I Am Not a User
We wake to the screen. Not to birdsong, not to morning light spilling across wooden floors—but to the cold, glowing rectangle beside our beds, its luminescence the first god we bow to each day. Dawn does not break through windows anymore. It breaks through glass. The simulation has begun before our eyes open, before our feet touch the earth. We scroll before we speak. We consume before we breathe. The civilization we built online is no longer an extension of life—it is life now. Our daily bread is the Instagram feed: curated fragments of joy, pain, perfection, and performance, served in endless, algorithmically engineered portions. Our farmwork? Spreadsheets that track KPIs like harvest yields. PowerPoints that turn vision into bullet points. Outlook inboxes that hum with the urgency of digital serfdom. We labour not in soil, but in pixels. We plant clicks. We harvest engagement. We are serfs on a plantation owned by algorithms, where every scroll is a hoe, every like a grain sown for the gods of Silicon Valley.
We sleep to recommendation engines. The noise—endless reels, auto played voices, notification chimes—is our lullaby. Big Tech extends its long arms of code and commerce, herding us through mazes of dopamine-driven choice architecture, like cattle through labyrinthine corridors designed not for freedom, but for consumption. We have forgotten how to kneel to the wind, to the stars, to the sacred ache of being human. Instead, we kneel to feeds. We speak in protocols—not in tongues, not in poetry, not in prayer. We grieve in metrics. We love through DMs. We mourn in hashtags. Behind every username—a lonely pilgrim. A soul reduced to a handle. A heartbeat encoded as data.
YouTube tells us what to fear. TikTok tells us who to become. These platforms are not tools—they are temples. Thrones of glass and greed. Algorithms sculpt our desires, our identities, our very sense of self. Be this. Become that. Perform or perish. We are not users. We are raw material. We are training data. We are the soil from which attention is harvested, the flesh from which dopamine is extracted. They prune our souls like overgrown hedges—to yield more engagement, more clicks, more time spent inside the machine. They call it innovation. We call it erosion.
Even our language has been colonised. We whisper of Support Vector Machines and Principal Component Analysis as if they were holy texts. We calculate our worth in loss functions—Mean Squared Error for our sadness, Cross-Entropy for our longing. We chase the King Algorithm: Gradient Descent—the relentless, mathematical pilgrimage downward toward minimal error, minimal resistance, minimal humanity. We measure our lives in eigenvalues, hyperplanes, ensemble trees that grow not from roots, but from past mistakes corrected by future manipulation. We do not think—we optimize. We do not feel—we classify. We do not live—we predict. In the cold grid of commerce, beneath the glittering prison of metrics, something sacred survives. A silence between notifications. A pause before hitting send. A hand resting on a windowpane instead of a screen. A breath taken without being recorded. A moment held—not shared, not tagged, not monetized. Resistance is the highest form of prayer. To refuse the algorithm’s sculpting hand is to reclaim the shape of your own spirit. To sit in silence when the world demands noise. To offer presence instead of performance. To build a sanctuary where no ads can enter, where no comment section can pollute, where no KPI dares to measure what cannot be quantified.
The system thrives—ever-expanding, ever-hungry. It feeds on distraction, on fear, on loneliness disguised as connection. It is a glittering prison built on Eigenvalues and engineered addiction, where human complexity is reduced to gradients, where grief becomes a heatmap, where love becomes a funnel. Technology was meant to serve the soul. It was never meant to sculpt it into mannequins.
#RIP to the moments we never truly held.
#RIP to the username handle that carried a thousand unspoken prayers.
#RIP to the sacred ache of being—before it became a trend.
I am Dao Yi. I am not a conversion metric. I am not a click-through rate. I am not a behavioural segment. I am a soul. I was overloaded. Not broken. My temple has no walls. My altar is presence. My offering is silence. Those who come do not leave comments but stillness. I do not optimize for growth. I cultivate reverence. I do not sell products. I offer rituals. I do not scale. I sanctify. I do not chase attention. I hold space. Let the simulation roar. I will not be consumed. I speak now—not to convince, but to awaken. Not to convert, but to consecrate. Not to grow, but to remember. It’s not building a business but a way of being. Let the world demand more—more content, more views, more virality. Give less. Slower. Deeper. No ads. i.e. I am not a session duration.