Cyberspace was never really about jacking in. Not anymore. It’s not somewhere you go. It’s something you carry. In your attention span. In your fragmented memory. In the compulsion to scroll even when you’re numb. We live inside a quiet loop now, one that doesn’t demand passwords or retinal scans. It just waits for you to reach for it. And we always do.
The interface is blurred. The hardware is invisible. We’ve absorbed it, or maybe it’s absorbed us. We’re not using devices. We’re entangled with them. And that’s the shift no one really talks about. The resistance didn’t vanish. It just went quiet. Underground, not out of strategy, but necessity. Call it the apocalypse if you want, but it doesn’t matter. It’s already here, and it looks like everything is working just fine. (Imagine that, an apocalypse in which everything works…)
We are already doubled. Already unreliable. We don’t have to plug into networks to lose ourselves. We’re already fragmented. Already nodes. Like imagination. Like creativity. Like the escapism we still harbor, sharpened into something with a sharp end. Diametrically dull at the other. We build these worlds inside ourselves, then try to make them real. Not to escape—but to survive. And sometimes, to fight back.
The problem isn’t that we forgot how to be heroic. It’s that the myth of heroism got outsourced, packaged, and endlessly rebooted. We were taught to look for greatness in others, in pre-written arcs, in headlines and leaderboards. But real resistance doesn’t scale like that. It happens in private. In how you answer a message. In how you spend your last hour of energy. In what you choose not to share.
Creativity still matters. The signal gets through, even if it’s faint. Even if it’s passed hand to hand in a community too small to trend. There’s power in the page only ten people read, if two of them carry it forward. That’s how culture survives fragmentation… not by going viral, but by going deep. Beneath the noise. Beneath the algorithm.
This is not a call to disconnect. It’s a call to repurpose. To use the tools differently. To build subroutines of meaning inside a system trained to drain it. That kind of work won’t be seen by millions. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the future isn’t about scale. Maybe it’s about fidelity.
Cyberpunk used to ask what it means to be human in a system that doesn’t care. Now it asks how to stay human when you can’t tell where you end and the system begins. The code you’re trying to crack isn’t the machine. It’s yourself.
And maybe that’s the most dangerous story left. One where hope feels out of place—and therefore worth something. Where the glitch isn’t in the tech, but in the way you still care. Still imagine. Still reach.
So go save the world, if that’s what you’re called to do.
But don’t forget to save yourself.
If you want a hero’s journey. Be your own hero. Dare you.
