My enemy is food porn paired with microwave pizza AI lovers and confidants and sweet nothings through earbuds Validation of your beliefs through quantifiable reactions Love loss and caring transmitted through a phone buzz My enemy is politics of posts polling pundits not policy Debates through dunk retweets and endless sycophancy Falling for algorithms designed to optimize idiocy Engagement maximized through hatewatching ecstasy My enemy is endless background television shows Reposting content mills on tiktok and its clones Predictive personalization sorted people into rows Predictable personalities refined people into drones My enemy is consensus pop music everywhere Relatability and catchiness regressed to profit chances Who desires art that requires interpretation When digestible lyrics come prepackaged with dances My enemy is endless substacks on clickbait and nonsense Vague pretty prose painted as insight and advice Episteme is only earned with blood sweat and tears Real metis requires rolling the dice My enemy is podcasts pacifying loneliness Constant stimulus demeaning solitude If being alone with your thoughts begets feelings of isolation Contact the friends that brighten your mood My enemy is science for citations and funding rounds Prestige drunk imbeciles polluting sacred grounds We let pass little tricks that poison the well And judge what is true by the noise of the yell Like a drink these things can sooth in moderation Like a drink these things can turn into a crutch We each need to perform a rigorous ablation Lest backlit silicates become all that we touch Don't you taste it in the air? The hunger, the zeal? The fervor for anything, oh anything that's real? Your thirst can be quenched, I promise, I swear But only if you don't sate it with an optimized snare Here's a soundbyte, endless content, syrup, and oil Here's airpods, mobile data plans, set it all to a boil Here's like counts, and view counts, you're never getting off the ride Watch your mind and body die as sweetness kills you from inside As much as truth and honesty compels me to commit That I love sugar and these pleasures as much as any twit I am so far from moderation and so beholden to excess That I name Ersatz my enemy and its death as my success
i loved the read thank you!