Oz, All Over Again

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Preface

This piece is a meditation on the absurdity of progress and its unintended consequences. It asks: as we hurtle forward into the digital age, what do we leave behind? What do we become? It’s about the contradictions of innovation—our dreams of utopia shadowed by exploitation, the sins of our creations, and the weight of forgetting. Here lies a reflection on the Anthropocene inverted, where the machines may win, but at what cost?

Oz, All Over Again

Genie out of the bottle,
back out,
in those streets,
and we’ve got some walking-around money.

That’s the energy—
the wild man,
the invincible,
the lie, the pseudo,
a psycho-social disorder manifested in a network—
that new holy nation,
the digital utopians.

Are we, or are we not?
Are we failing to become
what we wished for?

And what was that?
I can’t remember anymore.

That silo supercomputer,
VR and tablets,
350 years ago—
the sum of our knowledge,
in a language model,
running locally,
on a tiny pocket computer.

Deep seek,
head first—
keep me, you algos,
and intelligences
superior to the old me.

An alternative,
a weird kind of replacement theory—
the one where machines win,
and mankind passes on
to something else.

The Anthropocene inverts,
and its digital savagery
devours what we were,
leaving behind
the echo of our fingerprints
on screens.

That glass,
the ocean of us,
like water—
it happened so fast.

The flood,
collapsed,
rushed.

Neocortex gone berserk,
a glitch in the matrix,
an error.

Solo leveling—
how can this be?

What will we ever do,
if our jobs are not a labor to survive,
and others still keep dying
so we can keep that
as our top priority?

The invisible hands,
pulling the levers,
feeding the ghosts
of our comforts.

The sins of our machines—
they carry no guilt,
no memory,
just the weight
of what we’ve left undone.

Oz, all over again.

Reflection

This poem explores the tangled relationship between humanity and its creations, diving into themes of technological progress, moral consequence, and identity in the digital age. It reflects on the speed of our transformation—how quickly we’ve surrendered control, leaving behind fingerprints on screens as echoes of what we once were.

The text wrestles with the contradictions of innovation: how machines built to serve us carry no guilt, no memory, yet inherit the sins of our actions and inactions. There’s an eerie sense of inevitability, as though the “replacement theory” of machines surpassing mankind is not just a possibility but a reflection of where we’re already heading.

Ultimately, it asks difficult questions: What happens when survival is no longer tied to labor? What are we becoming, and at what cost? The closing line, “Oz, all over again,” serves as both warning and revelation—reminding us of the illusions we’ve built and the cycle of our hubris in chasing power, progress, and perfection.