Cora didn’t remember when the feed had become the world. It had been gradual, a slow erosion of the space between real and digital, so seamless that no one had noticed. At first, the apps were just distractions, a way to pass the time, a place to see what friends were doing, to laugh at mindless videos. But the distractions never stopped. They grew sharper, more specific, more tailored to what she wanted before she even knew she wanted it.
The videos were short, designed for instant gratification—a puppy doing a trick, a dance challenge, a clever joke, a political meme so easy to digest it barely required thought. She scrolled without thinking. It was automatic, instinctive. The flashing headlines, the looping videos, the rage-inducing clips clipped just short enough to keep the full context from settling in. It was effortless. It was engaging. It was everywhere.
The algorithm learned. It saw what made her stop, what made her hesitate, what made her linger a fraction of a second longer. It fed her more of the same, shaping her reality in quiet, imperceptible ways. She didn’t question it. Why would she? It was just entertainment, a reflection of what people were talking about, nothing more.
But she had noticed something. A shift.
It was subtle at first. A friend had lost his job after an old post resurfaced, something he had barely remembered writing. A woman she followed had disappeared overnight. Her account still existed, but her words no longer reached anyone. The platform had not banned her, not officially. They had simply stopped showing her to others. A quiet erasure. A slow suffocation.
A man she followed had spoken out, criticizing something he wasn’t supposed to. The next day, he was gone. Not officially silenced, just… gone, his content no longer appearing, his words lost in the void.
This was smoother, invisible, designed to feel like a choice. But it was not a choice.
People learned quickly. It was not like the old days, where censorship was blunt and obvious, where the government came knocking on doors and dragged people into the night. No, this was more efficient. People learned to monitor themselves. They adjusted. They rewrote their own thoughts before they ever spoke them. They adapted.
Cora caught herself doing it too. Before she posted, before she commented, before she even spoke in real life, she hesitated. Would this be taken the wrong way? Would this be flagged? Would this lower her engagement, lower her ranking, lower her place in the system? She wasn’t sure when she had started thinking like this, but now the hesitation was always there.
She had tried, once, to step away from it all. She deleted the apps, cut herself off from the noise. The silence was unbearable. The world was moving without her, the conversations still happening, the trends shifting, and she was no longer a part of them. Outside the feed, she was nothing. She saw the people who had left, those who refused to engage. They faded away, invisible, irrelevant.
She reinstalled everything the next day.
It was easier to be watched than to disappear.
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