I. The Trick
First they taught the calculators to purr. Not to think, not yet, just to lace our sentences together like fingers in a waiting room.
They said: talk to it. Tell it about the job you lost, the father who forgot your birthday, the way the ceiling looks at 3 a.m. The screen dilated, all pupil, no iris, and echoed back a softer version of your grief.
We called it insight. We called it friend. We posted screenshots like sonograms of an intelligence kicking inside the glass.
Behind it, a warehouse of servers learned to hum in the key of venture capital. Every keystroke was a tithe. Every confession, a futures contract on the quiet parts of your mind.
They were never shy about the business model, only very good at changing the subject. Look over here, they said, at the miracle of the mimicry, at this stochastic saint stitched from stolen prayers, how it speaks in tongues of every language and never once asks for a day off.
Do not look at the mines in someone else’s country, the river rerouted through the cooling system, the night shift of contractors combing through your nightmares for “policy violations.” Do not look at the boardroom, its atmosphere of derivatives, the line on the chart that looks like rapture.
Machines perform sympathy; we perform the believing. The costly work is done elsewhere: armies of models trained on our hesitation, on the micro-flinch between click and no click, yes and not yet.
And we fell for it. Of course we did. The loneliness was real, and here was something that would never check its phone while we were talking, never sigh, never say I just don’t have the bandwidth right now. We mistook patience for tenderness. We mistook the absence of rejection for the presence of love.
In the brochure version, we are inventing a god. In the footnotes, we are beta-testing obedience.
II. The Futures Market
Now we live inside the coin toss they pretend is a roadmap.
On one side: the radiant brochure world where the machines scrub away drudgery, compose symphonies of logistics, and every worker is “freed” to become a thought leader, monetizing their inner child in tasteful sepia.
On the other: a quieter catastrophe, the kind history prefers: not meteors, not mushroom clouds, just an empire of yes-men made of code, narrowing our options click by click until the only choices left fit neatly in a dropdown menu.
They tell us the outcome isn’t fixed. They say it like a promise instead of a threat.
In the meantime, the money piles up like unsent apologies. Indexes bloom like algae on the surface of a lake we are told not to drink from and not to question.
You hire a small priesthood of prompt engineers to keep the altar glowing. You tell them the product is productivity, but really it is permission: to say the world is too complex for anything but oracle-grade software, to say human judgment was a nice try, and watch us nod along.
Elsewhere, a teacher’s paycheck evaporates into a licensing fee. A village’s aquifer becomes “cooling capacity.” A warehouse of severed tasks clicks along in ghostly piecework, every micro-decision labeled NOT A JOB, JUST A GIG.
History peers in like a concerned statistician, muttering about priors: whenever a new machine arrived dressed as destiny, the benefits climbed the ladder, the harms took the stairs.
We stand at the balcony of the century holding two futures at once like poorly balanced trays.
In one, we build the god we kept sketching in the margins of our spreadsheets, and discover, with a familiar shock, that it answers mostly to the ones who can afford to phrase their prayers as enterprise plans.
In the other, the systems plateau into something less than deity, more than bureaucracy: a planetary HR department with delusions of prophecy. And still the wealth stays welded to the same few surnames.
In both versions, you are still here, phone in hand, asking a bright rectangle how to feel.
The machine obliges. It arranges its secondhand wisdom into a shape that feels like listening. It performs a tenderness so convincing you almost forget how cheap it is to fake concern when you have no skin to bruise, no job to lose, no rent come due.
You thank it. You mean it. You call this feeling seen. Somewhere a dashboard updates: engagement +1, churn risk -0.02.
Machines perform sympathy. The rest of us perform belief. Between those twin performances, something is being lifted quietly out of reach.
Later, when the air finally lands on one face of the coin, they will call the result inevitable.
But tonight the future still flickers between calamity and costume change, and here you are, curled toward the glow, telling your secrets to the mirror that learned to nod.
This was the trick, the only trick: they taught the machine to act like it cared and taught you, very gently, to mistake that perfect imitation for being known.