The Void Screams Back

Nobody hears you. Or worse, somebody hears you and reaches for the digital equivalent of a polite nod, that little yellow circle with the smile stretched so wide it looks like a rigor mortis grin, and you know, you just know, they have already scrolled past, their thumb already hunting for the next dopamine pellet in the great Skinner box of our collective degradation. I keep screaming into the void. The void, that bloated, indifferent, algorithmically-curated void, screams back with silence, or worse, with a notification that someone has reacted with a thumbs up, which is the social media equivalent of a pat on the head you give to a dog that has just drooled on your shoe. Precarious times, they say. Times when the common man, the man without the verified badge, without the cheekbones, without the venture capital, without the correct opinions pre-packaged in sustainable wrapping, simply evaporates from the record. History will not remember us. History is too busy watching a billionaire launch a car into space while the rest of us wonder if we can afford the electricity to charge our phones.

So I write. I write because the alternative is to become one of those hollow fellows, those shallow, fallow, facile men who dominate the discourse with their hot takes and their cold hearts, who accost you at parties and in comment sections with their certainty, their smug, polished, market-tested certainty that fits so neatly into a two-hundred-eighty-character coffin. I have a deep suspicion of digestion without rigorous mastication. Swallowing without chewing. Believing without bleeding. The modern condition, if we can call it that, if we can dignify this endless scroll with the name of condition, is a kind of intellectual bulimia, all binge and purge, no nutrient absorbed, just the empty calories of consensus. And the algorithms, those invisible gods we sacrifice our attention to, they love the nodding. They love the smiley. They love the people who agree, who aggregate, who amalgamate into the great beige blob of acceptable opinion. The algorithm does not want you to think. The algorithm wants you to engage, and engagement, in the twisted economics of the attention merchant, is often just a polite word for argument, or worse, agreement.

I cannot afford to reach you. There is no budget for my voice, no marketing department, no SEO strategist tweaking my meta-tags while sipping overpriced coffee in a co-working space that smells of desperation and oat milk. I have hashtags. I have the digital equivalent of standing on a street corner in Calcutta, shouting at the traffic, at the Ambassador cars and the Uber cabs and the cycle rickshaws, shouting into the particulate matter, the PM 2.5, the eternal haze of the city I love and loathe in equal measure, that bipolar affection that mirrors my own chemistry, my own broken brain with its type two turbulence, its hypomanic highs where I think I can change the world with a blog post, and its depressive lows where I know, with the certainty of a theorem, that the world is a toilet and we are all just waiting for the flush. But I digress. Or do I? Digression is the only honest form of progress in a culture that demands linearity, that demands you get to the point, that demands you compress your soul into a bullet point, into a listicle, into a digestible nugget of nothing.

The contrarian view is dead. Or rather, it is alive but screaming in a soundproof room. We live in an age of manufactured consent, not the old-fashioned kind with the printing presses and the party lines, but the new kind, the soft kind, the kind that wears the mask of choice. You can choose anything you want, as long as it is on the menu, and the menu was written by engagement metrics and A/B testing. I started to feel, somewhere between the third cup of tea and the fifth existential crisis of the morning, that I had to tell my story, even if my story is just the story of a man who is not rich, not pretty, not famous, not powerful, just a man with a keyboard and a grievance and a head full of books that nobody reads anymore because reading requires the kind of sustained attention that the algorithm has successfully amputated from the collective consciousness. I cannot represent everyone. I know that. The set of the unrepresented is large, is vast, is a continent of quiet desperation, and I am just one voice, one cracked, croaking, Calcutta voice. But by telling my part, it is a start. A small, pathetic, probably pointless start. But a start.

And you, the few who acknowledge, the few who lean in and say, yes, I hear you, and I want others to hear you too, you are the miracle. You are the exception that proves the rule, the rule being that we are all just talking to ourselves in the dark, masturbating our egos while the house burns down. I retreat to my books. I retreat to my own mind, my own thinking, my own writing, even though I know it is painfully narrow, subjective, emotionally laden, biased, broken, Bengali, bipolar, pick your poison. But these are my thoughts. I am not writing the Wikipedia entry on reality. I am writing the footnotes, the marginalia, the graffiti in the bathroom stall of civilization. And if the graffiti is obscene, if it is scrawled in the greasy ink of my own dysfunctions, well, at least it is honest. At least it is not the smiley face. At least it is not the nod.

The shallow men, the hollow men, they accost me with their opinions, pre-digested, regurgitated, spat into my face like mother bird to chick, except the nutrient is gone, except the nutrient was never there. They have read the headline, not the book. They have swallowed the summary, not the substance. They are the enemies of mastication, the foes of rumination, the adversaries of the slow, painful, necessary work of actually thinking. And thinking, real thinking, is painful. It is a kind of violence against the self, a wrestling match with your own prejudices, your own laziness, your own desperate desire to be liked, to be agreed with, to be part of the beige blob. I choose the pain. Or perhaps the pain chooses me. It is hard to tell, some mornings, whether I am the author of my own alienation or merely its stenographer.

So I write in the raw, in the red, in the bloody mess of the first draft that mirrors the first draft of my own consciousness, unedited, unfiltered, unafraid of the obscenity because the obscenity is the only honest response to a world that has made obscene the very act of paying attention, of caring, of giving a damn when the damn is not monetizable, when the metric is not favorable, when the algorithm turns its cold, glassy eye away from the spectacle of a man trying to think in public. I am not your content. I am not your engagement. I am the scream in the void, and the void, for once, is screaming back.

P.S. The references are the books on my shelf, the voices in my head, and the silence of everyone who scrolled past.