A long, long time ago,
Vaguely, I remember static pages filled with GIFs and style…
And each new CSS advance,
Would serve a site and not a trance,
And agency would linger, for a while…
But corporate interest made us shiver,
With every feature apps deliver...
Doomscrolls on your iPads,
From trolling farms and comrades
For all the folks they’ve classified,
A tailored discourse amplified...
An algorithmic genocide…
When cash and code collide!
We were singing why, why should our agency die?
If we let the folks at Meta build their own BCI?
We can’t opt out and we’re compelled to comply,
As we kiss our self-direction goodbye.
(Kiss your self-direction goodbye)
Do you write HTTP?
As conceived by the great Tim Berners-Lee?
If your client tells you so.
Now do you believe your moral soul
Will save you from each clicking hole?
Will your cyber-ethics let you raise dough?
Well prognoses now grow rather grim,
For folks in Chrome and folks in Vim,
Surveillance tools suffuse,
To manipulate and abuse,
When every widget leads into the muck,
Every browsing fool’s a sitting duck,
On data lakes patrolled by Zuck,
When cash and code collide…
We were singing why, why should our agency die?
If we let the folks at Meta build their own BCI?
We can’t opt out and we’re compelled to comply,
As we kiss our self-direction goodbye.
(Kiss your self-direction goodbye)
While the next years are a great unknown,
Besieging kings we cannot dethrone,
Who yields now to which decree?
When the pics appear on the smartphone screen,
With their well-timed hits of dopamine
It’s a new lifetime guarantee…
With executives all world-renowned,
Shirts buttoned-up, souls broken down
Is congress unconcerned?
What their machines have learned?
And while culture wars will jump their sharks,
The senate spouts their canned remarks,
And Sorkin builds his story arcs
When cash and code collide
We were singing why, why should our agency die?
If we let the folks at Meta build their own BCI?
We can’t opt out and we’re compelled to comply,
As we kiss our self-direction goodbye.
(Kiss your self-direction goodbye)
Lonely fellers living in their cellars,
4chans, wokes, and fortune tellers,
The nameless hoards of broader castes,
No norms either hard or fast,
Some cancelled, chased, and some harassed...
The affected, and afflicted, and out-classed
Now the venom from this cyber womb
Threatens discourse to consume,
Boardrooms perform their dance
‘Bout their shares of the circumstance,
From the valley to the greenest field,
Documents leaked that once concealed,
The power to which we once appealed
When cash and code collide
We were singing why, why should our agency die?
If we let the folks at Meta build their own BCI?
We can’t opt out and we’re compelled to comply,
As we kiss our self-direction goodbye.
(Kiss your self-direction goodbye)
I met AI with clearer views
And I asked it for some local news
It returned the time of day.
I walked into a local store,
Where I read the paper years before,
But the storefront, just a query and array…
And raging on my mind and screen,
An old affront, the new vaccine...
The browser stored my token,
My feed is thus bespoken…
And so I read, bewitched, engrossed,
Each sober fear, each drunken post,
A tangled web, a toxic host.
When cash and code collide…
We were singing why, why should our agency die?
If we let the folks at Meta build their own BCI?
We can’t opt out and we’re compelled to comply,
As we kiss our self-direction goodbye.
(Kiss your self-direction goodbye)
(I'll keep writing more parodies, essays, and snarky commentary on the world we all inhabit, hope you'll enjoy!)
You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: typefully.com/Evan_Coop/99J2J2M