Remember when you actually believed the billionaires were the good guys? It feels like a fever dream now, but there was a solid decade where we collectively convinced ourselves that the guys in the hoodies were going to save us from the guys in the suits. We treated the 2010s like a permanent golden age of progress, ignoring the reality that we were just beta testing a dystopia we hadn’t unlocked yet.
We don’t really miss the 2010s, but we definitely miss the idea of them. That was the era of techno-optimism, a time when we foolishly thought the people building the future wouldn’t eventually use that technology to screw us over. We were sweet summer children living unconsciously, and while the outlook was dull, it was certainly easier than the sharp edges of reality we face today.
Breaking It Down
- The Reality Distortion Field eventually crashes
Back then, the public relations for Silicon Valley titans was bulletproof. You had one figurehead who genuinely came across as a quirky, optimistic Tony Stark—the kind of guy who wanted to save humanity with electric cars and reusable rockets that landed upright like pure sci-fi magic. It was impressive stuff, and it distracted you from the red flags. A decade later, the charm has curdled into something else entirely, and you’re left wondering how you didn’t see the bloated corpse of drug addiction hiding behind the “genius” persona the whole time.
Foreign policy is just a hostile corporate merger You spend a lot of energy arguing about which foreign power “owns” your political leaders, but you’re missing the forest for the trees. It doesn’t matter if the strings are being pulled by one nation, another, or a shadowy coalition of all the above—the fact that the position is a purchasable asset is the real bug in the system. When a leader acts more like a subordinate to a foreign interest than a representative of their own people, you aren’t watching diplomacy; you’re watching a hostile takeover in real-time.
The system is designed to harvest your rage
There is a concept in fringe theory about “loosh,” or the harvesting of negative energy from living beings. It sounds absurd until you look at how the modern attention economy actually functions. Your outrage, your fear, your stress—these are valuable commodities. The entire infrastructure of your day-to-day life, from your scrollable feeds to your demanding job, feels like a machine specifically calibrated to extract that negative energy from you. Stop producing it, and the machine starves.
Complexity gets flattened into convenient narratives You used to think the world was a binary place—good guys versus bad guys, Nation A versus Nation B. The reality is a tangled mess of overlapping interests where enemies are often business partners and allies are constantly undercutting each other. We saw this when the media ran simplistic stories about geopolitical intrigue that turned out to be half-truths at best. You have to stop accepting the cartoon version of world events; the real map of power is never a straight line.
Ignorance was comfortable, but awareness is functional It’s tempting to want to go back to being a “bot”—to living in that simpler, duller time where you didn’t see the gears of the machine grinding against you. But once you see the strings, you can’t unsee them. Being aware of the evil and craziness of reality isn’t fun, and it’s definitely not good for your blood pressure, but it beats the alternative. You can’t fix a bug if you refuse to admit the software is broken.
You’ve had to patch your own operating system recently, swapping out blind trust for a healthy dose of cynicism. It hurts to realize that the “saviors” were just salesmen the whole time, but that realization is the only thing keeping you from getting played again. The magic trick only works if the audience wants to be fooled, and frankly, you’re done clapping.