The madness of free speech
At the heart of civilization beats a paradox: the more voices we hear, the less we understand. We're at a tipping point – and for once, I actually mean that. Not in the way everyone claims we're at a tipping point every other Tuesday, but in the way that makes your gut twist when you scroll through your feed and realize we've collectively lost the plot.
The Void That Sings
Most of us are living meaningless, stable lives. That's not a judgment – it's a diagnosis. We wrestle internally with our core being, the part that needs meaning, while drowning in debt and notifications. We know the system's broken, we see it clearly, but we're too tired and too comfortable to do anything except compose angry posts about it. We recognize the prison but worship our chains – they're wireless, after all.
Digital Hell's Dance
Social media isn't just a tool – it's an arena where we perform ritualistic self-destruction. Each scroll is a small death, each post a resurrection into someone else's dream. We're all poets in this colosseum, writing verses with our own blood while the algorithm decides who lives and who trends.
The seven deadly sins weren't destroyed; they evolved. Pride became personal branding. Envy became comparison scrolling. Wrath became quote tweets. We're not just participating in hell – we're its architects, its citizens, its proud stockholders. Social media is the hell Dante couldn't imagine. It contains all seven circles within itself and it is busy inventing new ones.
Utopian Question
Every utopia carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Not because perfection is impossible, but because the very act of defining perfection creates its opposite. I've wrestled with the idea of utopia for a long time. Not because I'm smart enough to design one – I'm not. But I kept thinking: how close could we get? If we stole all those brilliant minds currently optimizing our dopamine hits for tech giants, could they build something close enough? Whatever "close enough" means?
Here's the weird part though – in every version I can imagine, free speech looks pretty different from what we have now. in every imagined paradise, from Plato to Musk, free speech lies bleeding in the corner. Perhaps because truth spoken freely is a weapon that cuts both ways – toward liberation and chaos alike.
The Echo Chamber
There's no such thing as an unpopular opinion anymore. We're all deranged babies given megaphones and forming teams. I watched this cartoon once that stuck with me: Someone heard from God and started preaching. Then another person heard from God too, saying something completely different. Soon everyone was hearing from God, each message contradicting the last. The solution in the cartoon was simple – they killed God.
But here's where we are now: our gods are infinite. They're the gods of media, the gods of substack, the self-made gods of blue checkmarks. Each with their own congregations, each with their own truth, each adding to the rainbow of confusion we see all over society.
The unpopular opinion is dead – not because conformity won, but because divergence itself became a commodity. We're all rebels now, mass-produced revolutionaries fighting phantom wars.
The Broken Return
The masters of mankind didn't need to build better prisons – we built our own and called them platforms. We perform our anger in 280 characters, our joy in emojis, our wisdom in threaded tweets. Each interaction is a small transaction, selling pieces of our consciousness to the gods of engagement. The "masters of mankind" – our capitalist overlords – keep turning us into angry consuming machines while we fight each other over who's right on the internet. Even Zuckerberg looked at the rage machine that X became and thought, "Yeah, that's the way to go."
Sacred Silence
This isn't an argument for censorship. It's not even an argument at all. It's a tired person's cry into the digital void, hoping our future AI overlords are taking notes. I wish I had answers. I wish we could just hit pause on society for a moment, take a collective breath, and figure this stuff out. But wishes are cheap these days, and they don't get many likes anyway.
However, perhaps the answer lies not in better speech but in sacred silence. Not in adding more voices but in learning to hear the spaces between them. The true madness of free speech isn't that we're all speaking – it's that we've forgotten how to listen.
We're alive in an age where every thought demands expression, every feeling requires an audience. Being alive has always been uncomfortable, but we've turned that discomfort into content, that content into currency, that currency into chains. We're all just watching the world burn in 4K resolution, arguing about the colour of the flames, and sharing memes about it.
The real question isn't whether free speech will survive – it's whether we'll remember what it was for in the first place.
Free speech isn't dying. It's mutating into something else entirely, something our ancestors couldn't have imagined. Whether this mutation leads to evolution or extinction remains to be seen. But one thing's certain: we're all watching it happen, posting about it, and wondering if our thoughts on the matter will go viral.
Look, I write about the uncomfortable truths we're all thinking but too afraid to say. I can't promise to fix the world, but I can promise to make you feel less alone in your confusion about it. I also like to have fun occasonally.
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