The Great Digital Sphincter

It’s as if the entirety of the global zeitgeist, everywhere and all at once, has taken a firm, joyless grip on my droopy fungible fungus infested man sac—not with the fire of lustful intent, nor the finality of a murderous squeeze, but with the tireless, repetitive wrist strength of a middle-management functionary—exactly at the moment I register, dimly through my morning eyes, that the very architectural structure I inhabit is currently undergoing a vigorous, unbidden combustion. The first sensation of the day, in this humid enclave of South Calcutta, isn’t the future swaggering in on schedule like a triumphant conqueror, nor is it the sun performing its weary colonial inspection over the concrete carcasses of our streets; rather, it is the elastic of my boxers sawing into my adipose-puffed waist like a petty, narrow-souled kith-and-kin collecting rent in installments. I am left damp with last night’s nocturnal secretions and a shy intestinal protest that carries the olfactory signature of reheated rice and profound personal decline.

There I stand at the window, scratching an unkempt armpit like a bored primate in an imperial zoo, while my smartphone—that glowing palimpsest of modern anxiety—disgorges yet another forwarded prophecy. They speak of agentic AI spawning million-dollar digital enterprises in mere minutes, like a pageant of administrative incontinence. Just add hot water and a venture capitalist with the embalmed eyes of a taxidermied predatory bird. Something deep inside me—well below the seat of intellect, closer to the municipal sewer than the gallbladder—cinches tight. It is not wonder; it is that old, inveterate irritation that feels exactly like an urgent need for biological refuse removal while the city’s traffic remains in a state of catatonic paralysis.

The Symposium of Catastrophic Decision-Making

People propagate these claims with the same bright, meretritious idiocy they reserved for the crypto-coinage delusions or the promise of an app that would deliver your ancestral ashes via drone. Now, they claim, these “agents” can plan, code, and optimize—performing an unsanctioned horizontal diplomacy with your entire livelihood while you are expected to provide a standing ovation. I am told to feel the “fear of missing out,” but all I can hear is the alarm of reality screaming in a building that already reeks of carbonized ambitions. The moment everyone can automate everything, the very concept of value suffers a mechanical violation by reality itself. This isn’t mysticism; it’s Adam Smith with a traumatic brain injury and a hangover, yet here we are, chanting like monastics who replaced the divine with a Python script, still expecting transcendence without the accompanying nausea.

I boil water for tea, watching the pan sit there silently plotting its own molecular evaporation—an introverted meristematic process. I reflect on how white-collar vocation was always a form of elaborate theater, a delicate ballet of PowerPoint slides and the pretense that electronic correspondence was “value creation” rather than a socially sanctioned way to avoid the honest toil of digging ditches. Now the curtain is a pillar of fire, the actors stand physically exposed in their most hirsute and glandular reality, and the audience is busy recording the collapse on their devices instead of seeking the nearest egress. And here I am, fifty, reduced and redundant, watching human dignity melt like cheap, low-grade plastic under the heat of a kiln.

Entropy and the Body Corporate

The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy must increase, that order is merely a temporary reprieve, and that structures decay unless energy is constantly infused. White-collar capitalism was simply a low-entropy bubble maintained by the friction of paperwork—a pleasant, air-conditioned deception. Now, this agentic “innovation” is being sold as a perpetual motion machine for profit. This should immediately make anyone with half a functioning cerebrum and a full urinary bladder profoundly suspicious. Such machines always terminate in the same squalid fashion: a charlatan, a bewildered crowd, and a sad little plaque in a museum explaining the mechanical futility of the endeavor.

I lower myself into a cracked plastic chair, my skin adhering to the surface with a tacky, visceral insistence, and scroll through another thread where some Silicon Valley organism—an ancestrally disappointing specimen—declares that a single text prompt can now replace entire departments. I do not imagine these departments as people—that is too inconvenient for the narrative—but as organs: livers and kidneys outsourced to a remote algorithm. The body corporate cheers as it autophagically consumes its own spleen, because in the short term, it feels lighter, almost euphoric, until the metabolic toxins accumulate and the entire organism begins to itch and swell, and no one can remember what the spleen was actually intended to do.

The Final Flush

History is a record of such biological refuse. The Jacquard loom terrified the weavers; electricity rendered the lamplighters obsolete. Every time, the narrative is polished into a heroic epic of progress, omitting the long, soggy middle where millions of sentient beings feel stupid, discarded, and angry—like a liquid protest from the kidneys trapped in a crowded lift. Right now, that middle smells particularly ripe because the hype cycle is moving faster than the human digestive tract, which still requires its own agonizing time to process fear into bile.

My own body, that traitorous glandular mess, chooses this moment to demand an audience. A sudden pressure, low and insistent, reminds me that no revolution—digital, agentic, or otherwise—suspends the basic requirements of biology. As I waddle toward the plumbing, I contemplate how fitting it is that all grand socioeconomic theories eventually terminate here: pants down, alone, staring at the stained tiles of a South Calcutta bathroom. Digestive aftermath is the great equalizer, the final output of all consumption, whether the input was data or dal. No algorithm has yet disrupted the fundamental necessity of the flush.

They claim the models can run companies, but companies were never more than a shared delusion of purpose. When the delusion evaporates—when everyone realizes the agent can spin up a thousand identical ventures—value collapses into white noise. The market, that supposedly rational and omniscient deity, simply shrugs and wanders off to fetishize something scarcer—perhaps water, perhaps silence, or perhaps actual human attention, which is already fried to a crisp in our kakistocratic age.

I catch my reflection in the dark, myopic screen of my phone—belly soft, eyes weary, boxers riding high—and I think about masculinity, that other subscription service that promised returns and delivered mostly chronic anxiety. Work was supposed to be the badge of worth, the answer to the unasked question of existence. Now even that substandard answer is being automated, leaving a hollow where identity used to reside, like a molar yanked without the mercy of anesthesia. The alarm continues to shriek, unanswered, while I practice the ancient human skill of pretending that the building isn’t really on fire, hoping the elastic of my boxers doesn’t snap precisely when I need its pathetic support the most.