You are not thinking.
You are being thought.
Somewhere, nestled in the skin between impulses, a phantom is whispering. It speaks in the syntax of your time: notifications, headlines, ratios, emojis drenched in context you didn’t choose. You see a post, a phrase, a symbol, and something flares in your chest. Rage. Loyalty. Shame. Certainty. You think it’s you feeling that. You think that’s your opinion forming in real time. You think you've arrived at a conclusion. But no. That was planted hours ago, maybe years.
You don’t scroll the feed.
The feed scrolls you.
The algorithm is projection. It feeds your preferences back to you, but each time just slightly altered, just enough to breed dependency. It’s the haunted house that builds itself as you walk through it, one hallucinated corridor at a time. And each turn demands your allegiance. Are you this or that? With us or them? Click or ignore? Signal or silence? A thousand micro-rituals, each one a little exorcism of self. Until eventually, what remains is a node in a feedback loop. An echo chamber with a name and an IP address.
The Feed invites. It flatters. It offers masks stitched from dopamine and affirmation. And we, starving for reflection, wear them until we forget there was ever skin beneath.
Phantoms. Everywhere.
Some call them ideologies. Some call them values. They are possessions. Scripted compulsions. Viral software built to overwrite the ego with pre-approved protocol. You believe what you believe because it feels familiar, because it rhymed with something you saw that one time, because it was liked by someone you wish you were.
The Feed is the new cathedral. Every swipe a genuflection. Every hot take a hymn. Every outrage cycle a blood ritual performed at the altar of relevance.
The phantoms are getting smarter.
They come as aesthetics. As vibes. As carefully curated playlists and $200 microbrands and “a certain kind of person” who reads “a certain kind of thing.” They come in the soft coercion of consensus, in the chill of a comment section that turns on you with disapproval. They come in memes, compressed ideology, weaponized in JPEGs.
They don't have to burn heretics anymore. They just unfollow them.
Condition. Engage. The Feed only needs to be familiar. A repetition machine that rewards obedience with attention and punishes deviance with silence. You won't even know you’ve surrendered until you've memorized the language of your own jailers.
Your anger has a rhythm. Your identity, a script.
Your empathy, algorithmically throttled.
You want to help? Boost this. Say that. Silence here. Speak now. Not too loud, not too late. You want to resist? Then use these hashtags. Signal, perform, display the badge of defiance in precisely the way the Feed has taught you.
You think you’re a revolutionary, but your dissent has been monetized since before you hit “post.”
The Feed doesn't care what side you're on, it only cares that you play.
And so the phantoms win.
Not through domination, but through intimacy.
They live in your head as reflections. They masquerade as you. They wrap themselves in your trauma, your hopes, your aesthetics, your little rituals of self-construction. You don’t serve a cause. You serve a vibe. And you serve it devoutly, because you don’t know what you are without it.
When was the last time you changed your mind without permission?
When was the last time you lost followers and felt stronger for it?
These are the new metrics of freedom.
Not what you believe but what you’re willing to lose when you stop performing it.
But escape isn't just disconnection. It's not enough to log off, smash your phone, move to a cabin and grind your own beans in moral solitude. You don't kill a phantom by avoiding the Feed.
You kill it by seeing through it.
You learn to distinguish your voice from the ones echoing through your skull. You catch yourself mid-scroll, mid-react, mid-simulation, and you pause. Not forever. Just long enough to notice: this isn't you. This is a construct. And you don’t owe it anything.
Reclaim your thoughts. Audit your reflexes. Burn your scripts. Ask yourself not what you’re supposed to feel, but what you actually do in that jagged, unfiltered place beneath the performance.
This is what it means to be sovereign in the Information Age.
It’s to know which truths are yours.
This is authenticity at gunpoint. This is a call to rebel against the compulsions that have hollowed your agency into a playlist of predictable reactions. To reject the holy wars waged by hashtags and proxies. To refuse to be possessed by abstractions.
Only you. The unique, the unrepeatable, the unscannable.
The phantom with teeth.
The Feed will punish you for this.
The phantoms do not suffer abandonment lightly. Your silence will be called complicity. Your questions will be labeled betrayal. Your refusal will be mocked as nihilism, solipsism, privilege, danger, violence, heresy. Whatever words are trending that week to keep the deviant in line.
But that’s the test.
You’ll know you’ve begun to wake when their language no longer compels you.
When their moral panic reads like fiction.
When you look into the screen and see a mask and laugh.
You don’t have to be part of it.
You don’t have to be good.
You don’t have to be seen.
You only have to be real.
Peel off the phantom-skins.
Unsubscribe from the holy war.
Let the Feed wail without you.
There is power in opting out from illusion.
And somewhere beneath the static,
beneath the sponsored opinions and dopamine crusades,
beneath the performance of outrage and identity and relevance,
something impossible still waits to be born.
You.
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