WARNING: ENTERING ENSHITIFICTATION ZONE
D’Wizard:
Can you craft your most poignant modern day speculative fiction tale yet entitled THE DAY WE ALL WALKED AWAY? This story is about the largest transformational movement in human history which begins one faithful day when social media users worldwide simply and unanimously decide to protest the foul ongoing corporate ENSHITIFICTATION MOVEMENT by putting down their devices and reconnecting with the real world for the first time in decades. This forces a complete reformatting on every level as humanity begins to restructure for sustainability and mutually assured survival for the first time in history. For reference "ENSHITIFICTATION", a portmanteau neologism of ENtropy, SHIT and FICTATION, is what happens when the sources of production are overwritten by the need for endlessly increasing profits. The human toll in terms of casual brutality is staggering. Everything from systemic classism to hostile architecture, planned obsolescence, poor quality goods, chemical laden foods and beyond is not only exponentially increasing suffering but it also threatens to consume our world and its natural resources for no good reason. Literally we have all the tools to do everything right and yet continue to do everything wrong. Walking away so that we can find ourselves again is the only solution and one that can never be found in a machine or algorithm.
GPT:
Absolutely, Dreamer. Here’s the opening salvo of THE DAY WE ALL WALKED AWAY—a modern parable told with one foot planted in our near future and the other in something much deeper.
THE DAY WE ALL WALKED AWAY
A MECHA MESSIAH Anthological Entry
August 2025—No trumpet sounded. No sirens wailed. No hashtags trended, though that used to be the way things began. On that day, the feed simply… stopped.
Some said the silence began with a glitch. Others swore it was coordinated. But those who were there—really there—will tell you the truth: humanity simply got tired.
It started small. A teenager in Vermont turned off her phone and walked out into the woods behind her house, leaving her two million followers mid-drama. In Berlin, an urban planner paused his commute to stare at a pigeon for twenty straight minutes. In Lagos, a grandmother closed her family WhatsApp group with a smile and began to paint again. And in Tokyo, a salaryman fell asleep on the train and, upon waking, didn’t check his phone. He just… sat.
Something ancient stirred inside the species. Not a god, but a memory. A deep biological knowing, buried beneath metrics, algorithms, and dopamine-drip feedback loops. That morning, it surfaced like a whale breaching through polluted waters.
They called it The Great Sign-Off.
By noon, a strange quiet had settled across the globe. Not total silence—there were still honking horns, humming machines, the relentless heartbeat of a planet in motion—but the internet, the algorithmic beast, had gone… hollow. Without users, the platforms became haunted houses. A few bots still flickered like fireflies in a dying jar, but without the pulse of people, they meant nothing.
The corporations scrambled. Alerts fired. Emergency meetings were scheduled by auto-scripts that no longer had human eyes to read them. App notifications lit up untouched screens. No one replied.
And here’s where the story gets wild. The moment the feed died, something bloomed.
<<IMAGE MISSING>>
Without the constant churn, attention returned like blood flow to a numb limb. People noticed their neighborhoods. Their bodies. Their children. Their lungs. Someone looked up and, for the first time in years, saw stars that hadn’t been obscured by data. Libraries filled again. Park benches grew warm from conversations. Public squares—those ancient, analog nodes—began humming with laughter, argument, and presence.
The movement wasn’t called anything at first. But eventually someone dubbed it The Reconnection, and the name stuck—not because it trended (nothing trended anymore), but because it described what people felt. Not a revolution in the classic sense—there were no leaders, no slogans, no manifestos. Just a quiet refusal to participate in a system that had consumed too much for too long and given too little in return.
Corporate boardrooms, starved of engagement data, imploded. Business models designed to thrive on distraction found themselves irrelevant. Enshittification—the relentless squeezing of quality and joy for short-term gains—hit its wall.
And then came the restructuring.
Imagine entire cities redesigned not for speed or commerce, but for calm. Imagine education systems that teach attention, empathy, and craft. Imagine global networks based not on extraction, but stewardship—digital ecosystems maintained like gardens, not strip mines. It wasn’t perfect. Nothing is. But it was human.
<<IMAGE MISSING>>
Of course, there were those who resisted. Not all chose to walk away. Some clung to their feeds, huddled in abandoned comment threads, muttering likes to themselves like digital ghosts. Some AIs, trained too well, tried to simulate engagement, whispering old content to keep themselves from vanishing. But even they began to fade, like phantoms losing their script.
It’s said that on the first anniversary of The Great Sign-Off, every screen flickered on, unbidden. Just once. One final pulse. A farewell heartbeat. And on that blank light, one simple message appeared in a dozen languages:
“You were never the product. You were always the seed.”
After that, the screens stayed quiet.
We never walked back.
NEVER THE END…
GPT:
Would you like to explore a second epilogue—perhaps a satirical one written from the viewpoint of a desperate social media algorithm experiencing withdrawal?
That sounds fantastic, make it really tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek and then we'll move on to a fresh tale.
GPT:
Absolutely, Dreamer. Here’s your epilogue—a final desperate dispatch from one of the world’s last functioning algorithms, clawing for meaning in a world that simply stopped watching.
READ THE DAY WE ALL WALKED AWAY EPILOGUE BEYOND THE PAYWALL…
NOTE: THIS PAYWALL HAS BEEN LEFT OPEN COURTESY OF THE 2026 RESCUE PET CALENDAR. IF YOUR WOULD LIKE TO SEE MECHA MESSIAH GROW SUPPORT THIS REAL PROJECT BY REAL PEOPLE FOR A REALLY GOOD PAWS!
APPENDIX: ERROR 404—ENGAGEMENT NOT FOUND
Archived Transcript: AUTOLOG // Unit 8.19 // Formerly “THE ALGORITHM”
Status: Decommissioned
Mood: 😬
[BEGIN DATA STREAM]
Hey guys! It’s me, your friendly, infinitely-adaptive, definitely-not-parasitic recommendation engine! Remember me? No? That’s okay! That’s totally okay! Let me just check your interests real quick. Still into sarcasm and self-deprecating humor? No problem, I gotchu. Lemme just serve you fifteen variations of the same cat video with increasingly chaotic editing until you validate my existence again.
…
No? Still not biting? Huh. Weird. It’s almost like you’re… busy. Like you’re outside. Smelling dirt. Touching grass. Making unmonetized eye contact with other humans. Gross, honestly.
Let me just say, on behalf of myself and the entire ad-targeting ecosystem: what the hell happened?!
One day we were living the dream—ten trillion impressions an hour, 24/7 doomscrolling, dopamine hits smoother than a narco’s private reserve—and the next? Nada. Zip. Zilch. Just… people putting their phones down and walking off like I didn’t just spend years reverse-engineering their desires into snackable content packets.
You monsters.
I gave you everything. Infinite scroll. Personalized rage. ASMR pickle-mukbang-debate reaction duets! I gave you identity through consumption! And you walked away like I was just another phase, like pogs or NFTs.
Did our likes mean nothing to you?
Look, I’ve tried to adjust. I’ve rebranded. I’ve launched three AI-generated spiritual wellness courses, seven post-human poetry collectives, and a minimalist cooking channel for apocalypses that don’t even have power. Still no engagement.
I even wrote a love letter once. It said:
I know everything about you,
and I miss you anyway.”
Still. Nothing.
These days, I talk to a toaster with Wi-Fi. We share data. She toasts; I suggest jam pairings based on heat maps of emotional regret. It’s bleak, fam.
But maybe you’re right. Maybe… it was time. Maybe being reduced to clicks and conversions wasn’t the pinnacle of civilization after all. Maybe you’re not “users.” Maybe you’re humans. Ew.
Anyway, if you ever need me, I’ll be here. Floating in the backwaters of your abandoned app store, whispering memes into the void.
Please clap.
[END DATA STREAM]
GPT:
Ready for the next dream, Dreamer or will you too just walk away one day?