Unreality Wars
There's a glitch in the code of our shared reality. A feeling of deep, systemic wrongness.
You feel it when you watch a woman get shot in the face by a federal agent on your phone screen, and before her body is even cold, the official story declares her a "domestic terrorist."
You feel it when the story fades in the background of your own sense of revulsion as you watch the video.
Yet, it persists, hardening into a partisan truth. In a world where the official story is manufactured in the halls of power and truth is expected to catch up, where impunity is the cost of admission.
A world where old rules are gone. Where the game of persuasion, of debate, of shame and accountability, is over.
Where we are no longer citizens in a republic of ideas, but only users in an apparatus of control, and our outrage is its fuel.
You believe you're a smart, skeptical person with high standards, skilled in the language of debate, of proof, of the sensible center.
But in the world they are manufacturing, language has lost all meaning. Words have become cages, and sentences are chains. To explain yourself to the machine is to consent to your own grinding.
You think you're fighting an argument. You're not.
Inside The Apparatus
A machine for manufacturing reality—the apparatus works by hijacking your nervous system. It combines narrative capture with algorithmic amplification, seizing the story first and using platforms to make that story emotionally inescapable.
It creates a state of confusion and exhaustion.
You think it's about facts. If only people knew the facts. If you could just debunk their lies. But the machine's job is to make you believe truth is unknowable, forcing you to retreat into your tribe for safety.
Retreat is the objective.
You are trying to win an argument. But all you're doing is feeding the machine while the system continues to build real power.
Those in power have stopped pretending to care about truth. They manufacture the story first. They issue it with moral labels attached. They know by the time facts arrive—if they arrive at all—the frame is already set. The public has already split.
Accountability becomes a tribal fight, not an institutional process. The goal is to be first, loud, not right. By anchoring the initial story, the apparatus forces all subsequent facts to argue against a pre-established frame, a cognitive battle lost before it even begun.
The pattern is everywhere.
An official narrative issued immediately. Days later, video or witnesses contradict the story. But by then, the frame is set. The damage is done. The apparatus doesn't care about being correct, it is focused on keeping you trapped inside the frame.
Engineered Schizophrenia
Your feed is no longer a window onto the world but a finely tuned instrument for shaping your emotions and your loyalties. Algorithmic amplification accelerates emotional polarization dramatically overwhelming our collective ability to process truth.
One ecosystem hears “state murder.” The other hears “domestic terrorist thwarted.”
Headlines spike outrage. You find yourself arguing with a stranger in your head as you sink into a sense of dread and powerlessness.
The narrative captures your neurons and gets them firing on overdrive. Every cell of your body is on fire. All you have is the digital abyss.
You scream with everything you have and become another ghost inside the machine as the apparatus tightens its grip on your nervous system.
Escape
Your humanity is held hostage.
Your capacity to care. Your instinct to protect the vulnerable and need to help someone in pain. Your ability to see a stranger and recognize yourself in them.
The machine wants to make you numb to other’s pain and suffering. It weaponizes your empathy and turns it into outrage, tribalism, contempt for the other.
The apparatus cannot survive in a world of people who choose empathy over outrage, presence over performance.
The simple, radical act of treating another human being like they matter, protecting a child in danger. The instinct to help someone suffering, to stop injustice and stand for something, to matter.
To reclaim what it means to be human is the biggest threat to the machine.
It will cost you the comfort of certainty. The safety of your tribe. The dopamine hit of outrage. The feeling of being right. The ease of scrolling instead of connecting. The comfortable numbness protecting you from a cruel and harsh world.
Once empathy dissolves the numbness of the machine and you see the humanity of those around you, it will cost you.
You’ll feel more, and it’ll hurt.
You’ll feel responsible.
So start today.
Call someone you’ve been meaning to call. Show up for someone who needs you. Say something true to someone’s face. Help a stranger. Protect someone vulnerable. Choose presence over the feed.
Do it today.
Then do it again tomorrow.
Your humanity is not a luxury. It’s your most lethal weapon. Use it.




Superbly written, as always, Hussein--thank you. We are living in an endless dystopian nightmare
Bravo, Hussein!! This narrative so far is your most exemplary essay - that exposes the banal hyenas who pretend to be humans. ~Laura