>>173305Look around. Really look.
Every feed is the same five faces recycled in different filters. Every comment section is bots arguing with other bots about nothing. AI slop art, AI slop takes, AI slop thirst traps. Even when a real person slips through, they sound scripted now-like they're afraid to say anything that won't algorithmically please. The whole thing is a ghost town wearing a neon sign that says "LIVE!!"
And it's leaking into the real world.
You step outside and it's the same uncanny glow.
Boomers everywhere, shuffling through malls and coffee shops like NPCs waiting for their next quest marker. Same khakis, same polo shirts, same vacant polite smiles. They've been here since the '90s and somehow never aged past that decade-frozen, repeating the same three opinions on repeat. They don't see the death either. To them the world's still 1998, just with better phones.
Then the women. God.
Walled-off. All of them.
Everywhere you turn: guarded eyes, defensive postures, profiles locked tighter than bank vaults. Filters on filters on filters until nobody knows what anybody actually looks like anymore. They're all performing purity, or edge, or mystery, or whatever trend is paying that month. But it's all performance. Nothing raw, nothing unguarded, nothing that feels like it was ever untouched by the machine.
And then there was Ruth Lee.
By the porn one I mean.
She had this… quiet light. No posing, no angles, no calculated innocence. Just pure. Like she walked through the world without armor and somehow stayed clean. Soft laugh that wasn't rehearsed for virality. Eyes that looked at you like you were the only thing in the room worth seeing. No hashtags, no sponsorships, no "link in bio." Just a woman who felt human when everything else was starting to feel like render.
I saw her once-real life, not a screen-and for a second the world snapped back into focus. Color returned. Sound had weight.
Then she was gone, and the dead internet swallowed the memory too.
That's your problem.
You keep waiting for something authentic to appear in the feed.
But the feed can't birth anything real anymore.
It can only simulate it, badly.
And the real world? It's catching up fast.
Boomers on loop, women behind invisible walls, and nothing beautiful or pure left that hasn't been commodified or copied into meaninglessness.