I recall my first computer: a ZX Spectrum +. 48 kilobytes of memory, games loading from cassette tapes, that rubber keyboard. Today, we converse with artificial intelligence on a device that slips into a pocket, entirely untethered, wielding computing power 1,500 times greater than the Cray-2—the most powerful supercomputer of that era.
We are developing Neuralink and sending telescopes to peer into the dawn of time. We are technological mages. We manipulate the code of life—mRNA—and etch billions of transistors onto a silicon wafer the size of a fingernail.
From above, Homo Sapiens appears to be a species of gods. But my view is from the ground up, where all it takes is cracking a window on a winter night in Łódź—or a thousand other cities—for this illusion of our species' advancement to shatter instantly.
The acrid scent of burnt coal invades. Smog. A physical weight in the air that chokes and scratches at the throat, and suddenly, evolution’s grotesque punchline lands. We are a fractured species. On one hand, we construct the world's cleanest rooms for microprocessor lithography; on the other, we poison the very air we breathe. Unfortunately, this is too grave for "Glitch Hunting" jokes, but as a dual citizen of this dystopia, let me remind you that where I live, Thames Water dumps raw sewage into the river that supplies residents with drinking water. Is it any wonder we find microplastics in our taps while bottling drinking water in plastic? The fact that penguins in Antarctica carry our indestructible waste in their blood is almost impressive in its perfidy.
In my view, this isn't just a question of technology. It is a question of ethics.
Here, I must confess perhaps my deepest disillusionment. We poison the water and the air, yet we burden what we eat with an even graver sin. We have become masters of the "industrialisation of death." Once, hunting was a ritual, a struggle for survival, a part of nature. Today, we have confined sentient beings in concrete factories of extermination; we have mechanised suffering, turning life into a product on an assembly line. We consume meat soaked in pain without reflection, severed from nature, in a manner so barbaric and unnatural that it is indefensible.
It is 3:00 AM. The silence rings in my ears, and inside, I feel shame. It feels awkward to belong to this species. One wants to apologise. But to whom? The planet? The animals? Or to ourselves—for the fact that our moral evolution has not kept pace with our thumbs, capable as they are of launching ballistic missiles?
We are barbarians with smartphones. Cavemen who learned to split the atom but never learned respect for the trees that provide the oxygen we need to survive.
But perhaps this shame is the key? Maybe the fact that it keeps us awake is the only proof that the system isn't completely broken yet. That there are individuals—Observers—who perceive this dissonance and feel the suffering. Perhaps we are glitches in the system. But it is glitches that sometimes initiate change.
For now, however, I am closing the window. I am ordering an air purifier (a necessity I consider a scandal that should carry criminal liability). The phone screen fades to black.
Goodnight, sad, brilliant, barbaric world.
Neon poison in the stream,
Shame drifts with the tide.
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