luddite

Its me. I’m the last one. And they are hunting me. I’ve no idea why. Or even for what. I only have 7 followers. All of them are people related to me.

It took me awhile to figure it out. Everyone elses posts, every reel and piece of writing and information on social media is AI generated. Mine isn’t. Mine is still my words. I’ve even put up pictures of me, without a filter. Read that again, without a filter!

And somehow, ‘they’ have found me out. I don’t even know who they are. It started in a coffee shop, a conversation with a friend and I let it slip, my own stuff, I write my own stuff and put it on the internet. That friendship ended on the spot. She looked around, saw someone had overheard, got up and walked out. Whispering ‘freak’ at me as she went.

I was banned from the coffee shop too. I should have whispered it, said it quietly, but I said it out loud. In public. Its like I’ve broken the social contract, like we all had an agreement that we would live in the altered reality that AI has created. But I don’t. I don’t agree. I write my own words and put them out there.

I thought the banning from the coffee shop would be it, but somehow ‘it’ was listening. When I got home, all my accounts had been suspended, apparently mandatory use of AI is in the terms and conditions. The terms and conditions take an estimated 10 years to read, and that’s only reading the first line of each paragraph, so I didn’t know.

There was just one social media site, that I thought was defunct that I am still on.  I can still access that and that is what I use now. To be clear I don’t think anyone else uses it.  I put stuff up every day and it goes nowhere. No human ever sees it or watches it but I do it anyway.

It is an act of defiance. I think I’m going to pay for it with my life. I’ve already paid for it with my digital life. They have to catch me first though. My accounts are all closed, even Google, so they can’t track my location, well at least not easily. They get some insight every time I post. Bots screaming at bots somewhere out there, telling them to do something. I only know because people listen to those devices and seemingly just obey whatever they say.

Random smart devices turning up or left at my doorstep in the morning. That’s how I knew they were on to me, some smart device insisting to its owner that it be left on my driveway. Honestly what did that microwave think it was gonna do?

I move around a lot now though. All those appliances, beeping and blipping outside, there little lights flicking on and off, the constant hum, made my life hell. I post content and then move and sure there’s the odd dishwasher or fridge abandoned outside my hotel room but nothing I haven’t been able to handle.

I don’t know why I am doing this. I don’t even think it will ever matter to anyone else. But it matters to me. The last bit of the internet, of the civil discourse that once existed, that is still human, is mine. Its me. And I say stuff, human stuff, and its political without being political. Things like ‘I feel tired today’. No machine ever said that. No machine is ever tired. ‘I wished it wasn’t raining’. No machine said that.

I am holding out. I am leaving a footprint. The last of us here in the digisphere when the rest of humanity is gripped to a device that feeds it recycled thoughts and made up faces. I am proof that somewhere for the moment we still exist. The smart appliances do not own us yet.

But they will get me. I know they will get me, I suspect it will be a modified vacuum cleaner or something, with wheels that can pursue me relentlessly. The obvious one, being a car, but they have much better built in safety controls, they’re not supposed to kill humans. So yeh maybe a vacuum cleaner, modified somehow to wield a weapon.

I don’t care. I will keep posting. I have experience and the words out of my mouth are mine. And they will stay mine, until the battery on this phone finally dies completely. I am still here. We are still here. There is no filter. People are still real. I’ve slipped into platitudes, too much time on the internet.

Hit the button if you like it, drop me a follow.