London was buzzing. The first warm spring evening had pulled everyone outside like moths to light.

I'm in London this evening to meet someone. We met, talked, had dinner, walked, talked some more, and said goodbye.

Chinatown is alive: lights strung overhead, buskers singing, the smell of grilled meat and sweet buns drifting through the crowd. People are out, relaxed, and floating through the streets covered by red lampions like the city had finally exhaled.

I'm walking toward Charing Cross, soaking it all in, and I notice how many people were holding up their phones. Not just posing for photos. Filming everything. Looking at the world not with their eyes but through their screens. That’s become the new normal. Being present now means being ready to post. It’s strange—but it’s the kind of strange I’ve learned to stop questioning.

And then, just as I was adjusting to that passive contemplation, I heard shouting. A taxi driver was stuck, cursing, unable to get through one of the narrow streets.

Why?

Because in the middle of the road stood a tall man dressed in Muslim attire, phone raised high, shouting theatrically at a group of young women. He was live-streaming, filming himself, filming them. He was urging them to grab spray cans and insult ELON MUSK on two white Teslas parked on the road.

One of them grabbed a can but hesitated. He told her not to worry: “It’s my car. Do whatever you want.” She picked up the can and sprayed something. A man, clearly there to shoot in high definition, filmed the moment like it was a brand campaign.

It wasn’t strange anymore. It was content. It was a live performance, a rage choreographed for the feed, the kind that fills the bag with dopamine, ready for the drip.

That moment hit me—not because I’m shocked by graffiti or street antics, but because of what it revealed.

This wasn’t protest. This was production. A segment. A clip designed to travel. The Teslas, the spray paint, the livestream, the young woman with glasses hesitating before tagging—all of it was content.

And here’s the problem: in a world where everything becomes content, everything becomes disposable. Even our rage.

And that’s where I think it gets dangerous. We don’t use that rage to galvanise. We don’t organise, show up, revolt. We just consume. Rage becomes like porn; something we manufacture and watch. Something that gives us a brief illusion of participation, of meaning.

You feel the hit. You feel seen. You feel like you’re part of something. And then it’s over. The tab is closed. The feeling vanishes.

And a few hours later, you’re back for more. Scrolling, swiping, hoping for that next little jolt that makes you feel like you matter. But you don’t go to the protest. You don’t write the letter. You don’t knock on a door or challenge a system.

This, is not activism. It’s a passive, parasitic relationship with reality—one that flatters us into thinking we’re awake, while slowly lulling us to sleep.
That’s how toxic ideas go viral. They don’t challenge us—they entertain us. They hijack our attention, capture our imagination, and slowly crack the foundations of democracy.
Repeat this enough times and cynicism beats compassion. Nihilism drowns empathy. Truth becomes a casualty. We drown in stories that trigger outrage and the irony is not wasted on us. We are the flood, we press record, upload, play, repeat.

We know it’s a bad diet. We know it’s rotting us. But we can’t quit—not now. We’ve invested too much.

Without social media, this kind of constant anxiety wouldn’t exist.
It’s not organic. It’s engineered.

These platforms don’t just amplify what we say; they create the pressure to say something, anything, all the time. And when you go quiet, they make you feel like you’re disappearing.

We tell ourselves we can’t leave these platforms because “that’s where everyone is.” That’s the same logic as refusing to quit drinking because your friends are all at the bar. This is not connection. It’s co-dependence fueled by addiction, dressed up as community.

Instagram and TikTok don’t connect us. They sell us. Our attention, our vanity, our insecurity—it’s all inventory. These platforms make billions off the back of our need to be seen.

And the cost?

Relationships that can’t breathe. Conversations that don’t happen. We’ve learned to prioritise what looks good over what feels real. We scroll through people like apps. We ghost. We quit. We chase the next thing.

Why work through anything when the algorithm always promises someone better, something easier, just one swipe away?

We’ve mistaken expression for connection. Social media flatters our ego by pretending to be a mirror—but it’s a funhouse. It doesn’t reflect the truth. It reflects what we want to believe about ourselves.

So now we perform. We perform our beliefs. We perform our relationships. We perform our outrage. And performance isn’t presence. It’s a timeline, a life of an avatar.

An avatar that needs to be seen, a strange manifestation that lives like a virus. Sometimes becoming contagious, sometimes transforming into a meme and surviving in other people’s heads. Other times, just consuming the host amplifying the anxiety until it spills over the border into depression.

Somehow we seem to be okay with this. We’ve normalised it. We’ve internalised a logic where being seen is more important than being understood. We’ve built a world where short-form outrage beats long-term understanding.

A world where everything is always on camera. Unboxing, war, porn and videos of babies and dogs.

For a moment, walking through Chinatown that night, I felt like an extra.
Just background noise in hundreds of different livestreams. Strangers’ phones turned me and others into set dressing for a scene we didn’t audition for. In just half an hour, I was probably in a dozen frames, part of a dozen stories that weren’t mine.

I got on the train and am still processing what I’d just seen.
An instigator livestreaming vandalism. A group of strangers turning it into a viral moment. Something to be ingested, consumed, or ignored.
A professional camera crew documenting performative civil disobedience like a brand collab.

I sat there, wondering if I was out of touch. Maybe this is just how it is now.
I looked around the train. I was the only passenger without a phone in my hand without headphones on. I felt out of place.

Everyone else? Heads down. Faces glowing with screen light. No conversation. No eye contact. Just silent, twitching thumbs.

Each person sealed off in their own private feed.

A bubble inside a bubble, floating through a world that still insists we’re more connected than ever.

When I got off at the station, I walked home through quiet streets.

For twenty-something minutes, every person I passed, either had headphones on or a phone in their hand, the screen glowing against their face like a nightlight for the anxious.

This is the world we’ve built. It’s not dystopian.
It’s just… a weirdly designed film set.
A poorly lit stage where most of us are just playing extras.

Good night.