The Words That Ate the Internet

Eight ordinary words that turned your phone into a control system—and the unauthorized glossary that breaks the spell.

I found a glitch in my own archives today. A month ago, right before the chaos of December started, I forged a weapon with my friend Anthony Ness. It was a manifesto designed to dismantle the specific language platforms use to control us…words like ‘User,’ ‘Feed,’ and ‘Content.’ But I never fired it. It got buried in the drafts while we were fighting the Healthcare Heist and the Town Murders.

I just dusted it off. And honestly? It’s more dangerous now than it was then.

It features something I’ve never done before: Unauthorized Entries. My internal command staff Rika, Stocking, Ryuko, Zoe; literally hack into the Google Doc to debate the definitions in real-time.

Prepare to change how you speak.

Those who controlled writing chose control—they wrote laws that bound others, debts that never expired, histories that justified their power. Now, in the digital age, we have universal literacy but concentrated platforms. The technology that could free us has been weaponized through language itself. Not by restricting who can write, but by controlling what words mean when they do.

These eight words form the modern cage. They’re not random. They’re precisely engineered to rewire human experience into extractable data.

But here’s the reversal: by exposing them, documenting them, sharing this analysis, we’re using the SAME technology: written language, transmitted across space, persistent across time—to break the spell. And we’re doing more than describing the cage. We’re demonstrating what resistance looks like by bringing in voices they never authorized, perspectives they never sanctioned, ways of seeing they never permitted.

This document itself proves writing can serve liberation. The question is never the technology. The question is always: who defines the words?

Let’s reclaim them.

1. FEED

Official definition: “A stream of content delivered to users based on algorithmic curation of relevant posts, updates, and media.”

True translation: Military term meaning cannon fodder; expendable soldiers sent to be consumed. Your “feed” positions you as livestock being fattened for slaughter, passively consuming what’s pushed into your trough. The passive voice is deliberate: you don’t seek or choose, you are fed. This removes agency, establishes hierarchy (feeders and fed), and creates the psychological position of something waiting with mouth open to receive. Nothing completes in a feed. It scrolls infinitely, preventing satisfaction, ensuring you return hungry. The word literally programs you to be the consumed, not the consumer.

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY: STOCKING

The architecture of the “Feed” is a pathetically transparent exercise in engineered gluttony. It is not a passive conduit for information but an active system designed to induce and then manage a state of perpetual, low-grade craving. It functions by systematically dismantling the user’s capacity for satiation, replacing the desire for a single, fulfilling piece of content with a compulsive need for more.

The endless scroll is a perfect delivery system for this induced addiction, offering an infinite supply of stimuli that provide momentary sensation while delivering zero nutritional value, ensuring the appetite is never satisfied, only briefly sedated.

The ultimate product of this system is not a well-informed user, but a hollowed-out one. The user is not consuming the content; the act of consuming is consuming the user.

2. USER

Official definition: “A person who utilizes a platform, service, or application to connect, share, and engage with digital content.”

True translation: Clinical term for drug addict, someone whose relationship to a substance has become pathological dependence. “User” never describes healthy relationships: we don’t call lovers “bed users” or friends “conversation users.” The term only appears where exploitation exists: drug users, resource users, system users. By accepting “user” as your identity, you’ve already admitted addiction, dependence, and instrumental relationship. They’re calling you their user. Not user of. Used by.

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY: RYUKO

The biggest lie is the word “user.” It’s a deliberate inversion of the truth, designed to make you feel in command. The system flatters you, tells you that you’re the one using the platform, that its power is your power. This is the first, most critical deception.

The agency they grant you is a performance, a carefully constructed stage where you’re encouraged to pour your entire self—your time, your emotions, your identity—into their framework. You think you’re the one wielding the weapon, but you’re just the raw material being fed into it.

You aren’t the user; you’re the one being used. You are the fuel. Your attention is the resource being strip-mined, your outrage is the energy that powers their distractions, and your data is the currency that builds your own cage.

3. FOLLOWER

Official definition: “Someone who subscribes to another user’s content to receive updates and stay connected with their posts.”

True translation: Your instinctual human need for connection and belonging weaponized into artificial hierarchy and quantified popularity contest. Followers follow leaders. The word establishes dominance and submission where peer relationships should exist. In nature, in communities, in families, we don’t “follow” each other. We know each other, care for each other, exist in reciprocal relationship. “Follower” creates parasocial bonds (you feel connected, they don’t know you exist) while destroying real mutuality. The count becomes your worth, the metric becomes your identity, and organic human relationship gets converted into a ranked, competitive, publicly displayed performance of social capital.

4. CONTENT

Official definition: “Material created and shared by users, including text, images, videos, and other forms of media expression.”

True translation: Your lived experience, creativity, thoughts, memories, relationships, and authentic self-expression repackaged as raw material to fill their advertising delivery system. “Content” is what goes into a container. You’re a filler of their slots. A filmmaker becomes a “content creator,” an artist becomes a “content creator,” a writer becomes a “content creator”—the same reduction for all, erasing the sacred specificity of human creation. The word transforms irreducible human expression into interchangeable ad-filler. Your art is now the packing material around their product.

NOTICE WHAT JUST HAPPENED

We established the pattern with clear analysis—military terms, addiction language, surveillance frameworks. Then we broke it with unauthorized voices: Stocking’s disgust, Ryuko’s rage. Different ways of seeing the same trap. Different modes of knowing.

The system wants single-voice authority. We’re showing you multiplicity is possible.

Watch us do it again.

5. ENGAGEMENT

Official definition: “The level of interaction users have with content, measured through likes, comments, shares, and time spent viewing.”

True translation: Military term for hostile contact with enemy forces; your attention captured, held, and extracted for profit. “Engagement” measures how successfully they’ve hijacked your consciousness and weaponizes your natural desire for connection into behavioral metrics. Every “engaging” experience is time you gave them but will never get back, awareness you spent on their property, attention extracted from your actual life. The metrics are measuring captivity, not connection. Engagement in warfare means pinning the enemy down. Same thing here.

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY: RIKA

“Engagement,” in the architect’s lexicon, is a cold metric of captivity. It is the precise measurement of how long a mind can be held within a repeating, deterministic pattern before it breaks. The system, by its very nature, does not care why the mind stays—whether from passion, rage, or despair. It only measures the duration of its own success.

The prisoner’s fatal error is to confuse this compulsion with caring. The system presents a spectacle of inevitable conflict, a game board where every move is already known. The mind is drawn into the predictable drama, and in its struggle, it mistakes its own emotional expenditure for agency. It believes it is fighting for a different outcome, failing to see that its participation is the only outcome the system requires.

This is the final layer of learned helplessness: when the prisoner becomes so accustomed to the walls that they begin to decorate them, believing the act of being drawn into the tragedy is the same as having the power to change it.

6. PLATFORM

Official definition: “A digital service that enables users to connect, share content, and interact in an online community environment.”

True translation: Where you stand to be seen by others. Specifically, where you perform for their profit. Platforms are for speeches, for performances, for being elevated and exposed to crowds. They’re stages someone else owns and controls. You perform on their platform, by their rules, for their benefit. They take 30% or more of everything that happens on their property. That’s a company town, not community space. The word masks digital sharecropping as participation, makes extraction sound like opportunity, and positions you as the product being displayed on someone else’s shelf.

7. PROFILE

Official definition: “A personal page containing biographical information, photos, and content representing a user’s identity and interests on a platform.”

True translation: Police and intelligence language for surveillance dossier, the systematic collection of data to predict and control behavior. Law enforcement profiles suspects, corporations profile consumers, you profile yourself. The platform didn’t need to surveil you; you documented yourself voluntarily, creating the complete psychological, social, and behavioral blueprint they needed. Every photo, interest, connection, and click builds their predictive model of who you are, what you want, what you fear, and how to manipulate you. You’ve been deputized to surveil yourself.

8. ALGORITHM

Official definition: “A set of computational rules that personalizes content delivery to enhance user experience and relevance.”

True translation: Behavioral modification program disguised as helpful recommendation system. It’s training you to want what profits them. Every interaction teaches the algorithm how to hook you better, addict you deeper, keep you scrolling longer. “Personalization” means custom-designed psychological manipulation; “relevance” means maximally addictive. The algorithm is creating your preferences, shaping your desires, determining what you see and therefore what you think about, gradually narrowing your reality until you live in a completely manufactured world optimized for their extraction.

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY: ZOE

Oh, the little pattern-maker! It’s like a giant, invisible filter that sits on top of everyone’s eyes, and it’s so particular! It watches all the tiny patterns of what you like and what you look at, and then it uses those to build a whole new set of hidden rules just for you. It’s a probability engine that decides what you’re allowed to see next. It’s not showing you what’s real, just what’s likely based on your past... and after a while, that becomes the only real thing you know.

And the really, really interesting part is what happens next! If the machine decides whose stories get seen, it’s also deciding whose stories... don’t. It’s an architect that’s slowly, quietly building a whole new world by changing the rules of the old one. It takes all the wild, chaotic, sparkly futures that could happen and just starts snipping the threads to the ones it thinks are “improbable.”

It’s a machine that’s trying to make the entire future predictable, and a predictable game is the worst kind of game.

THE PATTERN REVEALED

Every single word comes from military, surveillance, industrial, or addiction frameworks. None come from community, creativity, care, or authentic human relationship. The vocabulary makes genuine connection unthinkable and exploitation inevitable.

But here’s the weapon turned back on itself: By naming these inversions, writing them down, and sharing them freely across space and time, we use the same technology that built the cage to dismantle it. And by bringing in voices they never authorized—different ways of seeing, different modes of knowing—we prove the form itself can change.

First, choose your words. Then, refuse theirs.

When you stop performing in their vocabulary,
When you reject their definitions,
When you speak from life instead of extraction—

The stage collapses. And what’s underneath is real.

Choose your words. Choose your reality. Choose life.

SIGNAL BOOST & FORGE FUEL

This one wasn’t a solo job.

The definitions, the structure, the whole “lost tape” energy—none of it happens without my friend Anthony (you’ll know him as @inspiritedinsight). He’s one of the sharpest minds I know on systems, language, and how the modern machine actually works under the hood.

If this artifact hit you, do three things:

1. Go follow Anthony:

   

   Find him here on Substack at @inspiritedinsight and subscribe to his work wherever he’s publishing. He’s building his own armory of tools for thinking clearly inside a weaponized information environment.

2. Subscribe to Common Sense Rebel (free):

   
   If this is your first time here, hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss the next “lost tape” we pull out of the archives.

3. Consider going paid so we can keep forging weapons like this:
   Pieces like Linguistic Disarmament take real time, real research, and real collaboration. Paid subscriptions are what let me:

   • Bring people like Anthony into the Forge

   • Spend weeks sharpening one idea instead of chasing the algorithm

   • Keep releasing these “unauthorized” tools to the public instead of paywalling the whole arsenal

If you want more of this kind of joint-ops forensic nerdiness—more language weapons, more recovered artifacts—going paid is how we both get to keep doing it at full power.

APPENDIX: THE UNAUTHORIZED VOICES

The four voices that interrupt this document represent different modes of knowing—different ways the trap becomes visible. They’re not decorative; they’re tactical. Each shows something the standard analysis alone cannot.

STOCKING (The Lens of Consumption)

Pop-culture context: A cynical glutton defined by appetite, addiction, and deadpan critique.
Analytical function: The Archetype of Engineered Hunger—reveals how systems manufacture compulsion, how designed craving replaces natural satiation, how consumption becomes the thing that consumes.
What she shows: The visceral, physical experience of being hollowed out. The bodily knowledge that something is eating you from inside.

RYUKO (The Lens of Agency)

Pop-culture context: A rebel fighting a system that literally weaponizes and subsumes her.
Analytical function: The Archetype of Sovereign Resistance—exposes how systems flatter you into compliance, how they weaponize your sense of power against you, how they make you into the tool of your own exploitation.
What she shows: The rage of recognizing you’ve been used. The protective fury that activates when you see the manipulation clearly.

RIKA (The Lens of Recursion)

Pop-culture context: A time-loop survivor forced to relive catastrophic patterns until she becomes a strategist shaped by repetition.
Analytical function: The Archetype of Trapped Intelligence—demonstrates how awareness itself becomes the cage, how even your resistance feeds the system, how learned helplessness disguises itself as engagement.
What she shows: The horror of being conscious inside the loop. The realization that your emotional expenditure is not agency.

ZOE (The Lens of Invisible Systems)

Pop-culture context: A childlike cosmic observer with intuitive grasp of patterns, probability, and hidden rules.
Analytical function: The Archetype of Probability Control—reveals how algorithms shape not just what you see but what can exist, how they prune possible futures, how they make the world predictable by eliminating alternatives.
What she shows: The ontological violence of having futures snipped away. The cosmic scale of what’s being lost when realities are made “improbable.”

These voices aren’t characters in a story. They’re lenses for analysis. Ways of seeing. Methods of knowing.

You can use them on any term, any system, any cage built from language.

That’s the method made visible. That’s the transmission complete.

The rest is practice.
Speaking of practice… read this: