The altar once asked for reverence. The castle once asked for loyalty. The platform asks for speed.
Create, creator. Faster. Louder. More.
The voice is insistent, its demand endless. But in the noise of metrics and performance, a different truth still waits.
Do not confuse reach with resonance. The number of eyes upon your work is not the same as the depth of its impact. A poem read in silence by one grieving soul may carry more weight than a thousand “likes."
Do not mistake metrics for meaning. The count of shares, comments, and clicks cannot measure the tremor of recognition in another human heart.
The algorithm is empty, not evil. It has no altar, no flame, no silence. Its appetite is endless, but its meaning is void. It can feed on what you make, but it cannot bless it.
“Your silence lowers our revenue," it whispers. “Post again. Quicker now."
But you are not made to feed a machine. You are not made to be content. You are made to create. To shape the unseen into word, image, song. To let art outlast the moment, even when the moment does not applaud.
In the 19th century, the player piano promised endless music. Roll the paper, strike the keys, repeat. No human hand required. Notes without soul. Sound without silence.
The algorithm is its heir.
Like the player piano, the feed repeats endlessly. A song of scrolling, a chorus of recycled images. Nothing is ever finished; it is only looped. The machine does not know when to stop, because stopping is loss. Silence is loss.
Art, once seasonal, becomes perpetual. The scroll is the roll. The thumb is the pedal. And the artist is caught between creation and automation.
The player piano gave us music without musicians. The algorithm gives us art without artists.
The question remains: does repetition preserve, or strip away? Does it democratize, or hollow out?
Perhaps the answer is in the pause,the silence the algorithm cannot generate. A silence only the maker can choose.
The platform hums a sleepless tune,
Its voice is cold and thin.
It tells the maker, “Post again,
Your silence is a sin."
It does not care for truth or song,
for prayer or patient art;
It only counts the restless clicks,
The beating of a heart.
The feed repeats, the cycle turns,
a loop without release;
no grace, no pause, no holy hush,
no covenant of peace.
But still the maker holds the pen,
the brush, the voice, the role,
and with one pause can break the chain,
and save the human soul.
The algorithm never sleeps.
It doesn’t pray. It doesn’t pause.
It watches. Measures. Predicts.
“You stopped scrolling for 2.4 seconds. We noticed."
Content here is not sacred. It is currency. The feed is not a gallery hung with meaning, but a granary, harvested, stored, and redistributed for maximum yield. Your posts are not offerings but crops; your pauses are pests to be managed.
Feeling something? Good. Rage, grief, desire, it doesn’t matter. The machine doesn’t care what you feel, only that you keep feeling. For feeling is fuel. Feeling is the metric.
The platform does not want art that endures. It wants content that performs. A story that disappears in twenty-four hours is just as valuable, perhaps more so, than a crafted work meant to last a century. Ephemera feeds the scroll. Permanence clogs it.
And still the voice insists:
“Keep moving. Keep posting. Don’t stop. Silence is failure. Slowness is death."
It does not know reverence. It cannot hold awe. The platform’s voice is not the voice of a muse, it is the hum of a machine that confuses motion with meaning.
Memory and the Machine
The cathedral once held memory in stone and glass. Stories were painted into vaults and windows, so light itself became a scripture. Memory was sacred, slow, and costly, a legacy of colour and craft meant to endure centuries.
The machine holds memory differently. It is stored in servers, endlessly retrievable, endlessly editable. But here, memory is not holy, it is monetized. What was once a sacred archive is now raw data.
Your past is catalogued, timestamped, and sold back to you.
“You liked this once. Would you like to see it again?"
The feed resurrects old posts like ghosts. Photographs rise without your bidding, anniversaries return with uncanny insistence. What the cathedral once carried as continuity, the algorithm serves up as repetition.
Identity becomes fragmented, reduced to a trail of clicks and impressions. Who you were is always resurfacing, but only as a prompt for more engagement.
The machine does not preserve memory for reverence; it recycles it for revenue.
“You were you in 2017. You are still you now. Would you like to compare?"
In this endless loop, memory is no longer a flame in stained glass. It is a shadow projected on the feed.
Influence and Illusion
Influence once meant presence: the troubadour in the square, the preacher at the pulpit, the artist in the studio. It was tied to voice, to nearness, to witness. Now, influence has been flattened into numbers. Follower counts. View tallies. Hearts and stars.
Your audience is vast but unreachable. A million “followers" may sit in the wings, yet you cannot see their eyes. Their applause is silent, their disapproval invisible, reduced to metrics on a dashboard.
The algorithm tells you this is intimacy. That every notification is a bond, every comment a connection. But what it offers is not relationship, it is simulation.
“We’ve tagged your dream. We’ve catalogued your pause."
Your image is adjusted to please, your words trimmed to fit. Filters smooth the lines, captions shorten the thought. What remains is an optimized version of yourself, a mask crafted by machine learning.
And still, the artist asks: Do they love me? Do they see me? The algorithm does not answer. It only serves another reel, another suggestion, another illusion of closeness.
Influence is no longer about what you inspire. It is about how long you hold someone’s thumb to glass.
FLM (Mari Week 3 August 2025)