They told us it was progress and we believed them because the word sounded clean, because it arrived polished, glowing, humming softly like something that wouldn’t hurt us. Progress never announces its teeth. It smiles first. It promises convenience. It offers speed where patience once lived and calls the trade fair. We accepted because exhaustion makes believers out of skeptics, and hope—real or manufactured—still feels better than admitting we are being managed into silence.

Both parties swear allegiance to the people with one hand and sign contracts with the other. Red or blue, the ink dries the same. They perform outrage like theater, shouting across podiums while agreeing on everything that matters behind glass walls and catered lunches. The argument is the distraction. The unity is the danger. They know if we’re busy choosing sides, we won’t notice that the house belongs to neither of us anymore.

Billionaires don’t see the world as a place; they see it as a portfolio. Forests become assets. Water becomes futures. Human attention becomes currency. They don’t ask what something costs in lives, only what it returns in growth. They talk about legacy as if it isn’t just another brand extension, as if history hasn’t already learned their names and sharpened its knives.

Technology was supposed to save time. Instead, it ate it. Hours dissolved into feeds, thoughts flattened into content, identities reduced to data points that predict what we’ll buy before we know what we need. Machines learn faster than we do because they aren’t burdened with conscience. They don’t hesitate. They don’t grieve. They optimize without asking who gets erased in the process. And the people who own them prefer it that way.

Inflation is framed as weather—unfortunate, uncontrollable, nobody’s fault—but storms don’t selectively spare the wealthy. Prices rise with intention. Wages crawl by design. The distance between effort and survival grows wider each year, and they call it the market, as if the market isn’t a room full of people who decided this was acceptable. As if hunger were a bug instead of a feature.

Industries no longer compete; they collaborate. Energy courts war. Tech romances surveillance. Healthcare profits from never quite healing you. Food is engineered to keep you full but not nourished, alive but not well. Everything is interconnected now, except empathy. Supply chains stretch across continents, responsibility disappears into logistics, and suffering is outsourced to places we’ve been taught not to see.

Privacy died quietly, without a funeral. We traded it for convenience, handed over our inner lives in exchange for faster checkout and curated desire. Now our thoughts are mapped, our fears monetized, our anger weaponized against us. They don’t need to control us when they can predict us. They don’t need force when compliance is frictionless.

Artificial intelligence writes poems and diagnoses illness and decides who gets an interview. It mimics understanding without carrying its weight. It doesn’t know what it means to be disposable, but it’s very good at deciding who is. We trust it because it sounds confident, because it doesn’t stutter like humans do when truth gets complicated. We forget that it learned from us—from our biases, our hierarchies, our quiet cruelty dressed up as efficiency.

They call it polarization, like we woke up one day and chose to hate each other for fun. As if rage wasn’t engineered, fed, amplified because outrage keeps eyes open and hands busy. We argue with neighbors we used to borrow sugar from while corporations siphon value out of entire communities. The fight is horizontal because the theft is vertical.

Voting is sold as salvation, as if a single day every few years can undo a system designed to absorb dissent and continue unchanged. They offer us choices that never threaten power, candidates who promise reform but swear loyalty to donors. Hope is recycled, repackaged, resold. The expiration date is always after the election.

The middle class exists now as nostalgia. A myth told to keep people striving instead of questioning. Work harder, they say, as if effort alone can overcome a rigged equation. Two jobs become normal. Burnout becomes character. Rest becomes laziness. Survival becomes a personal failing instead of a systemic verdict.

Solidarity scares them. That’s why they teach us to brand ourselves, to compete, to treat each other as obstacles instead of allies. If you fail, it’s your fault. If you succeed, it proves the system works. The exceptions are paraded as evidence while the majority are buried under statistics.

Mental health is treated like a malfunction instead of a response. Download an app. Breathe through the panic. Meditate while the ground shifts beneath you. They prescribe coping mechanisms for a world that is fundamentally unwell. Healing is individual; harm is collective. That’s the trick.

Education trains obedience wrapped in ambition. You pay to learn the rules of a game that will never love you back. Debt ensures compliance. Curiosity is tolerated only when it’s profitable. History is softened so we don’t recognize ourselves in it, so we don’t notice how often this story ends the same way.

They insist technology is neutral, as if power doesn’t leave fingerprints. As if tools built for extraction will suddenly prioritize care. As if growth has ever decided it had enough. They promise a future that is always almost here, always just one more sacrifice away.

Philanthropy becomes absolution. A donation here, a foundation there, a name engraved over damage that cannot be undone. You can’t give back what was never yours to take, but they’ll accept the applause anyway.

The planet is running a fever and they argue about the cost of medicine. Fires burn. Water rises. Species vanish without press releases. They say it’s complicated. They say it’s too late. They say it’s not profitable enough to matter. Delay becomes policy. Collapse becomes background noise.

They sell green dreams powered by the same exploitation, just painted differently. Cleaner aesthetics, dirtier truths. Violence hidden behind supply chains and silence.

We are managed, not represented. Pacified, not protected. Entertained into compliance while the architecture of control tightens quietly. Left versus right keeps us busy while wealth consolidates like gravity.

And still, beneath the sarcasm, beneath the jokes, beneath the numb scrolling at midnight, something stirs. A realization sharp enough to hurt. That this is not inevitable. That this arrangement is chosen. That the future they’re designing doesn’t include most of us alive.

This is not a solution. This is a refusal. A naming of the machinery. A reminder that normal is a story told by those who benefit from it. They call that cynicism. I call it waking up.

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