My Phone Doesn’t Know I’m Human
May 19, 2025
I keep scrolling and it feels like the sea has been drained and the coral’s still talking to me, but it’s made of plastic now. I know this isn’t a healthy way to live—counting hearts, watching reels flicker by like moths in a bug zapper, and yet my thumb is addicted to movement like it’s praying. The screen hums like an altar. I wonder if I’ve ever truly posted something alive.
90% of content will be AI-generated in a year. That’s a headline. Or a prophecy. Or maybe just math. I think about it while I’m brushing my teeth, while I’m on the train, while I’m lying on my floor at 3am with a hoodie over my face. That means everything—these captions, these so-called thoughts, these tears dressed up as memes—will be some faceless model's regurgitation of language. Like ghostwriting for ghosts.
And I can feel it already: the uncanny grammar, the overfamiliar tone, the way the laughter in the captions doesn’t reach the eyes because there are no eyes. Just prompt after prompt, fed into a pipe until it spits out what used to be called personality. Soon there will be no bad lighting. No blurry images. No run-on sentences typed in the middle of panic. Everything will be optimized for engagement, and none of it will mean anything. I’ll miss the weirdness. I already do.
Somewhere, someone is coding a “humans only” app. I can smell it. But by the time it hits the App Store, we’ll be too tired to migrate. Too used to the sugar high of synthetic novelty. The inertia of staying put is heavier than any outrage. It always has been.
I’m not trying to romanticize the mess of it all—but maybe I am. Because I’m grieving in advance. I’m mourning a version of the internet that felt like a hallway where I might bump into someone crying or confessing or singing off-key. Now it feels like a museum where all the exhibits talk back, but none of them have blood in their mouths. I miss the blood.
I don’t know what comes next. Maybe the pendulum swings back. Maybe we all unplug and touch grass and laugh with people without thinking about how it would look on the grid. Maybe IRL becomes sacred again. Or maybe we just keep making fake people talk to fake people and call it connection. Maybe we all just take off our masks.
All I know is this: If this is the last stretch of internet where human voices still echo, I’m glad I got to hear them. And I’m glad I got to speak. Even if no one’s listening anymore.