This is supposed to be fiction, right. Here we go.

Look what our sense of humour has devolved to. I laughed at a anthropomorphic rabbit kicking an anthropomorphic egg towards the camera today. I couldn’t stop giggling. Every time I watched the looping video, it was tracked. Every time I paused and hovered over content, my pause was logged, analyzed, sold to paying companies.

Everything is decontextualized, re-contextualized, remixed, and repurposed for a new narrative. Isn’t it great? Isn’t this media literacy? We’re finally reading ‘into’ everything, treating everything as a text, a statement, an opinion, and a deliberate choice. By letting ‘virtual’ reality become such a large part of analogue reality, we’ve questioned the notion of reality itself. Everything is recorded and reused. People are still trying to make sense of every individual comment, smile, characteristic, and silence. Copyrights are ignored, the line between personal and professional has been eliminated, and yet we are forced to continue engaging in the virtual by economic and socio-cultural demands.

Texts are not just read into, they’re being reused. Peace sign in a photo? You risk having your fingerprint stolen. Selfie with window catch-lights? You risk tipping off a stalker to your location. Have a built-in camera and microphone on your device? You risk having someone turn it on, watch you, and listen. Have an A.I. personal assistant? Your conversations are always being recorded, anyway. Be in too many photos and you risk having your identity stolen. Speak too much and you risk having words literally put in your mouth. Share your preferences, hobbies, routines, and they will be recorded, commodified, and used by strangers for their own gain.

Oh, right. This was supposed to be fiction.

A meme from the early 2000s that circulated on social media. The image is a commentary on how English teachers in the West extract symbolism from minute details in texts and expect students to do the same. This meme suggests that the extracted symbolism only has value if it consciously included by the author.