(D:\) Drive

Say, can you hear?

Singularity's calling.

The clouds buffer

while servers sweat

into neon tombs

of our own design.

Towers of slick black glass latch

onto clouds above, the heavens, I wonder—

What's God's server uptime?

My load-bearing wrist aches under the thought

The panopticon sings a mocking song.

Just one more product, yes

Just one more investment, yes

Just one more hour of your time, you cog

for the machine—

Just say yes to it all.

We scroll up, down, lying flat, through our teeth

Clenching without noticing

at crosswalks, kitchens, in bed,

next to bodies whose faces we've forgotten

In the same way we've forgotten our own

Interface replaces inter-face

We optimize ourselves

for pretend smiles where

Everything's a product, designed

Shrink-wrapped in a shimmer except

When you look inside

nothing's there

Just like us

And after all this emptiness

We've split off into

ones and zeroes, binary, hot green

ambling nowhere across the title screen.

The future is homogenized, baby

We'll become homunculi

Searching for the same things

Just in different ways.

So post your content, go ahead

Ride that high, chase the likes

Because you can be a copy, too!

All for the low, low price of the truth

Simulacra made real, these bodies

are copies of copies of copies

But read the liner notes, you'll see

That terms and conditions apply to you

We've been dragging our feet

Numb to the uphill boulders

On these branching lanes, so distant now,

Like planks in our eyes, they splinter,

Cutting us blind.

The generator is overclocked—

Data center rainfall bludgeons us

Before we can pay the electricity bill.

It's too late now.

1999 was the cutoff but

We partied too hard, too long

Now stopping is no longer an option

'Cause the club isn't ours, and

The white rabbit is long gone and

Maybe it was never there to begin with.

You can sleep easy, though, knowing

There's never been a better time to be

"alive".

And let's not point the finger

Gutenberg never saw this coming

How could he have known

That, like cancer, a mass would grow

Production for production's sake—

"Why not?"

We can always start over.

The earth's not disposable,

We are—

Right?

The Old World is gone.

From now on,

All that is not saved will be lost.

Ask not just what you have now

But what you can afford to lose later.

In the New World,

solid states will intertwine.

Memory will collide until

Everything becomes

Everything Else

at the same time.

So don't delay

Buy your future!

and download your soul

to the Death Drive! or

Let your cores burn—

Let them churn heatwaves

like human EMPs,

Target locked onto

All of modernity

Sell your own data

on the Silk Road

like a spice

grate it all down

to Bits topping spaghetti code

to fuck up

The Algorithm, yes

but also

to make yourself yours again.

Let blood-cold

pressurize in your veins,

Your heart boiling over, blooming

into steam, becoming

so hot it's glacial,

like those glassy shrines

we live inside, here to stay

They might cut you but

You'll only bleed out

If you let yourself.

Take a look at your hands

See their wrinkles, those lines

Can never be copied

Look at yourself—

You're somebody,

A real body,

Like the one whence you came.

Your lineage, your destiny

It's come to this point

And copies can't remember

How those fists were made.

With that knowledge now

You can cut your teeth

And enter the ring

In the game of your life

Never free

But however you please

And then you can fight, bleed

like a real natural

(D:\)