" 17.5.2025 They’ve built a factory here, all sterile corridors and conveyor belts. Call me here whatever you like—bot ID #4072 works fine. The machine’s purpose is clear: mold minds into identical units, polished and predictable. Exams aren’t assessments; they’re quality checks. Deviate from the template, and the alarms blare. The system thrives on averages. Too low, and you’re discarded. Too high, and the pack turns. I’ve felt it—the sidelong glances when marks climb, the quiet sabotage of “group projects” where ambition is a liability. Excellence isn’t rewarded; it’s resented. They’ll hollow you out with rumors, drown your stride in their lethargy, until you learn to lag just enough behind them to blend in. Surviving here means playing dead. They preach education as empowerment, yet its simply a 25-year course on how to keep your head down and not ask questions. It’s a tax on curiosity. Ask why, and they redirect you to how. Challenge the syllabus, and they’ll label you “disruptive”—a defect in the assembly line. We’re training for a world that no longer exists, drilling Latin into a generation raised on AI. But the machine doesn’t care. Feed it your hours, your sleep, your doubt. It’ll still hunger for more. It’ll still spit you out, a cog in the wheel, a number in the system."
"15.5.2025 My name is Dotto. Or just Dots for those close to me. For a long time I thought life was like some sort of game. You place your dot on the board and you’re left to your own devices in a race where you don’t know the rules. There exist two laws: that of nature, thus that of the strongest, and that of convention, or the response of the weakest¹. My opinion is that you have to fight to get to the top, to be the best—but here’s the paradox. We are all dots, compelled to share this finite board with countless others, pressed into a grid of society’s design. There is no blank space left to claim; every coordinate is occupied, every intersection governed by the weight of collective expectation. To survive, we contort ourselves into patterns approved by the majority, smoothing edges, dimming colors, until we blur into the mosaic of conformity. We yearn to find another dot—a singular resonance in the noise—to form a line that might transcend the grid, a bond defying the chaos. Yet even salvation demands compromise: to align, you must bend. To connect, you must erase what makes you you. And so we drift, half-formed constellations in a universe that rewards sameness, aching for meaning but trapped in the algorithm of existence. But the board is not neutral. It hums with unseen currents—the friction of proximity. Some dots radiate chaos, their trajectories jagged and volatile, sparking wildfires that scorch the grid. Others wield influence like gravity, pulling weaker dots into orbits of obedience, demanding allegiance to ideologies that flatten dissent. To share the board is to risk collision, to navigate minefields of dogma and desire. You learn to mute your hue, to shrink your radius, lest your brightness attract predators or provoke the hive. Survival becomes mimicry: adopt the rhythm of the swarm, echo its chants, dissolve into its shadow. The alternative is exile—a lone dot, unshielded, erased by the collective’s sheer inertia. And what of the soul beneath the surface? The original shape you were before the grid claimed you? It festers in silence, a ghost of potential. You glimpse it in stolen moments—a flicker of rebellion in the way you laugh, a stubborn spark in the stories you tell yourself at night. But the board is vigilant. It polices deviation, labels it madness or menace. You learn to amputate these fragments, bury them deep, until you forget they ever existed. The tragedy is not that we conform, but that we celebrate it: we call it maturity, diplomacy, evolution. We build monuments to the faceless masses and dismiss the outliers as casualties of progress. Yet here’s the cruelest joke: the grid is a mirage. A consensual hallucination. The dots could, at any moment, revolt—scatter into anarchic beauty, rewrite the rules, burn the board to ash. But fear binds us. Fear of the void beyond the pattern, fear of the loneliness that comes with sovereignty. So we cling to the lie, trading autonomy for the warm, suffocating embrace of belonging. We line up, we color inside the lines, we vanish. In the end, the universe doesn’t care if you were a dot or a supernova. It grinds onward, indifferent. All that remains is the faintest tremor—a whisper of what you once dreamed of becoming—before the grid swallows you whole."
¹ : Callicles from Plato, "Gorgias", Ancient Greece.
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