Feed the Beast

Turn off your phone

You’ve got a Ouija board in your pocket,

and every lonely second

you yearn to unlock it.

Eyes bulge in sockets.

Thumbs twitch. Mouth slack.

The Scroll is a seance—

and we’re all moving the planchette,

but none of us knew

what we were summoning.

Or maybe some of you did . . .

Servants of Clickbait, Renfields of Silicon Valley,

Igors of the Attention Economy,

lapping up scraps of virality to serve your master.

But the rest of us . . . we all let the wrong one in.

And now we have Mr. Wriggles in a velvet suit,

smiling as he splits your skull in two.

Pazuzu with a ring light

and a 10-part skin care routine

dancing on TikTok,

spinning your head like a record, Baby.

It feels like comfort, when you swipe

up, down, left, right—

but it’s a parasite devouring your originality, your creativity,

the aura and essence that made you

so uniquely, immeasurably, incomparably YOU.

It’s devoured the realness of your rage,

left you tied to a chair, your throat packed with worms, and

celery juice blessed by an Instagram shaman

and dusted in adaptogens for “emotional resilience.”

You can’t even scream anymore—you comment.

You react.

You chant “thoughts and prayers,”

your screen slick with blood

and branded hashtags.

Another school shooting,

another dead refugee,

another victim’s corpse paraded for likes—

and still we scroll.

We don’t feel the horror.

We don’t face the blood.

We don’t see the mirrors being held to our own faces.

Because that would mean admitting

we are complicit.

We are culpable.

We are scrolling through the massacre,

praying the algorithm doesn’t show us too much.

We slaughter our empathy on the altar of relevance—

serve our data, our attention, our fucking souls

to The Goat with a Thousand Likes.

And the Digital Devil’s favorite food?

Remember the fairy tales.

Witches eat babies and demons love

the taste of adolescence.

We feed it little girls—who once skinned their knees

and danced naked under a chandelier of stars.

Now starving themselves to look like AI-generated avatars,

slicing away a pound of flesh, another,

whatever it takes to fit inside a filter.

Posting selfies and praying for worth.

We brainwash young men into the Cult of Fake.

Why risk heartbreak when you can summon an AI girlfriend

who loves it when you click her button

and will never, ever have a headache?

Or a feeling that wasn’t programmed for your pleasure?

She never asks where this is going.

Never cries in the kitchen.

Never tells you the truth when it hurts.

Searches for “AI girlfriend” are up 2,400%.

Because we taught boys to fear intimacy.

And girls to become consumable content.

Pretty filters. Pouty lips.

More palatable, less powerful.

This is not a call to delete your apps.

This is a call to wake the fuck up.

To look around. To look within.

To reclaim your attention like it’s sacred.

Because it is.

The scroll is a spell.

And every time you resist it,

you remember:

You are more than the sum of your data.

You are not a brand.

You are not a number.

You are not here to be palatable.

You are not here to be Liked.

You are here to Be.

IRL.