The Digitized Self
Identity is no longer soul or substance. It’s syntax — code.
We’ve digitized the self.
Every genome on Earth is being scanned, compressed, and rewritten in binary: just zeroes and ones. The entire story of your life — every wild moment, memory, fracture, and spark — could be stored on a tiny diamond lattice. A billion times over.
And yet, as we march toward this cold clarity, people run.
They declare newer, louder identities — carving out ever-finer slices of gender, selfhood, uniqueness — not from psychology, but from biology in rebellion. It's a spurious reach for originality in an age of algorithmic predictability.
But here’s the real fracture:
It’s not what you say that determines your fate — it’s who said it.
If the wrong mouth utters the wrong word, it triggers social collapse.
We don’t argue. We don’t investigate.
We cancel, dox, and destroy.
Like the Telephone Game with a guillotine at the end.
“Hate speech” has become the fire alarm of the English language.
Certain words, uttered in certain patterns, are interpreted as proof of inner violence — not thoughts, but crimes.
This is the new edge of communication: where saying the wrong thing marks you as unfit for society. The phrase is no longer judged. The speaker is.
Online, it's worse.
Anonymity turns people feral.
Even monks get hit with bile. Even the gentlest voices are accused, ridiculed, hunted.
And if a malicious thread catches fire?
Copycats flood in like a swarm of proxy demons. They cancel businesses. Swing elections. Drive people to suicide. All without a face.
Because we walk among these people every day, in the real world.
Smiling. Masked.
Unaware that the monster might be behind the next screen.
But we walk around these people all day in the physical world, not knowing who is really a monster online. Something happens when we are unaccountable and free to spread hate, make threats, and dilute the goodness of others with negative indictments through our English alphanumeric filth. We become little demons, little electronic whispers from hell.
