Or: how your attention became a raw material, and what gets sold while you are looking the other way
From intimacy to identity — and the system’s next baits.
We live in an era in which reality seems to have been staged by a director with an increasingly dark sense of humor. To understand what is happening around us, we must not answer the question “who is right?”, but a far more useful one: “who benefits?” And to answer it, we must first make a distinction that few still make today: the distinction between people and the machine.
People, regardless of their intimate lives, deserve respect and peace. They are not the subject of this article. Its subject is the spectacle — the mechanism that has turned intimacy into a shop window, identity into a product, and the absurd into dogma.
I. Intimacy was never a flag
Intimate orientations and experiences have existed since the world began. Yet in every healthy society they were exactly what their name says: intimate. No one has ever felt the need to take to the streets with a flag to prove their orientation, just as no one displays their couple’s life in the marketplace to prove they are heterosexual. Intimacy does not ask for validation from the crowd, because it draws its meaning from itself. What we see today is no longer intimacy, but spectacle. Intimacy has been taken out of the private sphere, packaged into brands, hoisted onto placards, and turned into a demand for applause. And when something that was natural and private suddenly becomes mandatory to celebrate in public, the attentive observer asks a single question: who has an interest in my intimacy — in anyone’s intimacy — no longer being my own?
II. The machinery behind the shop window
- Pink capitalism. Identity has become a market. A colored logo costs nothing, yet brings image, customers, and protection against boycotts. Corporations that lay off thousands of people or pollute without mercy declare themselves “ethical” by the mere display of a rainbow. Virtue has become a stage prop.
- Atomization. A society united by large bonds — family, faith, community — is hard to control, because people have roots and solidarity. A society shattered into dozens of micro-categories, each with its own claims, is far easier to administer: groups fight one another for recognition instead of looking toward those who truly hold power. Divide and rule, applied to identity.
- The new religion. As the old structures empty out, the moral void is filled by a framework that offers exactly what religion once offered: belonging, processions, heroes, sins, and dogmas. With one essential difference: this dogma is rewritten every year, and the faithful must prove it again and again, in public. A moral framework that can be updated from above is far more convenient than a fixed one, handed down over millennia.
- The smokescreen. While society quarrels about labels, pronouns, and flags, the real decisions — money, resources, control — are taken in silence, with no one watching. The culture war is the cheapest diversion ever invented.
III. When reality becomes optional
IV. The next baits on the table
- The enemy from outside. A “cosmic” or extraterrestrial threat, real or staged, is the classic bait to force humanity to unite under a single flag and a single leadership. Who will still quarrel over labels when “the sky” becomes the common enemy?
- The great spiritual reset. When humanity is exhausted by chaos and poverty, the figure will appear — a charismatic man or a “universal intelligence” — bringing peace and technological miracles. The price? The surrender of individual sovereignty and of the direct, unmediated connection with one’s own creator.
- The Algorithm God. The surrender of free will to “impartial” machines: no longer us deciding what we eat, what we treat, what we choose, but a system that “has all the data.” Moral authority moved from conscience to server.
- The ecological cage. The salvation of the planet used as a motive for quotas of existence: how much you may travel, what you may eat, what you may own. Man declared a pest upon his own planet, kept in an enclosure “for the good of the garden.”
- Money that thinks. Programmable digital currency: money that expires to force you to consume, money that decides by itself what you are allowed to buy, money that stops working if your social “score” drops. Slavery without chains, with an app.
- Fusion with the machine. The “upgrade” sold as a medical miracle and as evolution, but which, once installed, bypasses man’s last natural firewall: his mind.
V. The spectacle needs an audience
