The World We Live In

 by Steven Craig Hickman

    It’s the global theatre of the grotesque, a carnival where every mask has started to melt. You can’t even parody it anymore; satire requires distance, and the world’s running on close-ups. The ICE raids, the hollow populism, the techno-despot smiles, each is just a different costume for the same exhaustion. Power has become performance art, endlessly replaying tropes it no longer believes in: the strongman, the savior, the patriot, the victim.

  Trump lurches through it like an animatronic nostalgia act, pure algorithmic id. Putin’s the relic monarch, ironed flat by his own mythology. Xi grins because he knows the script better than the rest; he’s directing his version of the same play on a bigger stage. The whole spectacle feels embalmed, politics as necromancy; leaders animated by old ideologies long past rigor mortis.

  Meanwhile, the real horror throbs impatiently in the infrastructure: servers drawing more power than cities, borders patrolled by drones, economies coded into self-reinforcing loops. The chaos on the surface is just noise from a civilization being run by its own automated metabolism. The immigrants, the politicians, the tyrants: all of them are actors trapped in a story that’s already been outsourced to the machine.

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