Syndicated Vindication
A profound shift in the human experience.
Television was once everything: a sanctuary and a friend where a ten-year-old girl could hide from the cruelty of the world. It dazzled and mesmerized, with voices leaking into the mind late at night, shaping the architecture of dreams. It was a shared fantasy of glowing glass, wherein kings and knights from a time long forgotten were witnessed by those unaware they were falling awake inside carefully arranged illusions. The era of cable was a lightning bolt placed behind the velvet ropes of syndication. A segregated power that sowed and reaped the energy of the people through an emotional lens. A show so well done, it kept the masses comforted enough to sit in stillness before the flood.
In the true age of kings, decrees were read from scrolls by heralds. Later, they arrived through faces behind glass. These voices informed the people of seemingly all known knowns. The cost of things, the weather, the violence, the peace. They screeched in synchronized tones of where bombs had fallen, and why no one had been consulted. They blurred the dead, softened the living, and edited dissent into palatable shapes. They dressed themselves in gemstone hues so their skin would glow correctly through the screen, and they instructed the global citizens on how to live. The people did more than listen. They loved, they longed. They learned how to grieve when a fictional animal cried in a frozen field. They knew how to experience loss through animation, and how to carry that ache back into their own lives. They blissfully merged into the script.
Eventually, the calm became the storm. Eyes went from occasionally peering up at giants in darkness, to a perpetual state of looking down into the light of palms. As the gaze dropped, the camera became a permanent extension of the hand. Suspension of disbelief gave way to constant exposure: a living newsreel where performance and reality collapsed into the same frame. Audiences became the acts; broadcasting themselves in fragments, as the idea of a high trust society lingered like a family memory on an empty couch. The glass sanctuary disappeared, replaced by a proliferation of screens that colonized attention, turning life itself into a continuous transmission.
Then, after decades of being told that everything on the screen was permanent, the signal broke. The networks dissolved. The public layer collapsed into white noise. An Agartha erased. Forbidden memories overturned by constant revelation… and they called this vindication. However, the systems did not disappear, only the executives. All the people had were mouths to tunnels they were never meant to enter. Corridors built long before the audience was invited to watch. While the visible screens fractured and multiplied, those who ran the production moved elsewhere, through structures the public never occupied. Those who come after, holding their own vessels of light, will feel the same paralysis when their Atlantis ends. Transfixed by color and disclosure, they will be unaware of the worlds that preceded them, just like those who came before.
Amazing. Had to read multiple times. Depressed every time I’m reminded of the old high trust society.