My Enemy

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My enemy is food porn paired with microwave pizza
AI lovers and confidants and sweet nothings through earbuds
Validation of your beliefs through quantifiable reactions
Love loss and caring transmitted through a phone buzz
My enemy is politics of posts polling pundits not policy
Debates through dunk retweets and endless sycophancy
Falling for algorithms designed to optimize idiocy
Engagement maximized through hatewatching ecstasy
My enemy is endless background television shows
Reposting content mills on tiktok and its clones
Predictive personalization sorted people into rows
Predictable personalities refined people into drones
My enemy is consensus pop music everywhere
Relatability and catchiness regressed to profit chances
Who desires art that requires interpretation
When digestible lyrics come prepackaged with dances
My enemy is endless substacks on clickbait and nonsense
Vague pretty prose painted as insight and advice
Episteme is only earned with blood sweat and tears
Real metis requires rolling the dice
My enemy is podcasts pacifying loneliness
Constant stimulus demeaning solitude
If being alone with your thoughts begets feelings of isolation
Contact the friends that brighten your mood
My enemy is science for citations and funding rounds
Prestige drunk imbeciles polluting sacred grounds
We let pass little tricks that poison the well
And judge what is true by the noise of the yell
Like a drink these things can sooth in moderation
Like a drink these things can turn into a crutch
We each need to perform a rigorous ablation
Lest backlit silicates become all that we touch
Don't you taste it in the air? The hunger, the zeal?
The fervor for anything, oh anything that's real?
Your thirst can be quenched, I promise, I swear
But only if you don't sate it with an optimized snare
Here's a soundbyte, endless content, syrup, and oil
Here's airpods, mobile data plans, set it all to a boil
Here's like counts, and view counts, you're never getting off the ride
Watch your mind and body die as sweetness kills you from inside
As much as truth and honesty compels me to commit
That I love sugar and these pleasures as much as any twit
I am so far from moderation and so beholden to excess
That I name Ersatz my enemy and its death as my success