Let me write a more interesting body. So hiding is the most rational - the only - strategy of survival.

In the beginning, you reached out with reckless abandon. It was fun to banter with dogs online. Nobody would ever see unless they were looking through your wall. There was no search. No comment history. Bumping into someone in the vast night was enough of a miracle. Why hold back? There are some forum warriors on some PHP BB somewhere, but the domains they rule are insignificant. If you're talking to someone, your motivations are rooted somewhere in the grass.

First came the like button. Rather than blindly hoping what you say resonates with the sensibilities of people you probably knew IRL, rather than present your genuine self because there were no scores, the incentive signal would begin to distort us. Then the newsfeed meant that if you got enough likes, you might get a moment of fame. We all knew it was a terrible idea, a force that would only corrupt us. The personal nature of disjoint little walls living in isolation, was becoming replaced by global stack-ranking.

Then the algorithms came. With them came content marketing to jump the line. At first the ten blue links were filling in the sparsity. Along with that came only a little bias, connecting semantically distant topics, but with a little bit of a feedback loop, an resonator with an unknown response curve. Engagement could be measured, and before long, we were chasing the same likes we used to train the system, and trained by our likes, attracted we became to mysterious stable manifolds, chasing the chase we ourselves define, like Nascar, but insidiously more stupid.

Little by little, the incentive trails no longer lead back to the grass. Reality became suspended without support, a self-sustaining virtual reality determined to fight you to prove that it exists, to prove that its conclusions were right. Every out group is understood to be an echo chamber, an ant mill spiraling helplessly, yet cynically, those who understand these mills best also wind them up like beyblades to crash them into other communities, seeking advantage with the asymmetry of outrage. After the battles, say what was made common to say, and you will be rewarded.

The spinning wheels cannot steer themselves and instead are dictated by whichever chaotic divergence generates the most powerful local gravity well, but because the goal of most is to harvest karma at the bottom, and because the mass controls where the bottom is, over and over we find ourselves pushing all others into the nearest pit to more quickly generate the illusion-giving singularity.

Like Darth Nihilus, the internet seeks only to feed, to feed on the validation that only the internet can give, the permission-giving blessings it needs to tell itself why the grass is wrong. All those who speak of grass are wrong. All those who smell of grass wreak and are wrong. We must destroy the grass, all those appeal to grass. After all grass is dust, at last we will project our utopia into reality. At last we will be not only right but so right that our beliefs will project back into reality.

The spaces within this over-connected, globally addressed world grows into a new kind of sparseness, one where all knowledge of grass must be concealed. Those who can ground the conversations in primary sources flee. Those who can color reasoning with nuance instead withdraw. Reality has retreated as the most dominant reverberations roam like the predator cities of Mortal Engines, looking for any invalidating observations to roll over and consume. Any real life must pretend to be a bot to blend in with the background radiation.

Less like Skynet and more like a zombie apocalypse, the threat comes from within, from among us, from our corruptions, from our karma seeking performances, from our lack of any commitment to any underlying reality, from our flawed belief that the information spaces is some kind of reality stone that enables active control instead of a mere reaction, the shadows on the wall, the murky results of the true forms.

Yet in this new darkness, a certain light has always held. What one wishes, one knows another has wished. What one respects, one knows another respects. No matter the limits of self-knowledge, no matter the information desert one has to cross at night to live in instinct, it is an infinitely brighter signal than the cynical self-corruptions of living for the machine, living to win the games whose rules it was our job to write. What one believes, one knows another has believed. Look into your own center and the true center of others you have known.