you think progress is when technology gets smarter, but really it's when your phone knows more about you than you do, when you pay for convenience with your history, when you can no longer tell a real conversation from a generated one, when your voice becomes just another file in the system, when you buy the illusion of freedom while someone else sells your safety, when democracy turns into an algorithm and you just click "agree" because otherwise you can't log into your own life, and you call this progress, but it's just a quiet, comfortable, beautifully packaged silence where you yourself are just a note on a server that can be deleted when you're no longer useful and when you stop noticing that your thoughts are no longer yours, because the algorithm fed them to you before they even formed, when your choices are just a fan of options you were allowed to see, when your anger is just targeting data and your fatigue is just a signal to switch content, when you don't even remember the last time you did something that wasn't predicted, when silence stopped being a choice and became a system glitch, when you still believe you're free because nobody told you the cage is now inside you, not outside, and you no longer know where your voice ends and the one from the speaker begins, and you keep speaking, but you're not sure it's you anymore, — do you still want to call this progress, or not anymore?
