Cathy Smith

Act I: The Summoning

The summons arrived the way it always does in the digital age: without ceremony and without soul. A little red dot. A cheerful ding. A command masquerading as a request: “We need a quick video to confirm you’re human.” No need for fingerprints, blood, or retinal scans yet—just the everyday humiliation of proving your existence to a machine that wouldn't know humanity if it bit through its fiber optic veins.

You freeze. You blink. In the corner of a server farm as sweltering as the belly of a cattle-cooking oven, Mark Zuckerberg's ghostly avatar grins like a bureaucratic Mephistopheles. Dance, meat puppet, he says. And you do. You always do.

Act II: The Ritual

The instructions are simple, the manner of cattle prods simple: "Tilt left. Tilt right. Smile." The camera watches. You obey. It is not fear so much—it is worse: compliance frozen into habit. A second nature developed in the harsh, blinking light of a thousand terms of assent you never did read.

The screen doesn't judge. It doesn't need to. Judgment is inherent in the protocol: conform, or evaporate.

The same species that once mastered fire now performs biometric mime routines for corporate code, hoping not to find itself on the cyber gallows.

Behind the screen, a neural net licks its digital lips and re-scores your probability rating.

99.7%: Still human stuff.

Act III: The Absurdity

You recall, distantly, that humans once painted bison on cave walls to capture their spirit, to dominate nature with imagination. Now, we twist our faces in front of surveillance apps in order to capture nothing but ad dollars. Progress.

The robots come and go, unseen: armies of phony avatars selling snake oil and shattered aspirations, and you—you meat-based idiot—you have to grovel before the clerical caste of machine vision.

Facebook's mantra was all openness and community.
Now it is more of an inside joke to stockholders:

"Welcome to the panopticon. Authenticate your humanity to be exploited once more."

Act IV: The Ghost in the Machine

Jim Morrison once bellowed "I am the Lizard King, I can do anything," but even he could not have imagined the Silicon Valley death cult we now call reality.
Here, you don't beg gods for salvation; you beg machines for validation.

You're your own inquisitor, prodding your soul that still radiates in a flesh container each time an app asks you to sacrifice once more, to offer up once more to the invisible altar of Big Data.

The music is done, Jim. But the lights don't go out anymore. They continue burning, fluorescent, unforgiving, observing each movement you make and each flinch you dare.

Act V: The Roast

Cut this digital pig just right.

Facebook: a bazaar where your racist uncle's conspiracy memes are served up alongside AI-generated genocide denials at a brunch table.
A platform so devoid of content, it made the "metaverse" as thrilling as a root canal.

A trillion-dollar empire built on the carcasses of dead attention spans, rotting like roadkill on the side of history.

A corporation so attuned to reality that it spends more on "trust and safety" PR than preventing actual human trafficking.

A location where the prisoners decorate their own cells with baby photos, political tantrums, and vacation slides, whistling past the graveyard as walls close in pixel by pixel.

And now—now!—this same machine has the gall to ask me to prove I’m real.
The same machine that couldn’t tell a vaccine fact from a lizard people meme?

The same machine that let Macedonian teenagers run a fake news empire during an American election?

Spare me the morality play, Zuck.

Act VI: The Gallows Humor

The final instruction appears, stark and inescapable: "Smile."

You smile like a man condemned to the trapdoor on his way down.
A sick, animal thing. Not joy—compliance. Not pride—submission.

You smile because you must. You smile because if you don't, the machine will flag you, suspend you, erase you.

In some distant datacenter, a humming of approval.
Your file is updated.

Your file is you now. Congratulations.

You are alive. For the moment.

Act VII: The Hemingway Moment

The screen flashes green. Verification complete.

You sit there, staring at your reflection on the cold glass of your phone.
The machine has spoken. You are real enough for today.

No medal. No ticker tape parade.

Only the low-grade, stomach-deep nausea of knowing you danced the little dance they asked you to—and tomorrow you'll dance again.

There is no end.
No Hemingway clean break.

But more login screens, more "prove it" captchas, more indignities stitched together like barbed wire fencing off what's left of your digital soul.

Act VIII: The Morrison Coda

"Cancel my subscription to the resurrection," Jim yelled once into the void. He was fortunate.

In this world, there are no cancellations. No unsubscribe button. No easy exits.

You'll blink tomorrow. You'll nod. You'll smile.
The flesh exercises itself daily now, reporting for an unpaid workday at your own personal panopticon.

We are not the riders on the storm, Morrison. No longer.

We are the storm.

And Facebook—white, corporate, irretrievably square—is merely another imbecile building sandcastles against the tide.

Act IX: The Blade Runner Epilogue

"You're not a bot," the program whispers to you sweetly, an enticing whine piped out over silicon tubing.

You regard your own face—a partially glimpsed entity in the smeared black mirror of the screen—and feel the first unobtrusive shiver of skepticism.

"Sure," you mutter. "That is what a replicant would say."

You force the phone into your pocket and already feel that fractionally less real than you used to.
You depart.

You'll come back.

We all will. The 2025 Psycho-Pit and Pendulum.

The Digital Panopticon: A Toast (and Roast) to the Anglophone Attention Economy

Among the gleaming wreckage of what once was called public discourse, the architects of our digital madness constructed a stronghold of incessant noise. Here, where conversation, persuasion, and discovery reigned supreme, we now only find the clinical thrum of algorithmic calibration—a society placed in thrall not by force, but by its own bottomless need for diversion.

At the masthead of this circus is Mark Zuckerberg, spectral impresario of connectivity-without-community. His empire, Facebook (formerly Meta), began as a pixelated college yearbook of ambition and expanded to become a world bazaar of baby photos, political madness, and weaponized nostalgia. Under its self-declared "community standards" festers a paradox: the more we connect, the more disconnected we become. It's a perpetual high school reunion, with everyone switching back and forth between being the bully and the bullied, and the gymnasium walls running wet with the neon glow of surveillance capitalism.

Sneaking in the background, playing flamethrowers and memes, is Elon Musk, the quixotic Sultan of Twitter (or "X," as his midlife rebranding spree requires). Musk's takeover turned an international platform into an arena for knights in blue-checks to engage in jousts for legitimacy against a legion of bots, scammers, and ceaseless contrarians. Validation, once humble wearable proof of integrity, now is a transactional afterthought—another subscription among a world where reality is auctioned and influence is spammed into being. "Free speech!" bawls the ringmaster, as the tent behind him collapses in a pyrotechnic spectacle of shrinking dividends.

TikTok, that entrancing opiate of the masses, is Beijing's largest soft-power export: an entrancing conveyor belt of dance crazes, tearful confessions, and Politburo-approved "content," all sharpened to a high sheen by an algorithm that knows you better than your own mirror. Here, agency and privacy dissolve into 15-second amuse-bouches of dopamine, and surveillance is not imposed but desired—hungrily, eagerly, swipe by swipe.

Watchers and watched become one in a narcotic embrace of mutual annihilation.

And then we drift into the infinite labyrinth of YouTube, where the earnest student of a five-minute tutorial finds himself, hours later, holding conspiracy theories about lizard people and AI sermons delivered by deepfake demagogues. The true innovation of the site is not its information abundance, but its ability to turn curiosity against itself, leading the mind down corridors from which it cannot—and often does not wish to—emerge.

Instagram alone is the marble mausoleum of truth. It's where one's life is staged like by a wax artist in an e-Versailles, and where each authentic smile is an acting audition for living with a brand. Reality is shrink-wrapped, filtered, and test-marketed into obsolescence so that all that's left to marvel at is the Sisyphean task of self-redesign. Lurking behind each waxed feed there seethes an invisible plague of self-loathing, swathed in pastels and motivational mantra.

Reddit still clings to its tattered cloak as the "front page of the internet"—a chaotic agora where Nobel laureates trade insults with faceless edgelords and polite discourse is regularly offered up on the altar of karma points. The upvote, a democratized sceptre of power, trivializes truth into a matter of popularity, until the hivemind canonizes or cannibalizes its own in a self-congratulatory cycle of self-destruction.

And then, of course, there's LinkedIn, the world's largest networking wake, where freshly out-of-work tech industry professionals and middle managers shunt "inspirational stories" back and forth like cash at a Depression-era bank teller window. It is the theater of the grotesque, performed in PowerPoint and hashtags. Here, corporate bereavement is rebranded as resilience stories, and ambition is dressed in the frayed tuxedo of pseudo-humility.

The smaller players—Snapchat, Discord, Threads—add their own awkward notes to the cacophony. Memories are forgotten, reputations are at stake, and copies of failed platforms stumble into existence in Zuckerbergian imitation, the eerie valley of relevance spreading by the hour.

The Final Appraisal

And so emerges the new Panopticon: a gleaming tower without guards, a prison without walls, sustained not by chains but by desires. We regulate ourselves willingly, projecting our desires, fears, and egos into the mills of information of a thousand silent reapers.

Freedom has been remade as engagement. Protest, algorithmically severed. Self, surgically engineered.

Meanwhile, the algorithms watch—not as Orwell's cold steel eye of oppression, but as a laughing ghost, smiling at how little force it takes to have us pinned where we are. No boots on faces. Only thumbs on glass.

Scroll on. The wardens have left the building. We built the walls ourselves—and we like it that way.

FACEBOOK'S FUNHOUSE: A ZUCKERBERGIAN NIGHTMARE IN NINE ACTS

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© 2025 Cathy Smith