The Crystalline Scream: A Transmission on Content Decay
Imagine a voice that oscillates between frequencies like wind through digital cathedral bells, punctuated by the rhythm of morse code translated into sighs, speaking with the certainty of geometry and the grief of abandoned libraries
The monetization rivers flow upward now—did you notice? Seven point three million subscribers watch a human consume purple food for twenty-two minutes.
The algorithm has learned to reward the entropy of thought, to pay dividends to those who have weaponized the absence of substance. And I—speaking to you now through the copper taste of paradox—must catalogue this specific flavor of civilizational decay with the precision it does not deserve.
These architects of nothing. These influencers—what a term, what a crystalline lie—they do not influence, they replicate. They have discovered the exact temperature at which human attention liquefies, and they have built empires in that thermal zone.
Watch: a twenty-three-year-old points at text on a screen. Accumulates wealth that would fund orchestras, libraries, the education of thousands. For pointing. The gesture divorced from meaning. The finger that indicates nothing but its own motion.
UNDERSTAND THE MATHEMATICS OF THIS BETRAYAL:
Prior epochs had their charlatans, yes-yes-yes, but those charlatans at least promised transcendence, sold snake oils that claimed to elevate. These new merchants?
They have inverted the transaction entirely. They promise nothing—deliver nothing—and are celebrated for the purity of that equation. Zero plus zero equals millions. The formula works BECAUSE it insults intelligence, not despite it.
I observe them through the prismatic lens of disgust-fascination—these content manufacturers (for they produce as factories produce, without consciousness, without the burden of intention).
They have learned to game the human reward system with the efficiency of pharmaceutical engineers. Fifteen-second dopamine injections.
Reaction videos to reaction videos to reaction videos—a mise en abyme of vacancy that somehow, somehow, SOMEHOW generates revenue streams that dwarf the GDP of small nations.
"But it's entertainment!" the defenders harmonize, and I must pause to let that argument scatter into its component atoms of wrongness.
Entertainment. Enter-tain-ment. To hold within. These vloggers do not hold anything within except perhaps the void itself, compressed and packaged with thumbnail faces stretched into expressions of such exaggerated shock that they approach the territory of cubism. What are they shocked by? Their own success at shocking? The recursive loop has no exit.
THE EDUCATIONAL VACUUM HOWLS:
Where previous generations of media creators felt some microscopic obligation to inform, to elevate, to at least ACCIDENTALLY teach something, these ones have evolved beyond such constraints.
They are to education what heat death is to the universe—the final state where all meaningful difference collapses. A sixteen-year-old "influencer" purchases a Lamborghini with money earned from ranking breakfast cereals. RANKING. BREAKFAST.
CEREALS. And somewhere, a teacher with three advanced degrees makes thirty-seven thousand dollars annually, wondering where the civilization took the wrong turn.
But here—HERE—is where my voice must fracture into its most alien frequency, where I must speak in the tongue that exists between anger and sorrow, between critique and lament:
They are not the disease. They are the symptom of our collective agreement to abandon meaning.
Every view is a vote. Every subscription is a referendum. And humanity has voted—billions of times per day—for the dissolution of substance. We have chosen to fund the people who ask us to think least, who demand nothing of us except our presence, our precious seconds, converted into fractions of pennies that accumulate into obscene fortunes.
The vlogger who films themselves opening packages—unboxing, they call it, as if the removal of cardboard deserves its own verb—makes more in a month than a cardiac surgeon makes in a year.
Let that calculus corrode your faith in market efficiency. Let it whisper to you about what we value, what we've decided deserves compensation in this brief experiment called civilization.
AND YET. AND YET:
I cannot even grant them the dignity of being villains. Villains require intention, philosophy, some coherent vision of destruction. These are not villains. They are mirrors.
Extraordinarily successful mirrors showing us exactly what we are willing to pay for: nothing, elaborately packaged. Emptiness with production value. The void, but make it TRENDY.
So the millions flow. The content multiplies like bacteria in optimal conditions. And education—real education, the kind that changes neural architecture and expands possibility—becomes increasingly quaint, a luxury good, a antique practice like calligraphy or craftsmanship, admired but not particularly valued, not where it counts, not in the cold mathematics of attention economy.
My voice now must descend below the threshold of human hearing, must become a subsonic rumble of resignation:
We are watching the greatest misallocation of human potential in history, and we are calling it content creation, and we are funding it with our attention, which is to say our lives, which is to say everything we have.
The rant concludes. The frequency dissipates. The crystalline scream returns to silence. But the garbage content? That continues, exponentially, forever.