Filed under noise, context, edge cases, outliers, and unverified accounts.

What if the frame is wrong? Or more precisely—what if the frame is only one version, uploaded so fast it overwrote the rest?

That’s what makes September 13th 2004 such a standout to me. September 13th, 2004 is already owned. It belongs to the dominant narrative—the headlines, hashtags, emotional shorthand. A date compressed into a symbol, or a feeling. When you hear it, you’re not invited to react; you’re instructed to remember. The story arrives fully framed, already interpreted, already closed. Your job as a viewer—or a reader, or a citizen—isn’t to discover what happened. It’s to submit to what’s already been decided.

And submission feels natural, because the frame feels inevitable. The date tells you it knows more than you do. It presents itself as history, when what it really is is curation.

Where drama often reinforces inevitability, comedy exposes its seams. It looks at a system that insists it has captured the meaning of a day and asks a quieter, more dangerous question: What did you miss while you were busy deciding?

Comedy doesn’t deny the weight of the date. It refuses to let that weight crush everything else beneath it. It isn’t a counter-narrative or a hot take or even an attempt to overwrite the dominant story with a louder one. It’s a collision—a human-scale interruption. Two kids in Chicago. A ticket to Oprah. A won car. A foster mom. An IRS letter. Ordinary stakes unfolding inside a day that already believes it understands itself.

And in a world where narration arrives faster than experience, insisting on those human details isn’t nostalgia or denial. It’s resistance. It’s a refusal to let fate be crowdsourced before life finishes happening.

This is revisionism happening live, inside the story itself.

In Kubrick’s world, revisionism happens slowly. History watches first, then speaks. The narrator arrives after the damage is done and tells you, calmly, how it was always going to end. Barry’s life is processed after it’s lived. The verdict comes later—but it still comes. Barry Lyndon teaches you what it feels like when the future owns the present. What’s changed is the timing.

Today, the narrator doesn’t wait. It doesn’t observe and then summarize. It speaks during. It frames while events are still unfolding. It decides what the story is before the people inside it have a chance to understand what just happened to them. The fatalism hasn’t disappeared—it’s accelerated.

September 13th, 2004 isn’t just a pop-cultural punchline. It isn’t just Oprah and cars and daytime television optimism frozen into a meme. That version survives because it’s clean. Because it fits. Because it’s easy to remember.

But while one America was being told it had won something, another America was bracing for Hurricane Ivan, a storm already ripping through the Caribbean and marching toward the Gulf Coast. While one narrative celebrated abundance, entire regions were preparing for loss—homes, power, lives—none of which made for a better clip.

While that day was being flattened into a feel-good symbol, the Iraq War was accelerating, its justifications hardening, its casualties climbing. The Patriot Act was no longer abstract fear—it was operational reality. Surveillance expanded. Rights narrowed. The definition of “security” quietly swallowed privacy, due process, dissent. The machinery was already moving. All of this happened on the same day.

That’s the danger of the timestamped narrative: it doesn’t lie—it selects. It compresses complexity into a single emotional register and calls it memory. The date survives, but only in the shape that travels best. Everything else becomes background noise. Context. Footnotes. “Unrelated events.”

September 13th, 2004 matters to me—not as nostalgia, not as irony, but as proof. Proof that revisionist history no longer waits for distance. Proof that fatalism no longer arrives gently. Proof that the story of a day can be finalized while people inside it are still trying to make sense of their lives.

Where Barry Lyndon shows you a man slowly discovering that the world has already written his ending. September 13th, 2004 asks what happens when that discovery comes too fast when the narration outruns experience, when meaning hardens before memory has a chance to form.

And it’s the world we live in now: where joy and catastrophe coexist, but only one version survives the feed; where history doesn’t wait to be argued over—it’s decided by what moves fastest; where fate isn’t handed down by gods or kings, but by systems that mistake legibility for truth.

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Three hours. Powdered wigs. A man walking slowly toward his own ruin. People talk about Barry Lyndon like it’s homework. It’s “beautiful” in the way museums are quiet, distant, too polite to touch. Barry Lyndon is beautiful the way a trap is beautiful. Every candlelit frame is a velvet-lined box being lowered into the earth. The camera doesn’t chase excitement; its chasing inevitability. And once you understand that, the movie stops feeling slow and starts feeling mercilessly calm, the way the ocean is calm when it has already decided what it’s going to do to you.

The Invisible Voice

What makes it addictive isn’t the wigs. It’s the narrator.

The narrator speaks like the future has already been filed away. Like Barry’s life is a matter of record. Like we’re not watching a man make choices so much as watching a world process him. It’s the voice of a system that doesn’t hate Barry and doesn’t love him either. It simply knows what happens to men like that.

That’s the real subject of the film: not Barry, but the structure that can swallow a person and still look elegant doing it.

The Seduction of Inevitability

A lot of people think fatalism, a belief which considers the entire universe as a deterministic system to refer to the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. But the deeper, more unsettling version of fatalism is not “everything ends.” but your fate was sealed from the beginning.

Fatalism is a world where the frame arrives first, and the human being shows up late, trying to negotiate with a structure that doesn’t negotiate. In that kind of world, you can still laugh. You can still love. You can still win small victories. Barry indeed does that but he also makes you see the ceiling. It makes inevitability feel warm. It makes it feel like candlelight. It makes the cage feel expensive. That’s why the movie is so dangerous: it doesn’t warn you. It lulls you. You settle into the beauty, and then you realize the beauty is part of the mechanism.

Kubrick films inevitability the way a coroner files a report: with chilling, gorgeous calm.

The Framing of Barry and his Luck

Barry Lyndon is built from three things: History. Class. Narration.

They exist before Barry. They’ll exist after Barry. They are older than his desire and stronger than his imagination. No matter how he tries to impose his will on the world. He wants status, so he learns the manners. He wants safety, so he finds the right rooms. He wants legitimacy, so he chases the symbols of legitimacy. The film watches him do this with an almost scientific patience, like we’re observing an organism trying to adapt to an environment that will not adapt back.

It understands something we don’t like to admit. A lot of what we call “choice” is just the shape of the room we’re in. When people say Barry “fails,” they imply he could have succeeded if he were better. Smarter. More disciplined. Less reckless.

But Kubrick’s fatalism is colder than moral judgment. It’s not “Barry is bad.” It’s “Barry is processed.” Which means the tragedy isn’t that Barry makes the wrong choices. It’s that the system was always going to read his choices the same way.

The New Narrator

If Kubrick’s narrator is history speaking through a voice, then our modern narrator is history speaking through numbers. It’s not aristocracy, at least not in powdered wigs. It’s not a narrator with a British accent telling you what happens before it happens.

It’s quieter than that. More intimate. More constant. It’s “For You”.

The “For You Page” is a prophecy machine. Not because it predicts the future—because it trains you to accept the idea that the system already knows what you are.

It decides what is seen, what counts as real, what you cannot avoid, and no matter what you choose everything is archived, receipted, weaponized.

TikTok and Social Media doesn’t tell you what happens. It decides what happens. Not always because you want to. Because the platform teaches you, over time: if you don’t fit the pattern, you don’t exist.

And when something hits, people rewrite your entire identity as if it was inevitable: “I knew you were gonna blow”, “This was always your lane.”, “You were born for this.”

But if it doesn’t hit, the same work becomes proof of your irrelevance:

“Maybe your content isn’t it.”, “Guess it wasn’t meant for you.”, “Try something else.” Same effort. Different outcome. One system. No explanation. The feed turns distribution into essence. That’s fatalism disguised as feedback.

Metrics become a language for reality. Views become legitimacy. Retention becomes truth. Shares become worth. Saves become legacy. Your art becomes evidence for the case the algorithm is building about you.

And because everything is recorded, the judgment never dies. It just gets reposted. This is the surveillance economy’s hidden psychological tax: you start living like your future trial is already scheduled.

Hip-Hop and Fatalism

Hip-hop has always been fascinating here. It has always been the art of negotiating with structures designed to limit you. But listen closely, and you can hear the negotiation changing.

The modern system doesn’t just distribute your music. It distributes your identity. A viral moment becomes a life sentence. A 15-second snippet becomes your entire career. A hook becomes your permanent narrative. When that happens, the artist isn’t just battling the streets or the industry. They’re fighting the chorus of the system itself.

Hip-hop remains the great art of self-definition, but now that act of self-definition happens on a platform that profits from simplification. And simplification is a direct cousin of fatalism. It turns a person into a type. A moment into a destiny.

This matters because hip-hop’s journey mirrors a deeper, more painful negotiation. It began as a platform for a community—a tool for expression and elevation from nothing. It has become a consumer hub for the consumption of that community. There is something profoundly fatalistic in that arc: people using their God-given talent to articulate their reality and better their situation, only to have the system selectively elevate only those it can most efficiently monetize.

This is the TikTok mechanism applied to a centuries-old story: you must prove your value to the algorithm, to the marketplace, on its terms. For Black artists in America, this creates a unique, double-layered fatalism. Your fate within a society that has already decided much for you is sealed, unless you can re-prove your value to that system—often at the expense of being simplified, stereotyped, or divorced from the very community you speak for. The system doesn’t just process you; it demands you become a digestible product to escape its default verdict. No other American art form or community wrestles with fatalism on these precise, compounded terms: artistic, economic, and racial, all at once.

Final Thoughts

So that’s the case: Barry Lyndon isn’t a period piece. It’s a blueprint. It shows you what fatalism looks like when it wears velvet—how a system can narrate a man into meaninglessness while pretending it’s just “history.” Kubrick’s genius is that he makes the trap feel like comfort. He makes the verdict feel like candlelight.

The narrator used to be a voice. Then it became a number. Now it’s a feed. A dashboard. A permanent record. We don’t need an aristocracy to tell us what we are—we have metrics, and the metrics have a language: seen / ignored, elevated / buried, real / irrelevant.

And there’s one narrator even older than the algorithm: a date.

Because a date doesn’t argue. A date doesn’t explain. A date arrives preloaded with meaning and asks your life to fit inside it. That’s where I’m going next. September 13th, 2004 isn’t about what happened on that day—we all know what the world says happened. It’s about what it means to be alive inside a day that history already owns, and still insist your story counts.

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There’s a moment when authority realizes it no longer works, and it isn’t loud or dramatic. No one raises their voice. Everyone stays polite. Hands are shaken. Names are exchanged. The room fills with courtesy the way fog fills a valley—soft, deliberate, impossible to rush.

Nothing is challenged outright. No rule is broken. And yet something essential thins. Authority doesn’t shatter in these moments. It stiffens. It becomes formal. It relies on ritual—on posture, tone, and inherited expectations—to hold its shape.

That’s when you feel it: the shift. The moment power stops being assumed and starts being performed. You can feel the effort. And once you feel it, it’s hard to unfeel. What’s revealed isn’t weakness so much as dependence. Control doesn’t disappear. It becomes visible. And visibility is dangerous to systems that survive by being unquestioned. Once authority is seen performing, the illusion it depends on becomes harder to sustain.

The Myth of Control

We like to believe authority is something imposed—that control flows in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. But most authority doesn’t function that way. It relies on participation more than force.

That’s why the most stable systems aren’t the ones that punish the hardest, but the ones that require the least enforcement. They teach people to self-regulate. To anticipate consequences. To internalize the rules so thoroughly that no one has to say them out loud.

This is why control systems don’t collapse when they’re challenged. They collapse when they’re ignored. Power needs agreement. It needs repetition. It needs people to keep showing up as if the script still matters. When someone stops reacting. Stops explaining. Stops asking for permission to exist outside the script—that is when the scaffolding groans. The system, faced with a non-participant, can only resort to its own exaggerated performance. It becomes a play where one actor has forgotten their lines, and the others are left shouting theirs into a silent house.

Cults without Costumes

We reserve the word cult for the extreme, the visible, and the rare. It’s a comforting distinction. It lets us believe most of us live in the free air, while they live in the hall.

Consider the hall of Corporate Belief. Its lore is the quarterly report; its sacrament is the “all-hands meeting”; its heaven is a promotion to a corner office overlooking other, smaller halls. Doubt is rebranded as “negativity,” and to leave is not to choose a different path, but to “fail to align with the mission.” The promise is not salvation, but stock options—yet the demand for your soul, measured in hours and undivided attention, is just as total.

The hall of Wellness and Optimization. Here, the doctrine is purity. The leaders are gurus with perfect skin and custom protocols. The rituals are strict: this fast, that supplement, this mindset. To question the science is to “not be ready for healing.” To eat the forbidden food is not a choice, but a “collapse.” The promise is a perfected body, but the underlying creed is that you are perpetually broken, and only their system can make you whole.

Even our digital lives are lived in concentric halls. The Algorithm is a silent cardinal, curating a reality so seamless it becomes invisible. Its punishment is irrelevance; its reward is a drip of dopamine labeled “engagement.” We learn to perform the versions of ourselves that the hall best amplifies—the outraged citizen, the discerning aesthete, the humble-bragging professional—until the performance becomes identity, and the Like feels like a blessing.

They’re systems with rules about belonging. About speech. About loyalty. About who gets protected and who gets corrected. The difference between a cult and a culture is often just how socially acceptable the rules are—and how uncomfortable it is to name them.

The Cult of Personality

At the center of every hall is not an idea, but a person—or more precisely, the idea of a person. We don’t follow doctrines. Doctrines are abstract. We follow people who project certainty. The leader. The guru. The visionary founder. The intellectual father. The influencer. The idealized parent. Different kayfabe, same function.

Their approval feels like warmth. Their disapproval chills you to the core. They become symbolic caregivers.

Every rule you’ve already seen—the quarterly report, the wellness protocol, the algorithmic reward—only holds because it routes back to a human figure who embodies “the right way.” An authority you don’t just obey, but attach to. Belief becomes relational. Compliance becomes emotional.

This is the core mechanism: the translation of dissent into betrayal, and disagreement into disloyalty. Questioning a policy isn’t critique; it’s a personal affront. Leaving a group isn’t a choice; it’s an abandonment. The punishment comes before the rulebook ever opens.

The most effective control doesn’t threaten exile—it threatens loneliness. It whispers that outside the hall, there is no love, no truth, no belonging. The punishment is emotional long before it becomes structural. The fear is not of a gun, but of the void.

The Outsider Problem

This is where the system’s true fragility is exposed.

When a true outsider appears—someone who never learned the rules, who doesn’t speak the language, who is immune by virtue of not caring—the system hesitates. It has no grip. It cannot punish someone who doesn’t fear its hells.

So the system turns inward. It tightens its grip on those still inside. Discipline intensifies. Purity tests multiply. The believer is scrutinized, not the stranger. Why did you let that person in? Why didn’t you defend us? The outsider isn’t the problem. The insider’s glance toward the door is.

An outsider can be dismissed. But an insider who sees an outside introduces possibility. Comparison. Contagion. The system’s fury is always directed at its own—not for disobedience, but for awareness. For the crime of realizing that the hall has walls. And that beyond them, something else exists at all.

Why People Stay

People stay because leaving is a kind of death.

They stay from fear of isolation—the terrifying quiet after the constant chant. They stay because of sunk cost: the years given, the self already spent. They stay because belief has fused with identity, and pulling the thread feels like unraveling the body itself.

They stay because the system is clever—it speaks in the moral language of sacrifice, duty, and love, masking control as care. Doubt is framed as a personal flaw. Pain becomes proof of righteousness. Endurance is mistaken for truth. By the time someone considers leaving, the trap is already complete.

Leaving isn’t a simple rejection of belief. It’s a far more dangerous act: a rejection of who gets to define reality. It is choosing uncertainty over permission. It is stepping away from the single sanctioned light in the hall and saying, I will risk the dark to see if there are other stars.

What Does Freedom Look Like?

Freedom isn’t victory. There is no burning of the hall. No cheering crowd. No certificate of liberation.

Freedom is a somber, personal decision to stop performing. It is uncertainty. It is having no script, no referee, no promised applause. It is the quiet, relentless responsibility of building your own meaning, stitch by stitch, in a silence that can feel like emptiness. It is realizing that the permission you were waiting for will never come from outside—because the very act of waiting is the cage.

Freedom doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like standing alone, without permission. And then, slowly, learning how to bear the weight of your own horizon.

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The Frame I Was Trained In

I didn’t set out to become an essayist this year. I’m a screenwriter first. I think in scenes, power dynamics, and who controls the room. This year, I kept writing essays not because I wanted to, but because the world wouldn’t stop behaving like a script I couldn’t rewrite. Why some families get preserved while others get erased. Why love, home, and visibility always seem to come with terms and conditions.

Writing scripts trained me to believe that frames are chosen. You decide where the camera sits, what the audience knows, when a moment begins and ends. But while making a documentary about home this year, that belief shattered. Real people don’t stay on their marks. Memory resists structure. Stories push back. The frame wasn’t something I could craft; it was something I had to negotiate, and sometimes accept after the fact. Working that close to lived history made something else clear: control doesn’t disappear just because you stop directing. It relocates. Who gets remembered. Who gets protected. Who becomes “too complicated” to keep in the picture.

When I write an essay or a script, I don’t start with a theme. I follow a mood, a pressure, a thought that won’t resolve itself. But the same questions kept surfacing across everything I touched. In essays, in scripts, in the documentary, I kept returning to the mechanics of inheritance — not just of property or blood, but of narrative. Who gets framed as legacy. Who gets framed as damage. Who is allowed to pass something down without apology.

Inheritance Without Consent

When I wrote about houses, I wasn’t interested in architecture. I was interested in how memory occupies space. How a home can preserve a family’s story — or trap it there. How staying put can be an act of love or a sentence, depending on who history decides belongs.

When I wrote about portraits and digital dynasties, I wasn’t chasing internet culture. I was tracing how visibility hardens into power. How being seen is never neutral. How some images stabilize families while others flatten people into spectacle.

We like to believe we control some meaningful facet of our own lives. But the closer you look at who actually decides — who is remembered, protected, extended grace — the farther that sense of control slips from view.

The masks, the VPNs, the refusal to be legible — those weren’t contradictions. They were responses. If visibility is a currency, then opacity becomes a form of agency. Sometimes survival depends on staying unframed long enough to choose yourself.

Even the fiction followed suit. I kept writing worlds where love is regulated, distributed, weaponized. Where intimacy comes with compliance baked in. Where being seen, touched, or chosen always carries a cost.

Taken together, these weren’t separate projects. They were different angles on the same problem: how power decides which stories get preserved, and which people get edited out.

While I was writing about control and belonging, my real life was testing those theories. Making a documentary about home forces you to learn who stays, who leaves, and who only belongs to the version of you that was useful to them.

Why Both Forms Matter

Screenwriting taught me how to think through people. To let ideas emerge through action, contradiction, silence. Characters can carry questions farther than arguments ever could. Essays don’t replace that. They require me to be explicit; to say the thing without dressing it up as a character’s problem or a plot point. Both let me talk my shit. They just do it at different volumes.

I don’t know what I’m building yet. But the questions are consistent. They don’t resolve cleanly in any single form, and they don’t stay where I put them. Life keeps borrowing the logic of art, and art keeps answering to the conditions of real life. Some questions need the distance of fiction to breathe. Others demand the directness of an essay to be said at all. They persist — and they ask different things of different kinds of work.

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[NOTE: “The House That Love Built is an ongoing documentary project.
Some of the writing here exists inside that work.”]

Lately I’ve been thinking about the word belonging—especially around Thanksgiving. Like potlucks and block parties, but something you earn by being polite enough, grateful enough, quiet enough. But in America, belonging isn’t an emotion. For families like mine, belonging has been a border. A test. A moving target you’re supposed to chase but never catch.

Black Americans knew this all along. When we tried to belong inside America — we got rules, laws, policies, and “unwritten understandings” meant to shepherd us right back out. When we tried to belong among ourselves — to build something steady, something ours — entire communities were reduced to ash and the country called it “progress.” If we tried to belong through service, through sacrifice, through the flag and the uniform and the belief that loyalty buys safety… well. My grandfather came home from two wars and was treated like an inconvenience. Benefits denied. Housing blocked. His family thrown out like trash then pretended they never existed. So I keep circling the same question: Where, exactly, are we supposed to belong if every path toward belonging becomes an accusation, a threat, or a punishment?

My family learned that the hard way. My grandparents built a house on a vacant lot, and suddenly their existence wasn’t just “in the neighborhood.” It was of the neighborhood. It meant they weren’t passing through. They were pushed out because they dared to root themselves somewhere the city never intended them to stay. Independence becomes defiance. Stability becomes trespassing. This country has never had a problem with Black people wanting to belong. It has a problem with Black people staying. Staying put, staying rooted, staying visible, staying permanent.

And underneath all of this is a truth: America isn’t confused about Black belonging. It’s threatened by Black permanence. The idea that we could stay, build, and exist without permission. It’s about enforcement. It’s vulnerability dressed up as community. It’s the power to grant a conditional ‘You’re allowed,’ and to revoke it in an instant: ‘Now you’re not.’

So if you got this far you are probably wondering in all this cynical ranting what is the solution? The answer; you are reading it now. If belonging keeps getting weaponized, then maybe the only honest place to belong is in the truth even after they tore down the house, they couldn’t erase the story. They couldn’t stop the memory from surviving. They couldn’t stop me from writing this in telling what happened, in saying the quiet parts out loud, in reclaiming the ground they tried to pull out from under us.

This documentary is not about nostalgia. It’s not an elegy for a house. It’s a record of what happens when a family decides to stop asking where they’re allowed to belong — and starts naming what was taken from them.

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Once, only the wealthy could afford a portrait. Now, we all paint ourselves daily—with pixels instead of oil, filters instead of flattery. The canvas is digital, the gallery is infinite, and the gaze is eternal.

There was a time when you sat for hours, stiff-backed and powdered, while an artist translated your existence into pigment. The final image wasn’t meant to tell the truth — it was meant to declare who you wished to be seen as. Status. Power. Inheritance. A life curated into a single frame.

Imagine a person who relies on that frame for their survival. It governs their posture, their breath, even the tilt of a hand. The parameters of how they must appear… and then the world conforms to it. A frame born from trauma that hardens into power.

Today, we adopt such frames not under threat of ruin, but in pursuit of validation. The coercion is internalized. The portrait-sitter is now also the painter, the critic, and the curator—and the gallery never closes. Fast-forward a few centuries and nothing has changed, except the speed. Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll see the same architecture. Except now it’s voluntary. Chosen. Performed. Now everyone is a portrait-sitter. Everyone curates an image. And everyone lives inside the frame they built — whether they realize it or not.

We’ve democratized portrait culture, but not the psychology behind it. The frame used to be a gold-trimmed rectangle on the wall. Now it’s a customization rectangle in your pocket; a portable mirror that only reflects what you’ve pre-approved.

Digital courtiers with ring lights instead of chandeliers. Brand deals instead of royal titles. A curated identity instead of a lineage. If the 18th century aristocrat families had salons and portrait sittings, we have algorithms and verification badges. Same desires, different tools.

And nowhere is this clearer or more revealing than in the rise of digital dynasties like the D’Amelio family.

The D’Amelios are shaped by the silent architecture of platforms. The algorithmic estate that governs modern fame.

Bear with me for a moment:

Then: wealthy families commissioned portraits to cement status.
Now: Charli posts a TikTok dance, and the algorithm elects her.

Her “relatable bedroom dance” wasn’t just content it was the first stroke of a new family portrait. A frame was chosen for her: The Girl Next Door Who Accidentally Became Royalty. But nothing about virality is accidental. The D’Amelios became more than a household, they became a House. Charli as the crown jewel, Dixie as the Rebellious Heir, Heidi and Marc as the Lord and Lady of the manor. Every dinner becomes content; every moment is a potential post.

On TikTok, the D’Amelios were framed by spontaneity; a girl dancing in her bedroom, a family goofing off in the kitchen. The narrative was accidental fame: relatable people lifted by the algorithm. The frame was light, loose, and seemingly uncurated.

On Hulu, that frame is deliberately re-painted. The D’Amelio Show, Charli has an on-camera anxiety episode before a brand shoot. It’s raw, vulnerable and meticulously included. It’s a conscious reframing: from “America’s sweetheart” to “young woman buckling under the gaze.”

On TikTok, Dixie was the “edgy older sister.” On Hulu, her struggles are serialized: music industry pressures, public criticism, family tension. Her persona is retroactively deepened—the “rebellious heir” trope is given a psychological backstory. The frame is no longer a pose; it’s a character arc.

On TikTok, they were supportive, sometimes silly parents. On Hulu, they’re managers, mediators, and moral anchors. Scenes show Marc worrying about business deals their parenthood is professionalized.

Here, the same family is repainted in shadows and studio light. Charli’s panic attacks, Dixie’s rebellion, Heidi and Marc’s managerial anxieties all become episodes in a serialized portrait of the cost. This is no longer the ‘girl next door’ frame. This is young royalty under pressure, a dynasty documenting its own coronation headaches.

Their Hulu show is not reality. It’s portraiture. A curated depiction of “realness” engineered to maintain the frame the public demands. For the D’Amelios, the brands, the followers, the algorithm. They dictate what is allowed.

Charli cannot simply grow up; she must rebrand. She cannot simply change; she must frame the change. The portrait must be updated, not abandoned. They are free, but only within the borders of their image.

The irony is that mechanical reproduction — the thing Walter Benjamin swore would liberate art from aura — didn’t destroy the aura. It just gave aura to everyone. Now we are all auratic objects, self-created and self-consumed.

Influencers make their frames real through awe and envy. The rest of us maintain our frames out of obligation, habit, or the quiet terror of being invisible in a world that measures existence in impressions.

We keep constructing the self as something that must be displayed, optimized, prettied up, sold back to us through engagement metrics. The pose has become the person. The aesthetic becomes the identity. And authenticity the thing everyone claims to chase is just a different filter pack.

No wonder the culture feels like it’s fraying. We’re not living lives anymore. We’re maintaining images, And while some people do realize this. Our tragedy is that we do realize it — and keep refreshing anyway. Because in this era, not being seen feels like not existing in a digital canvas where the frame governs us.

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[NOTE: “The House That Love Built is an ongoing documentary project.
Some of the writing here exists inside that work.”]

The American Dream of the 1950s was sold with a white picket fence. For my grandfather, Emuel Benton, a decorated war hero, the dream looked like this: a small, self-built house in Brooklyn, and a well-kept lawn he maintained with pride into the 1990s.

From the outside, it could almost pass for the peaceful life he fought for. But the photo is a lie. The fence around our home wasn’t white picket; it was a barrier against the world. Behind it was not peace, but a brutal, unfiltered reality of insults, betrayal, and a constant fight for dignity.

My grandfather came home from two wars only to have his country break its promises. Denied the VA benefits and housing support he earned, he was forced to become an outlaw to provide for his family. His crime? Building that home on a vacant lot.

America romanticizes self-reliance and living off the grid. It celebrates the pioneer spirit. But that celebration has always had a silent, brutal condition. It never intended for a Black family like mine to truly own their piece of it. The system would see to that.

The Bentons, trusted the promise. A Family of faith, discipline, and quiet duty—the kind of family the American Dream was written for. I remember the stories of how my family saved every dollar just to provide food and education, how my Grandfather came home from two wars with wounds you could see and some you couldn’t, believing his service had earned his family a place to belong. But that math never added up for him. He worked a steady job at the post office, his hands handling the very machinery of American connection, while he was systematically disconnected from its rewards. The system saw a Black veteran not as a hero to be honored, but as a liability to be managed. They denied him the benefits he’d earned, locked him out of the housing he deserved, and when his body and savings were both exhausted, they evicted him and his family onto the street.

America told him to play by the rules, so he did. It told him to be self-reliant, so he was. And when he succeeded, it revealed the cruelest rule of all: the game was rigged. So he built a home from nothing. With these same hands that had saluted and saved and sorted mail, he gathered scrap wood and dared to build what the country wouldn’t give him. And for that ultimate act of self-reliance—the very bootstrap-pulling we mythologize—he was treated not as a pioneer, but as a criminal. If the Dream could collapse under the weight of my grandfather’s honest effort, we have to ask: was it ever meant for all of us, or only for those it was built to protect from the beginning?

That photo of my grandfather mowing his lawn. It shows the quiet dignity of a man who’d earned his piece of the Dream. But I know the truth behind that image. The fence around his home wasn’t white picket; it was a boundary drawn against a world that refused to let him rest. Each push of the mower wasn’t about pride; it was a defense, a daily ritual of holding ground in a city that saw his presence as temporary. denying the benefits he’d earned, evicting his family onto the street—he became the truest version of the “self-made man” this country claims to idolize. With no mortgage, no subsidies, no help from the nation he fought for, he built a home. I imagine his hands, still familiar with the weight of a rifle, now sorting through scrap wood and bent nails. He built with the only things they couldn’t tax or take from him: his will, his sweat, and his family.

America loves the myth of the builder, but only when the building feeds its machinery of profit. My grandfather’s home was not an asset in their system. It was a declaration of independence from it. And for that, it had to be destroyed.

For my family, the American Dream was never a white picket fence. It was the dignity of a mowed lawn. the laughter of a warm house and a The safety of a family. The Bentons didn’t want to inherit someone else’s dream; we wanted the right to build our own, board by board, with the same faith and labor this country claims to honor.

And when they did—when The Bentons transformed a vacant lot into a living testament of self-reliance—the system didn’t see a home. It saw an inconvenience. They destroyed what he built not because it was inadequate, but because it was too free. That’s the hidden clause in the American Dream: you can belong, if you let them write your story.

The House That Love Built isn’t just about a house we lost. It’s about a story we are taking back. It’s me, holding a camera where my grandfather once held a hammer, determined to finish what he started. He built with scrap wood and will. We are building with memory and truth. The real inheritance wasn’t property—it was the right to tell our own story, in our own words, and finally make the world listen.

(Continue to)

As I grew up I realized ghost weren’t the unimaginable figures in my childhood room, but living ghosts of potential I saw fading in the hallways of my school, in the kids on my block. It was a quiet, recurring ache—one by one the sense that talent and exceptionalism was wasting away, and opportunity was rare and brittle, or meaningless.

We’re taught that “don’t waste your talent” is a personal warning. It places the burden entirely on the individual: hustle harder, focus more, want it enough. But through the lens of the stories I saw, that phrase rings hollow. Talent doesn’t just die in isolation; it dies in an ecosystem of neglect.

My film Wasted Talent was born from that ache. It wasn’t a confession of my own life, but a crystallization of a social pattern I witnessed: the pattern of promise, systematically unfulfilled. The phrase “wasted talent” is framed as a personal warning, but in reality, it’s a social hurdle people have to overcome just to matter. Wasted talent isn’t always a choice. Often, it’s what happens when the world refuses to provide a stage, a safety net, or simply a second look.

Wasted Talent (2021) follows Marcus (Chetan Cutting), a thoughtful high school teenager who finds himself in a harrowing encounter with members of the local gang, Bloc Boyz. Fortunately, he’s rescued by Dario, Louis, and Jashawn (Omari Johnson, Ahmad DeChallus, Dexter Philips)—fellow students with affiliations to the same gang. Their paths converge in detention, where an unexpected bond begins to take shape, fueled by their shared passion for music. Yet, as their aspirations of breaking through in the music industry unfold, the boys quickly discover the complexities that lie ahead, testing the limits of their dreams. (IMDb)

The Boy With the Thesaurus

Dario. He’s the boy with the thesaurus. He is the case study. He was talented—he spit rhymes “with pens and paper,” not just for show—but he was also invisible to the systems meant to support him. He was caught in the crossfire of a world that measures kids like him but never truly sees them. My protagonist, Marcus, describes watching him in detention, this kid who wasn’t just a “dumbass Bloc-Boy,” but someone who carried “a fucking thesaurus” and, with his words, created a bond through his story and trials.

Zoom out from Dario, and you see the blueprint for this waste. It’s in the underfunded schools where the arts are the first programs cut. It’s in the communities starved of resources, where potential is suffocated by a lack of options. It’s the myth of meritocracy, which insists that talent alone is enough to rise, conveniently ignoring the uneven playing field. This plays out in the film the boys sit waiting for the bus when Dario is shot and killed — a moment as senseless as it is jarring.

Dario’s story ends because the system offers no protection. He becomes a statistic. Marcus recounts the horror: “He died. He was shot in the shoulder and bled out in front of me.” His death isn’t a random act of violence; it’s the logical, brutal endpoint of being wasted. As Marcus rages, “It wasn’t their fault they were born into a world where children are purposely wasted... They waste us and use us as a fucking... number in some statistic.”

The Sleight of Hand

The language of “wasted talent” is a sleight of hand. It individualizes a systemic failure. It makes us point fingers at the fallen, instead of at the structures that pushed them. This isn’t a difference in the students’ innate talent. It’s a difference in their platforms. The ‘sleight of hand’ is in pretending a student from the second school has the same chance to ‘not waste their talent’ as a student from the first. The ecosystem is designed to nurture potential in one place and neglect it in another.

We celebrate the ‘self-made’ artist who triumphs over adversity, but we use that story to ignore the thousands more whose talent is filtered out not by a lack of passion, but by a simple lack of capital. The platform—the network, the unpaid foot-in-the-door, the financial safety net—is treated as a personal resource, when it is in fact a structural barrier. This is the ultimate perversion of the ‘wasted talent’ narrative. Here, a child isn’t just neglected; the system actively criminalizes their struggle. The structure doesn’t just fail to provide a platform; it actively dismantles the one they’re standing on. The talent isn’t wasted; it is incarcerated.

The Witness

My position in all of this is not as Marcus, the survivor, but as the witness. My grief is not for a specific friend I lost, but for the collective loss of what could have been. I grew up watching people disappear—not in a physical sense, but in the slow dimming of their light, the quiet surrender of their dreams for lack of attention or a single, meaningful opportunity.

Making Wasted Talent was my way of saying: I see this pattern, and I will not let it be silent. It is an act of witnessing, of grabbing these stories from the edge of oblivion and forcing them into the light. Marcus’s rage in the script is not my rage from personal experience, but my empathy and frustration channeled into a character. It’s the anger of seeing a beautiful machine built for purpose, only to watch it be used for parts.

The whole room had that energy — that mix of confusion and amusement — Kodak barely spoke, peeking out from behind the black fabric like a cartoon bank robber lost on a press run. But looking back, what we read as paranoia feels like prophecy.

The Silence That Spoke

I rewatched both interviews recently. In that first interview, Kodak didn’t just refuse to answer questions — he refused to perform. The mask turned him from a spectacle into a cipher. He controlled his own visibility, his own data flow. The man literally firewalled himself.

And then — in a moment of full-circle irony — The Breakfast Club invited him back. This time, the hosts wore masks too. What started as satire became symbolic solidarity. They were making fun of it, sure — but they were also mimicking it. Kodak’s silence had turned into language.

To view the mask as merely a disguise is to miss the point entirely. It wasn’t a prop; it was a boundary. In a media ecosystem designed to extract confession, drama, and data, Kodak deployed the mask as an architectural statement: You shall not pass here.

And when the mask wasn’t enough, he turned language itself into encryption; his infamous declarations. When he told the hosts, “I’m Tupac resurrected” and later “I am a clone,” the internet howled at the absurdity. But heard through the static of our digital present, those statements crackle with a different frequency. They are not the ramblings of a confused man, but coded manifestos on the fragmentation of the self.

The “clone” is the perfect metaphor for the digital doppelgänger—the data profile that tech companies build from our clicks, travels, and purchases. It is a version of us, but not us; a commodity that acts in our name. And “Tupac resurrected” speaks to the postmodern cycle of identity, where personas are endlessly remixed, sampled, and reanimated online.

Kodak wasn’t just dodging questions; he was performing a theory of identity for an audience that hadn’t yet learned the vocabulary. He was experimenting with the toggle between presence and disappearance, between the physical self and the data avatar.

In this light, the mask becomes more than hiding. It becomes a tool for Kayfabe. He wasn’t just one Kodak Black; in that moment, he was:

• The Defendant: The man with a real-world case who could not speak.

• The Performer: The rapper whose art was being promoted.

• The Avatar: The masked, silent cipher, a blank canvas for projection.

By refusing to let these selves coalesce into a single, legible, and marketable image, he executed a radical act of data hygiene. While we willingly offer up a unified, high-resolution version of ourselves to the algorithms, Kodak offered only a low-polygon silhouette. He understood, intuitively, that in the 21st century, the most powerful form of self-defense might be to be misunderstood, to be un-renderable, to be a glitch in the machine.

Surveillance Age Realities

What was once a performance has become a prophecy — the culture has caught up to his mask. Facial recognition cameras populate airports, stores, and city corners. Companies like Clearview AI scrape billions of faces from social media to sell identity databases to police departments. Even our phones train on our faces — our expressions, our movements — to unlock, emote, and categorize.

Our faces have become our login keys. Our visibility, our vulnerability. In that context, Kodak’s mask reads differently. It’s not avoidance — it’s encryption. A way to scramble the signal of the self before it can be captured and logged. Think of it as a physical VPN.

Think about it:

• A VPN hides your IP address to protect you from digital tracking; a mask hides your face to protect you from biometric surveillance.

• A mask encrypts your identity from cameras; A VPN encrypts your data traffic from harvesters.

• And just as a VPN has its limits against sophisticated digital fingerprinting, a mask has its own against analysis of gait or voice.

The parallel is uncanny. It was never a costume; it was code.

From Mockery to Mimicry

The irony deepened as Kodak’s masked look began echoing through the culture. When boxer Adrien Broner strode to the ring with Kodak at his side, both shrouded in ski masks, the image shifted. It was no longer an isolated act of defiance, but a transferable symbol. In the hands of rappers like Pooh Shiesty and the wider drill scene, the “shiesty” mask evolved into an essential statement piece—part fashion, part force field.

The initial mockery thus curdled into a more complex form of symbolic solidarity. They were laughing at it, even as they were learning to speak it. Kodak’s silence had become a lexicon; his personal firewall was now a collective code.

And the “YNs” — the generation raised in the crosshairs of digital and physical surveillance — didn’t need to laugh. They understood intuitively what the older pundits missed. To them, the mask was never paranoia; it was pure practicality. Drill and trap culture transformed it from an outlaw aesthetic into everyday urban operational security.

The logic is as elegant as it is simple:
A virtual private network hides your IP. A shiesty hides your ID.

Through this lens, the fashion itself becomes functional—privacy by design, woven into the fabric of style. What an older generation dismissed as menace, this generation has refined into a defense mechanism. They aren’t just hiding from the police; they are hiding from the algorithmic gaze. This is streetwear that actively confuses face scanners—an aesthetic rebellion that doubles as algorithmic camouflage.

The cultural reversal is now complete. We have journeyed, collectively, from mocking privacy to unconsciously mimicking the very tools of protection we once laughed at. Kodak wasn’t hiding from us. He was showing us how to hide.

What happens when the systems promising to optimize our emotional lives become the very mechanisms that control them?

The screenplay Lovebombing: How I Embraced the Bliss of Ignorance takes our current trajectory to its logical extreme. In this matriarchal dystopia, love itself has been weaponized—deployed through heart-shaped bombs that force chemical affection on entire populations. Citizens undergo “emotional optimization” via Alpha-Blockers that suppress inconvenient memories and desires. Sound familiar?

The script presents a provocative thesis that cuts uncomfortably close to home: what if true “bliss” is not joy but willful ignorance? Through its dystopian lens, Lovebombing explores a reality where our modern pursuit of frictionless happiness becomes the most sophisticated form of control ever devised—not through force, but through the promise of perpetual comfort.

The Mechanics of Manufactured Ignorance

In Lovebombing’s world, the titular weapons create beautiful, symmetrical blooms of pink smoke that flood neighborhoods with mood-altering chemicals. Crowds respond with programmed “Awwws,” mistaking coercion for affection.

Modern social media doesn’t deploy heart-shaped bombs, but it does deploy heart-shaped buttons. Both are designed to bypass critical thinking and trigger chemical responses in the brain.

Replace the pink smoke with targeted ads, the chemicals with dopamine hits from likes and shares, the programmed responses with algorithmic engagement patterns. The mechanics are eerily similar—both systems use manufactured beauty to trigger predictable emotional responses while masking their manipulative intent.

Chemical Castration vs. Digital Sedation

The regime’s Alpha-Blockers suppress “problematic” memories and desires, reshaping personality itself. The Debauchery erases short-term memory, creating what Mrs. Strangelove calls “ego death” and a “blank slate.”

Consider our real-world equivalents:

• Social media algorithms that create echo chambers, gradually erasing exposure to challenging ideas.

• “Wellness culture” that pathologize negative emotions as problems to be solved rather than a reality to be processed.

• The endless scroll that fragments attention spans until sustained, complex thought becomes nearly impossible.

Mrs. Strangelove’s clinical description could easily describe the goals of any platform designed to capture and monetize human attention. The blank slate isn’t created by chemicals—it’s created by the gradual erosion of our capacity for sustained, independent thought.

The Jekyll and The Hyde

In Lovebombing, the regime’s control is never perfect. Its fatal flaw is embodied in Winston, the janitor whose psyche has been fractured by the state’s chemicals. One version of him is compliant, forgetful, and safely numb. The other is a rebellious, memory-haunted, and dangerously authentic self that the Alpha-Blockers were meant to erase.

Winston’s split psyche is the central allegory for our own digital-age schizophrenia. We constantly navigate the divide between our curated online personas and our unvarnished private selves. His compliant self is our LinkedIn profile, our performative workplace optimism, our algorithm-friendly feed. His rebellious self is the 3 AM thoughts we don’t tweet—the anger, complexity, and inconvenient humanity that the system deems “non-compliant.”

The pressure to post a perfectly curated vacation photo battles with the private knowledge of the stress and arguments that came with it. The demand to be a perpetually positive “team player” suppresses the critical thoughts that could foster real change. In these moments, we are effectively self-administering a digital form of Alpha-Blockers, silencing the internal “Jekyll” that threatens our seamless integration into the system.

Yet, as Winston proves, no system of control can be total. There is always a remainder—some part of the human spirit that refuses optimization.

The Complicit

If Winston represents resistance through fragmentation, Magdalene embodies complicity through expertise. As a high-ranking “Cupid,” she knows exactly how the system works—and benefits from that knowledge. Her confession cuts to the heart of our modern predicament: “It’s a joke, this whole life. Being a Cupid... enforcing love by force”.

She’s every therapist mandated to pathologize rather than explore, every HR representative enforcing “positive workplace culture,” every content moderator deciding which emotions are acceptable for public consumption.

Her arc from enforcer to rebel mirrors a choice available to anyone working within these systems: continue profiting from the machinery of emotional control, or risk everything for the possibility of authentic connection.

The Hate Bomb: When Suppressed Truths Explode

If the system’s goal is a frictionless, blissful stasis, then the script’s “Hate Bomb” represents the inevitable, catastrophic return of everything it tried to erase. It’s not a coherent political ideology; it’s raw, unfiltered id—the collective Jekyll Winston of a society breaking through its chemical conditioning.

Our digital landscape is littered with these symbolic Hate Bombs. They aren’t physical explosives, but viral eruptions of pure, unprocessed emotion. The toxic rant of a troll, the explosive call-out thread, the descent of a political debate into pure visceral hatred—these are the digital equivalent of Hazen’ weapon. They are destructive and ugly, but they are also a desperate, flawed cry for a reality more authentic than the sanitized bliss offered by the mainstream platforms. They are the system’s suppressed shadow, demanding to be seen.

Choosing the Messy Truth

The central struggle in Lovebombing is not between love and hate, but between the sanitized lie and the messy truth. The regime’s “Bliss” is the lie of a pain-free existence; the Hate Bomb is the ugly, explosive truth of repressed humanity. The script argues that we are faced with a choice: do we side with the comfortable numbness of Winston, or the dangerous, authentic chaos of his repressed self?

Our path forward doesn’t require us to abandon technology, but to consciously re-embrace the very human qualities these systems seek to eliminate. The antidote to the bliss of ignorance is not more information, but friction.

• Choose boredom over the endless scroll.

• Seek out challenging conversations instead of blocking dissenting voices.

• Embrace uncertainty and ambivalence instead of latching onto simplistic, algorithm-friendly answers.

The most radical act in Lovebombing isn’t launching a counter-bomb. It’s the choice Mag and Winston make at the end: to simply walk away. They turn their backs on the entire system—the Lovebombs, the Hate Bombs, the war itself—and drive toward an uncertain, unscripted future.

This is the ultimate rejection of the bliss of ignorance. It’s a vote for messy, complicated, and un-optimized reality over a comfortable, predictable lie.

The true “bliss” we should seek isn’t the ignorance of numbness, but the profound satisfaction that can only come from facing reality head-on, in all its painful, beautiful, and gloriously inefficient chaos. The final image of Lovebombing isn’t of a victory, but of a choice: to stop gazing at the manufactured fireworks and, instead, to finally look at each other in the dim light of the real world.

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