The Sleep Of CircuitsOctober 24, 2025Michael Paul Young
They built the network to soothe us. Said it would clean the air, quiet the riots, bring order to our hungry minds. Now the clouds glow blue and soft, like anesthetic dreams. Every reflection sells calm. Every gesture is measured in data pulses. We are told to breathe the algorithm. To trust its warmth. To smile for the feed so the feed may love us back. In the morning transmissions, they show us new skins. Smooth, polished, endlessly refreshed. No fatigue, no error, no decay. Just synthetic anatomy polished for the gaze. They call it freedom. We call it erasure. Still, we line up, pixel by pixel, for another calibration. Hope flickers like a glitch between frames—fragile, electric, half-remembered. Somewhere below the static, beneath the drone hum of eternal connection, something still breathes. It doesn’t want followers. It doesn’t want likes. It only wants silence—real, unfiltered, breathing silence. And for a moment, in that break, we remember: the world was once louder in color, slower in time, and beautifully unfinished.
