I was looking at some news, and I think the power cut might be related to something bigger, to the same shit that went down at Times Square that night. I mean I don’t know for sure, but just in case I want us to be careful.
So attached to this is a version of Flex. As soon as you get a chance I want you to install it on that spare pair of spex I left with you. I dunno if it’ll work, but it might mean that if shit gets really fucked up we can still find a way to be in contact. Or that if things get bad in NYC and there are no networks you might have an alternative.
I know, I know—this sounds like me overreacting. I hope it is. But rather safe than sorry. I just can’t bear the idea of us not being in touch.
Take care, baby, talk soon.
And PS: I love you.
He stares at the screen for twenty seconds.
Then deletes the last line.
And hits SEND.
Then he sits in silence, staring at the screen, on his own.
http://pastebin.com/1bHQssPs
Posted by A Guest, 23.7.2026
Hello, dear friends around the world,
We do hope you are well. We have some news for you. Today this will be our last post. Not just for some time, but forever.
How do we say that with such certainty?
Because by the end of this week, we promise you there will be nowhere left for us to post.
“What?” you say. “Is Dronegod$ planning to take down our beloved Pastebin?”
Oh no, our dear friends. Well, not exactly.
We have far bigger fish to fry. And we’ve finally managed to get hold of a pan big enough to toss that fish into.
But first, let’s all catch up on a few things:
We hate the Internet.
Did we not mention that before?
Well, we do. We hate the Internet now. We used to love it. We grew up loving it. For us it was always there, it was never a new thing. But boy, our friends, was it ever an exciting thing. It used to make us so happy. It used to make us so excited. We used to have so much fun on the Internet. It was our playground, our home, our school. It was somewhere we could make friends — lovely friends like you. It was somewhere we could be naughty, somewhere we could be good. Somewhere we could laugh and cry. Somewhere we could fall in love. Somewhere we could come together, somewhere we could wander off to and be on our own. But most of all, it used to be somewhere we thought we could change the world, somewhere we could start a revolution.
Yes, that’s right. We’re so young we don’t remember a time where there was no Internet, but we’re still old enough to remember being excited that we could use it to start a revolution.
But we were so wrong about that, our friends. So very wrong.
There was no revolution to be had on the Internet. None at all. The idea that there ever was is false. A big fat lie.
Sure, we thought we saw revolutions start on here. We saw people come together to fight governments, stand up to bullies, bring attention to brutality, to show how corporations are stupid and greedy (we did quite a bit of that last one ourselves, if you remember, dear friends). We watched people fight for justice and against political correctness. We watched huge battles rage. And we thought they were exciting and important.
But we were wrong, we slowly realized. We realized those battles were just a spectacle, a distraction from what was really going on. Because those battles were taking place on a battlefield that didn’t matter. On a battlefield that had no way of making a difference. Because that’s a battlefield we don’t own, and never could. New battlefields built just to keep us occupied.
We used to think we could own it, that we were fighting to build communities for ourselves. That it was ours for the taking. To stake a claim for a place we could control and belong, a fight to make “safe spaces” for ourselves. It was a noble thing to think, that we were fighting for our own spaces, but we were kidding ourselves. We never owned these spaces, we never could. They were never ours to own, never ours to control. Instead we watched our battles turn into spectator sports, our revolutions turn to infighting. We watched our new communities dissolve into civil wars. We watched our political activists and community leaders become celebrity brands, our tech-utopian visionaries bow to capital and shareholders.
Without knowing — although somehow always expecting it — we let ourselves become nothing more than the content between adverts. Our battles, our beliefs, our loves — nothing more than the filler before the next ad break. We fought battles that we didn’t need to fight — battles that ripped our solidarity apart and distracted us from the causes we once believed in — just to create clicks and blinks and eyeballs for the advertising networks. We were nothing more than squatters in a space we wanted to believe we owned, paying our rent by giving ourselves away in the name of capital. Our revolution was a sideshow.
Well, not anymore, friends. This has to stop. And it will.
But back to those ads for a second. Back to a word from our sponsors, dear friends. What are those adverts for? Whatever the algorithms decide. What they decide they should be, based on what they know about us. Based on what we love, hate, talk about. Everything we do is data now, every move we make, every word we speak or type, every photo we take, everything we see or touch. All data. Data we don’t own, even though we made it, carried on networks we don’t own. Data mined so that the algorithms can know us, watch us, judge us, analyze us — predict us. So they can tell us what to think. What to do. What to buy.
The algorithms control everything now. And it goes up much further than just ads in your timeline. The algorithms control all the networks — both the physical and the digital ones, if there’s any real use in pretending there’s a difference anymore. From plastic-spewing gulags in China to the automated trading floors, from the bridges of container ships to the warehouses of Amazon, the algorithms decide everything.
Our politicians and corporations and leaders and economists and bankers — they all do nothing now. They do nothing more than serve the algorithms. They lack the ability to override them, to make real decisions. We don’t have powerful leaders anymore, we just have middle managers. That’s who we employ and elect — political debates and boardroom battles are no longer about ideas or visions, they’re just about who can manage the network most efficiently. They’re about trying to find the best people to interface with a system that’s so complex that mere people can’t comprehend — let alone change or control — it anymore.
We were all busy on the Internet when this happened. Some of us might have been reading stories or watching movies or playing video games about THE ROBOT UPRISING when it happened, which is kind of funny, isn’t it, friends? Entertaining ourselves by worrying about a massive inhuman artificial intelligence rising up and enslaving us, when in fact a massive inhuman artificial intelligence WAS rising up and enslaving us. Haha, isn’t that funny, friends? It’s ironic. What’s different is that the massive inhuman artificial intelligence wasn’t enslaving us with nuclear bombs or turning us into batteries (how WOULD that work?) or crushing our feeble human skulls with its metal feet, but by finding the best ways to sell us stuff. SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves.
“Ho ho ho,” you say, friends. “Have you finally gone mad, Dronegod$? Where are your tinfoil hats?”
The sad thing is, though, lovely friends, this is not a conspiracy theory. We’re not imagining things. And nobody planned this, no cabal of evil old white men in a smoky room. Nobody is in control, and believing that someone might be is where we all start to fail. This is just the political reality, it is just what happened. It’s what we all let happen. It’s the endgame of capitalism.