Future historians will look back at the daily routine of the early 21st-century human and wonder exactly when the trick was played.
It begins the moment we wake up. We purchase a shiny, premium piece of hardware, a marvel of engineering, but only to discover it is merely an entry ticket to a lifelong subscription trap. To send a simple email, we pay for data. To receive a vital document in return, we pay again. We have entered a bizarre era where humanity willingly pays a toll to speak, and another toll just to listen.
And then there are the memories. To keep the photos we take or the documents that prove who we are, we are told we have run out of room. The solution? We must rent a piece of the sky. We pay a perpetual monthly coin to a virtual landlord just to retain ownership of our own past.
Once the tolls are paid, the daily labor begins. Before we can touch our own files, we must stand before an invisible gatekeeper called Artificial Intelligence. We spend our finite time on earth typing secret combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols into a box, waiting for an algorithm to analyze our identity and graciously grant us permission to look at our own lives.
When the system inevitably glitches, no humans appear. Instead, we are left at the mercy of completely non-intelligent automated programs. We let rigid, unthinking bots lead us through digital dead-ends, wasting our mornings playing tech support to the very machines that promised to save us time.
It is a beautifully engineered loop. We buy the tools, rent our memories, beg algorithms for access, and serve the programs.
And from a distance, humanity looks at this exhausting, expensive cycle, nods in collective agreement, and calls it progress.
Rabiha Taouk
