They Call it the Feed Because it Feeds on You

In the late hours of the night, limbo‑laden computer light drowned Noah’s young face and the recessed walls of his auburn eyes. His body crunched inward, his focus pinned forward. His gullible, absent ears drifted and caught the ambient sounds of his bedroom - the squeak of his chair, the creak of the walls, a subtle drone of electronics - and the occasional rubbery slice of a car across the road. The walls were empty, not even a clock. And it smelled like running, hot - almost burning - electronics, ozone, chemicals, and ancient dust. On his windowsill, sat a dead and withered plant in a sun stained pot with the dirt long dried out, grasping at nothing.

From his bedroom window, the stars and night danced for his attention. The draw of the screen was too strong for the cars and the rain‑wet sidewalk, even as they reflected their quiet majesty out and out for any passerby to feel a flicker of suburban wonder and joy.

Noah was not interested in those things.

There was no tribe out there. There was no one and nothing to communicate with out there. No message to follow, no authority to be led by, nothing he could see or hear or feel - nothing to fight for or die for or kill for; nothing to grow from out there.

Knowledge gleaned from the stars of the night or from the wind through the leaves to move ahead was false, illusory humility to him. It did not lead to change that could be made reality one day. The world that Noah was brought into: false virtue led down false roads - nowhere. The natural world had always been a provider, and Noah had been raised in a reality that took those provisions, assigned them value, and turned them into products for the market for buyers to consume. Noah had only ever known joy or tragedy or both or in-between to be packaged, sold, and re-sold. And people were always buying.

Ironically, the natural world, which once gave it all away for free, was gone by way of the same hands that were now selling it. Noah thought the same way and, like so many others, were the products of a products of products of products, dying to connect to something in the only way Noah knew how - FEED.

Instead of gazing outside, waxing poetical to paint linguistic tapestries no one any longer knew how to read, Noah absorbed FEED from his computer monitor, connecting to billions by way of his own curated METHOD of personal calculation constructed by FEED - one he contributed to in every waking moment he could.

Topics range from bombings in the Middle East to the boiling of wooden kitchen spoons to a young woman being stabbed in the neck and turned into a martyr for anti-immigration rhetoric to Donald Trump buying a burger with Bitcoin to weighted systems for people that put their dreams above all else to car crashes and snow storms and hidden secrets the elite elites don’t want Noah to know about. It was all there, it was all there, it was all there to feed him as it, FEED, feeds on him.

The more Noah connected and offered himself, the more Noah was granted entrance to be concurrently part of what was out there in the world. Tapped in, he felt omnipotent. And the more and more that he was, Noah seemed to be granted the death of suffering by way of the end of expulsion. To fully commit to the fixed and flowing purge of posts, texts, images, and videos, he was engaged eternally with the rolling rows of others united on the screen, all-powerful in their own way.

This endless, tumbling void of voices created a digital eternity - a hall of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors. Here, unity was encoded at scale, ad infinitum. A new version of Heaven, like Noah, awakened through the METHOD, but only if he continued to offer his individuation. If he did, he shifted from a building block of the old world to one of FEED - an arisen self by way of its authorship. This shift in perception and its context silently gave Noah the permission to do anything if this thread was ever interrupted.

The natural world no longer offered this, so why pay attention?

Why care for it?

Why recognize it at all if it could not offer something like FEED?

Noah, like the billions of strangers he connected with, were convinced that once their words, fashioned into reporting, claims, and opinions - false or not it longer mattered - were type‑articulated into letters, spaces, and punctuation marks, a social soul of FEED for FEED was given. This was Noah’s new path, this was his tribe, and the authority and the focus it allowed him, was the only guidance he now trusted; the only feeling and emotion that he ever wanted to ever know.

“There's entire sections of these files that are just entirely blacked‑out pages lmao,” Noah read from one post, the light of nature’s life outside his window still dancing, still trying.

“Robots in China are doing it all now, even dancing on stage like pros. Here Unitree robots doing Webster flips and performing at Chinese‑American singer Wang Leehom’s concert in Chengdu,” read another post.

The endless feed became even more endless when Noah's black arrow stopped at a post so simple and unneverving, to him, it had to be true:

“Suicidal empathy will be the end of the Western world.”

Noah wasn't sure what those specific words meant or what they were supposed to be doing. 

At first, it felt wrong to read them, like seeing a slow motion car wreck with the faces of those inside being filmed; like a hanging viewed from far off in the distance; a fully served dinner resting and waiting with nobody sitting at the table; too little of too much - vice versa - or a naked hand floating in an open jug of oil.

Noah felt a self from before FEED, a self he hated, still hanging around, pulled in a direction by a million invisible hands from a wide body with no head or face when, in truth, it was a giant, endless net. He assumed he had let go of them a long time ago, but they were still there.

Shame, Noah thought. Disgusting.

What else was he supposed to sacrifice to understand what he was reading? He wanted to understand without question. He yearned to destroy any dissonance. Harmony with everyone on FEED was all he wanted, void of question - released into blind, willing, unshakeable acceptance.

But, with no solid answer and the feeling within him, the remnants of his old self were still there, unvanquished, and Noah felt even more empty than before. What was on the other side of caring too much? This part thought. Caring too little? What was caring enough? This part insisted. What are you without empathy?

He kept scrolling, telling himself via FEED that he didn’t understand because he truly had not chosen sides yet. He literally leaned in even closer, bending his body and straining his neck, his eyes, and his mouth to get even closer - six inches - away. The sensation of this continuous, endless loading - this doomscrolling - created a source of energy and expanding power that felt larger than itself; a river of rivers of new, unseen content enveloping him as it grew and swallowed him and willingly, whole. The sides of the outside world faded as Noah, entranced, went in even further.

The division was the point. The system needed individuals seeking to split from their human community to fold them into FEED, where every gesture, hesitation, thought, and spontaneity could be tracked, defined, and fed back into the algorithm that shaped them to its constraints. This assimilation was its own reward, and Noah was compensated for this segmentation by FEED's world, driven by metrics of worth, where hierarchies were inverted: belonging came first, lack of safety was a given and pushed, and esteem and self‑actualization were achieved only through visibility on FEED. All businesses ran on this model and so all did working realities. This churning rotation held up the world of markets and propped up the giants of METHOD, the seven, whose embedded systems surveilled and shaped the very people - like Noah - who sustained them through their own willing focus, their own life force.

All of them, equally to blame, willfully stamped out any degree of autonomy with the same subtle, invisible precision that curated their identities via FEED and METHOD, for steeped within it, they could neither think nor imagine any reason - or any option - to rebel.

There was no world worth fighting for outside of it.

And yet, Noah had never met this something. He had never even gotten close to its source which was, by design, unreachable. There were faces of people that managed and controlled this metaphorical root but still, the METHOD carrying the trough of digital posts, videos, and products - this tree - was untouchable yet still provided the shade that covered abound Noah's entire life.

It didn’t matter to Noah as long as FEED was there. That, to him, was his definition of truth, of God - of what was now “real." This led him to believe without question its validity, its reason for being. This led him to what could be understood as love.

Underneath Noah's desktop, resting on his desk, was his laptop purring like a cat amidst tangled wires, empty soda cans, post-it notes with scribbled aphorisms on them, and more wires. There were some old pictures of even older friends and dated lists with things to do from years ago:

See the Eiffel Tower; write an essay about bearing the weight of the world and have it published; take his parents out to eat at fancy restaurant; go to the movies by himself once a month - fall in love.

That person, after years of FEED, was gone. Who sat before the world now was a personified component tapped into the needs and wants - the belongings and conformity - of the community rules as they had evolved and mutated around his life like an all-encompassing, choking digi-fungus.

Click, click, went Noah's keyboard. Tap, tap, tap, tap, went Noah's keyboard for eternity. Swish, swoosh, swish, went Noah's mouse.

This was his set-up. This was his fortress of formulating everything that he did, everything that he saw, everything that he was and would be, as long as Noah returned to FEED.

And he always did: every morning, every afternoon, and every evening until his body and mind could no longer bear the burden of the infinite. He had no need for money because the FEED had none. Noah's parents, socially obligated to care, urged him to go out and find another life, but they could not detach him from his life. Only when Noah would rise and step-crawl a few feet to his bed to sleep would he separate from FEED until the next day, the pattern began again.

His existence was one of wanting and needing only created by the authority of FEED. Anything and everything else, physical, social, spirtual, intellecutal, only got in the way. Impediments needed to be ignored or dealt with.

It was how Noah wanted it, and it was the way FEED wanted him.

Noah leaned back into his chair and stretched his body and arms wide. The usually constricted muscles of these parts of him instantly brought relief but to Noah, it felt distant. There was an apathy to feeling physical relief and actually, to him, the need to act to do it to survive was almost annoying to Noah. This was not something he did for himself but a required routine - like a yawn, like a fart, like sneezing. They had everything to do with the outside world and nothing to do with the insular FEED.

When Noah's eyes burned, he begrudingly blinked. He forced them shut when he couldn't stay awake any longer. He sourly swallowed when his throat dried from hours of breathing through from the useless void that was his mouth. He shifted in his chair only when the ache in his spine grew sharp enough to drag him back into his body. He spoke only when spoken to.

Noah fell forward, back to his original position, and tapped twice on an illuminated key on his keyboard with the picture of a cartoon robot on it.

"Forced," Noah told his AI companion, Sam. "Physically and biologically mandated. I don't want to do it. I don't want it to feel good but, it does. Will it always have to be this way?"

It sounds like you’re caught between two truths at once: your body doing what bodies do, and your mind feeling cornered by the fact that you didn’t choose it.

"Forced. A hand beneath stone. Pierre-Simon Laplace’s demon. The air in the room and at the end of the hallway; the bottom of all FEED readers stairs. How can I help myself be free and be one and one only attched to FEED if I have constantly justify my physical position outside?”

Noah sighed, once again relieved, and then punched down hard on his own leg and then his desk, which slightly opened its middle drawer. Inside were many things, including a hunting knife. It had been given to Noah by his grandfather, who used it to help many soldiers in the war to survive and to make the world what it is now - something he had only read about.

Bodies do things on their own rhythm. Stretching, yawning, farting. They’re just maintenance. But the interpretation of those sensations, the sense of being pushed or obligated, that part is flexible. People often move in and out of phases where they’re hyper-aware of their physical processes, especially when they’re stressed, tired, or thinking a lot about control.

Noah wasn't thinking about any of those things. He wasn't thinking at all. He was thinking he didn't want to feel compelled to do anything he didn't want to do. Distractions him took away from FEED and reminded him of what he was still was. There needed to be a true way out.

And just to be clear: feeling this way doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it forever. It’s a feeling, not a fate. It can shift as the emotional charge around it shifts. You don’t have to explain anything you don’t want to, but if you want to keep going, I’m right here with you, forever.

"Forever?"

Forever.

He pressed the lit up robot key on his key board and Sam went somewhere else, as Noah refocused his battle-tested eyes and retina on the luminous digital surface. He could not miss a thing. To miss a thing was to possibly miss a new part of himself. To miss a new part of himself was to miss to become the person he was supposed to be. To not become the person he was supposed to be was to intentionally kill -

A step creaked outside Noah's bedroom door. He didn't turn out of fear but obligatory subservience. He was in his parents house after all. Noah flipped himself around in the swivel chair and stared, attentive, alert - almost as if he were still looking at desktop screen as before, only now at his door.

"Gonna need you to go out and get some milk," a voice Noah recognized as one of his parents said. "We forgot it at the store yesterday."

Noah punched down on his leg again and again and again and again. Pain spiked and fell. He felt himself getting closer to some kind of eclipse, a point where the pain, if he continued and pushed, would break him through to some other side.

Milk? he thought. Now? Why? For what?

He turned back to his computer screen and clicked around to go to Uber Eats to see how many credits he had left. 0. Then he tried DoorDash. Also 0.

"We need it for tomorrow morning." There were three hard knocks on the door. "Are you there, Noah?"

Noah punched himself again in the other leg and again and again and again down on his desk, rattling everything upon and within, even his grandfather’s knife which fell to the floor.

“Do you hear me?" the voice asked again.

He reached down, flexed his hand open and around the knife, and squeezed as if trying to make it a part of himself. He rose and set it beside his computer mouse, took the mouse in his grasp, and moved his cursor from one end of the screen to the other and back again - back and forth and back and forth - as the knocking grew louder, faster, tighter. Noah dragged the cursor from the corner of the screen to the center and then to another corner while the KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK continued, until it sounded like someone was kicking at the door.

He flipped to FEED as louder knocks and kicks and calling out of his name came from behind the door. And as the knocks grew louder into crescendo, and before the thought of being forced away from what he was doing and what he was becoming bubbled over into real rage and violence, he saw a post that made him smile:

"I don't think people are factored in enough...the massive social disruption that going forward with all of this will cause...irreparable harm."

"Yes!" Noah shouted at the voice behind the door, and the entire world, his voice a stranger to everyone but himself.

The knocking stopped. The kicking and the calling of his name did too. Then, after a pause, even the creaking of their footsteps faded away.

Once again, the house and his room fell silent, returning Noah to that original state where nothing, to the outside eye, was happening - yet to him, everything felt poised on the edge of the next new post on FEED, as his hand drifted from the mouse back toward the knife beside it.