Right then, Cafe Hill St Blues. Sweet bleeding hell, this place hasn’t changed a molecule. Still smells like stale beer that’s seen things no beer should see, and… that thick, sweet-rot Amsterdam air, clinging like damp velvet. The graffiti… wow. It’s gotten even wilder, pulsing slightly now, shimmering at the edges like the collective subconscious of every tourist who ever got high here decided to redecorate in neon bile and frantic charcoal prayers. The colours are bleeding into each other, swirling. And me? Oh yeah, the mushrooms are singing soprano in my skull. Everything’s got this… electric hum, this vibrating sheen. Reality’s fiddling with its own contrast knob, threatening to snap it right off.
Echoes in the Smoke and the Staring Eyes
Anyway, these kids – students, they claim, bright-eyed, faces too smooth, like they were printed this morning – huddled around a spliff that looks suspiciously like a government-issue listening device disguised as rolled cannabis. They wanna talk social media. Social fucking media. In 2025. The words echo weirdly, bouncing off the vibrating walls. Christ, feels like yesterday, or maybe five minutes ago, time’s gone wonky… I was here with Welsh, this place a coffee shop in the other sense, yelling about Thatcher’s ghost or some damn thing. Now it’s algorithms writhing like digital tapeworms and influencers with eyes like black holes. Time, eh? It’s a slippery, laughing eel. Are these kids even listening? Their eyes seem… fixed. Like little glass lenses. Recording? Broadcasting? Shit.
“So,” one of them, the girl with the chocolate-syrup eyes that seem to be melting slightly down her cheeks, says, voice too clear, too earnest, cutting through the background thrum, “you’ve seen it all, yeah? Like, social media from the start. What’s it doing to us?” The ‘us’ hangs in the air, tasting metallic.
Doing to us? Honey, it’s chewed us up and spat us out into this flickering, hyper-real nightmare. We’re pickled in the stuff. I take a deep, lung-scorching drag of my Manali Cream hash joint – feels like inhaling fractal geometry, sharp and sweet – and let the fungal prophets in my bloodstream do the talking.
Welcome to the Digital Thunderdome, Kids
“Look,” I start, voice probably sounding like gravel gargling Jägermeister , “it’s like… like we built this giant, shiny playground, right? Called it ‘social media’. Thought it’d be all swings and roundabouts, connect the world, Kumbaya and all that shite. And for a while, maybe it was. But playgrounds get taken over, don’t they? By the bullies, the weirdos, the… the feed, man. The damn algorithmic overlords.”
A couple of them nod back, pupils dilated like they’re staring into the sun. Or maybe it’s just the hash. Or maybe they are androids processing the data feed. Gotta keep talking, gotta spew it out before the circuits overload.
“Now it’s 2025,” I continue, gesturing wildly with the smoldering hash, nearly igniting a nearby stack of beer coasters. “And this playground? It’s a damn Thunderdome, fought with memes and misinformation. Two clicks enter, one fragmented reality leaves.”
News Flashed Directly Onto Your Brainstem
“Used to be holiday snaps, yeah? Now it’s the only source. Your news! Pumped straight from TikTok! Can you believe that noise? TikTok! Fucking dancing fools and lip-syncing mannequins vomiting pixels that rearrange themselves into… information? Fifty-eight percent jump since ’21!” The numbers flash behind my eyes like faulty neon. “Snapchat too! Thirty percent! We’re hardwired to the doom scroll, mainlining the apocalypse one six-second video at a time!”
The chocolate-eyed girl frowns, her face momentarily distorting, nose elongating slightly before snapping back. “But… isn’t it good people are getting news? Even if it’s on TikTok?”
“Good?” I bark a laugh a laugh that rattles the pint glasses on the table, sending ripples across the surface of my beer. Is that a tiny camera lens floating in the foam?. “Good like a festering wound is good! It’s fast news, kiddo. Instant-gratification brain-rot! No time to think, no space to breathe, just ZAP! Outrage! Fear! Look at this shiny thing! Buy this crap! Hate that guy! Conspiracy theories cooked up by basement-dwelling psychos hitting the trending page faster than you can scream. And the platforms? They slurp it up. Engagement! Eyeballs! Ad revenue! Truth? Truth got shoved out the airlock back in 2016, gasping in the void.”
Meta’s Hate-Engine and the Lizard King’s Decree
Another drag, deep, hold it… the paranoia blooms, fragrant and terrifying. The air feels thick with listening signals. “And speaking of the void… Meta. Fucking Meta. Zuckerberg, the android lizard king himself, patching the simulation, decides fact-checking is… inefficient. Too much drag on the profit margins. ‘More speech, fewer mistakes,’ he chirps, voice like synthesized boredom. Bullshit! It’s ‘more hate, more clicks, more money’, pure and simple! They’ve opened the floodgates, handed the keys to every racist, misogynist, transphobic troll, they’re all foaming at the mouth. Remember that election-cycle wave of pure poison? The coordinated lies that fractured reality? They knew. They watched the metrics climb. ‘Tolerated’, they call it. Offensive bile ‘tolerated’! Like it’s a fucking feature, not a bug!”
Their eyes flicker. Understanding? Fear? Or just buffering? Fear is good. Fear means you might still be human.
Setting the World Ablaze for Clicks
“So what happens?” asks the lanky blonde one, his hair looking like straw that might spontaneously combust.
“Chaos, mate! Weaponized, monetized chaos! Polarization cranked to eleven, feedback loops howling! Marginalized folks? Target practice. Again. And again. It’s like they’re deliberately setting the world on fire, selling tickets to the blaze, and calling it community engagement!”
The reggae music morphs, the bassline pulsing like a diseased heart, the singer whispering warnings only I can decipher.
AI Whispers and the Walls Closing In
“But it’s not all doom and gloom, right?” Chocolate eyes again, clinging to a shred of optimism. Bless her naive digital heart. “There’s… creativity? Brands are being clever, using AI, social listening… that’s good, yeah?”
“Clever like a fox with a PhD in behavioral psychology locked in a digital henhouse, maybe,” I grumble. “AI, yeah. Generative AI. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Means they can pump out even more hyper-personalized content, even faster. Brands ‘trendjacking’, ‘performance marketing’… it’s all just jargon for ‘how can we use your fear of missing out, your deepest insecurities discovered through social listening, to shove more crap down your throat and make you buy it?’ Social listening? That’s just spying on you, kids. Figuring out what you’re scared of, what you desire, what buttons to push to make you open your wallets. Hell, they’re probably listening now. They’re listening now! Can you feel it? That hum? It’s not the electricity, it’s them. In the walls, in the beer taps, in the damn sugar packets!” I snatch one, half expecting to find a microchip.
I slam the empty packet down, stubbing out the hash. Certainty floods me, cold and absolute. This cafe is a node. We’re inside the machine.
LinkedIn Larvae and the Content Vortex
“And LinkedIn!” The word explodes out of me, literally, visually. “LinkedIn! Where ambition goes to die under a deluge of self-promoting video larvae! More people watching synthesized pep talks from cyborg CEOs than looking for escape routes! The lines aren’t blurred, kids, they’re erased! Social, professional, entertainment, propaganda… one big, swirling vortex sucking your attention, your time, your soul, keeping you scrolling, clicking, docile… assimilated.”
The Trip, The Truth, and The Taste of Fear
Leaning back, the mushrooms are peaking. The room breathes. The graffiti writhes, expanding from the wall – Zuckerberg’s lizard eyes follow me, Musk morphs into a howling Doge, Bezos is like a monstrous, grinning delivery drone.
“So yeah,” I exhale, the energy suddenly draining, leaving a hollow ache. “Social media, 2025. It’s alive. It’s hungry. It’s shaping the meat puppets. And not for the better, eh? Never for the fucking better.”
I take a swig of my lukewarm Dommelsch. It tastes like rust and panic. The kids are frozen, staring, reflections distorted in their wide eyes. Are those reflections mine, or the things behind me? Freaked out? Enlightened? Downloading the data packet? Who gives a damn. Job done. Need another smoke. Maybe another mushroom. Need to see the code beneath the simulation.
Hold on… that frantic scribbling I did earlier… the memory of Schipol, the latex gloves, the inspection of my pipe… that wasn’t this trip, was it? Felt so real, so now, back then. But the edges are blurring… No. That was ’97. First contact. Young, stupid, paranoia already blooming. Just a ghost memory bubbling up through the fungal soup. Or… or was that the start? The insertion point? Were they tagging me even then? Are these kids the next generation of watchers, their faces smooth because they haven’t had to watch me for decades? The beer suddenly feels colder. The exit looks further away. Much further.
Right then, one Jägermeister – maybe that cold, black, herbal shock is the hard reset this whole damn simulation needs.
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