Man in a Feedback Loop
Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe
At first, he was curious—
a soft-bellied skeptic,
the kind who read footnotes for pleasure
and believed irony could save him from ideology.
He scrolled like an archaeologist of opinion,
brushing dust from data,
turning possibilities over in his palm.
But algorithms love a pattern.
And he became one.
Layer by layer,
his mind began to compact.
Sediment of sameness settled in his skull—
thin strata of confirmation,
hardened by repetition,
compressed by certainty.
He stopped reading for meaning
and started reading for mirrors.
Once, he debated for understanding.
Now he debated for dominance,
his arguments rehearsed until
they gleamed with the polish of doctrine.
He mistook familiarity for truth,
the way a fossil mistakes pressure for permanence.
By the fourth epoch,
his curiosity was extinct.
Empathy — eroded.
Doubt — fossilized into rhetoric.
He called it awakening,
but it was sedimentation:
the slow burial of a once-porous mind.
He began to see the world in binaries—
believers and betrayers,
facts and heresies,
light and the shadows cast by his own projection.
The feed rewarded his fervour,
praising his certainty
like an altar boy praises the echo in a cathedral.
His language grew calcified.
He no longer spoke,
he cited.
He no longer thought,
he pronounced.
He no longer saw the screen—
only scripture,
written in pixels and rage.
And when the mirror finally cracked,
when reality intruded
like a fault line through his doctrine,
he didn’t bleed.
He flaked.
Dust of conviction scattering across the feed.
Another relic
of a man who mistook his reflection
for revelation.
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