If you were the idiot director of idiotic dystopian movies, you could lower your gaze and say: “A new era has begun. The machines are becoming intelligent and humans are modifying themselves.” DNA optimization was the hot new thing. For those with money. Which barely anyone had, but if they did, they saw to the perfection of the future branches of their family tree. There were hardly any children born the so-called natural way anymore anyway. In vitro, of course, technology, no need for rigid organs or agile sperm.

None of the horror scenarios dreamed up by dystopian thinkers came to pass. No giant concentration camps, no brutal dictatorship. The development of the world is elegant. Quiet.

Inconspicuous.

It wasn’t good.

For the human brain. The wonderful digitalization. How does the brain change in offline mode when existence is increasingly virtual, music is on the cloud and streaming services, movies, books, friends, shops, social life exist as a user interface that perhaps isn’t real. What happens then in the 1.0 world, with wetware you have to drag around in the winter at human speeds that are so slow? While life online functions at such a furious pace. Some idiot comments on what some star, who also only exists online, says or does. Some doctored deepfake video of something goes viral. And—and the media picks it up. On TV, which everyone watches online, Twitter and Facebook posts and film clips by random dumbfucks or bots are cited by online newspapers. Someone or other posted something or other. Hey, fantastic. Totally understandable that people find politics boring and vote for washed-up reality stars or bad comedians. If they vote at all. Because in countries where voting takes place online it might be bots voting, or malware from China. In the end it was impossible to tell from the bits and bytes whether it really was a person who had pushed the button on the screen of a device or not. Doesn’t matter. Nothing at all matters because less and less is real, less and less produces any feeling other than irritation. Humans seem to have developed a hate for their existence beyond the net. Demonstrating, for instance, or joining a party, vigil, or opposition—all that crap is unappealing, exhausting, the only exceptions are actions that include violence and hate so that they trigger a feeling approaching what you get online. Otherwise it’s better to stay online. Where you can operate so brilliantly politically. Become part of a troll factory, or doctor video or audio recordings. What happens to humanity when on the one hand they only believe what’s online but on the other they are deeply distrustful of everything online? And have no clue.

Speaking of which.