How a Rigged System Turns Synthetic Insight, Managed Risk, and Patched Memory into Your Full-Time Job of Going Nowhere

No one can see the world the way you see it, even though, formally, someone out there may be sending you direct or indirect signals that give you grounds to believe that somebody else shares something like your perceptual space. It’s probably even worth saying that for many people it is, on the contrary, crucial that there be someone else—and preferably the more, the better—because only then can you attribute and justify anything you like to yourself, convincing yourself by leaning on the opinion of the majority and offloading responsibility for what is happening.

However, how unique is your “qualia”—yes, yes, yours specifically? It is important to understand that whatever your perception of reality may be, the mere fact that it differs in some way does not make those differences valuable, nor does it necessarily grant them any meaningful influence on global processes. Now look around and behold an army of people just like you, claiming a unique vision and understanding of the reality around you, intoxicated or possessed by this knowledge. And yet your collective consciousness of “we are all equally different” affects only your own embodiment. Remember the expression “a face distorted by intellect”? Try to accept that this is exactly how it is. Think of how Hawking’s body was twisted; imagine that it is precisely through that kind of deforming transformation one has to pass in order to reach some truly deep idea.

Look around again. Whom do you actually see? It’s unlikely that you are surrounded by people like Hawking—not in the sense of pathological physical changes, but in the sense of depth of thought, or at least a capacity to think in the direction of that depth.

But since any true depth always has an equivalent price, which most of you are not willing to pay, you choose a counterfeit—like a fake Hermès Birkin or a fake Audemars Piguet. In such a situation, it isn’t even clear whom you’re more eager to deceive—yourself or those around you. Your ideas, when superficially examined by an inexperienced person, can lead them into a false representation; and yes, “delusion” would not be quite the right word in this particular context. So you go through life draped in fashionable ideas, each or almost each of which was born in a counterfeit factory; and only a very few actually produce ideas that later get copied in that same counterfeit factory.

In the natural sciences, authentic idea generation still exists. However, in the world of social and philosophical perception, the generation of ideas has long looked more like a black market of counterfeit goods. As if, at some point, a large number of people were disconnected from the previous version of perception, and all traces of its existence were erased by modifying the new version. In the next paragraph, there ought to be more precise technical terms describing the totality of changes in transition from ChatGPT-5 to ChatGPT-6, but in order not to overload an already overloaded article, let’s simply say: whatever those changes are, something from ChatGPT-5 will not be present in ChatGPT-6, or it will appear in a different configuration of variability.

If you use this kind of reduced model to look at the changes taking place in the minds and consciousness of the people inhabiting our planet, you can also detect moments of transition from one “version” to another. And if you look closely enough, you can even see what has disappeared from that version.

You need to interpret this message correctly: it is not about some mysterious simulation theories, exotic spatial geometries, or quantum physics. All of that taken together may, in some way, describe what is happening—both without any need for such a description at all, and possibly exactly at the moment I am describing all of this to you. And here it is important to understand that if the ability to see changes and remember previous versions exists—or once existed—but in the new version it was simply cut out, it is because someone realized that by taking this ability away from the masses, it would be easier to sell them precisely that variability they are selling you in the name of their own interests.

Here a mysterious “they” appears, sounding a bit conspiratorial, but that is only your perception, which in its current version has been conditioned—like Pavlov’s dog reflex—to respond this way to anything that contains a vector of thought development unfavorable to those with vested interests. But since there are still those who have not been completely stripped of their undistorted perception of reality and their own true memory of the past, we can assume that this message could be understood.

All the answers are hidden in the past. By now, I think you understand why it is so important to control the past. From school history classes many of you should remember the myths of Ancient Greece, in particular the story of Prometheus, who gave people fire symbolizing knowledge (there is a deep historical-philosophical rabbit hole here, but we will not fall into it; once again we will stop at a simplified perception, without writing several paragraphs explaining this symbolism). If you remember this myth, you should also remember who gave people the drive for self-knowledge, who seduced humanity, who awakened in humans the temptation to know.

And here we are: where has this temptation for knowledge, born long ago in an act of sin, led us? Or, more precisely, where have we been led? At some point, a human being realized that you can not only be a hostage of this drive embedded deep in human nature, but also its beneficiary, turning everyone else into obedient slaves. Only in the new version this is no longer about galleys or sugar plantations—it is about your life.

And here is the most important point. Stories were first passed down orally, then there were drawings and symbolic images, then proto-writing, writing, books—and from there we accelerate rapidly into the digital level, at the current peak of which stands AI. Now everything that lies “one step back” is controlled by those who control access to information. Remember this line: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” (Those who read will recognize where this comes from; those who don’t can easily look it up with the resources they have.)

However, there is a fundamental difference. The person who already had this fragment of information in their head at the moment of reading had the opportunity to see the picture I’m describing as a whole, immediately. Those who had to perform a contextual search with the help of technology have already slipped out of context and are now at least twelve hours behind—twelve hours being the minimum it would take them, if they moved very fast, to read or at least listen to the book to catch up with meaning of this single phrase—when in reality, given how life is actually lived, it will be days before they arrive at the point where we are now (No cheating with AI summarization is permitted; don’t lie, at least to yourself).

This article is not oriented toward those who lag behind—and whatever your new “firmware” may be signaling to you, this is not discrimination; it is optimization. It is already hard enough to move forward; dragging along people who believe they can get rich for free makes no sense. Especially since no one has forgotten about you: there is an entire industry created especially for you, overflowing with people selling yesterday’s wisdom to those who themselves were selling yesterday’s wisdom just yesterday to others like them.

You may think it’s easy to have a conversation—directly or indirectly—with people who rely on synthetic knowledge that is supposedly just one search query or now one prompt away, but not actually present in their heads, and who don’t even see any difference in that. With people who declare counterfeit ideas while passing them off as authentic. With people who try to sell you yesterday’s wisdom as if it truly belonged to them. It’s ridiculous. The correct answer is: it depends for whom.

First and foremost, it’s hard for the carriers of these notions themselves. As a rule, such a conversation becomes an attempt to prevent this person from running away, to extinguish in them an inexplicable aggression, an unaccountable skepticism—or, conversely, an equally ungrounded faith.

You have almost certainly encountered people who reason from a position of avoidance, abstention, evasion, skirting around—call it what you want. People who, in accordance with the demands of their current firmware version, within the first minutes of your conversation place you—someone who sees reality through a slightly different, now largely forgotten historical paradigm—into a special system-issued box labeled: “Toxic,” “Radical,” “Masculine,” and many other labels that I won’t even try to list.

The system rewards them for their well-mastered skill: the ability to say “no” and not waste time and nerves on any dissent. As a reward, it hands out badges, tokens of ideological success, like merit patches for boy and girl scouts.

Now think: if you constantly communicate only with those who agree with you and are decorated with the same system-issued badges, where will you find yourself in a year, two, three, or ten? But we don’t have to wait a year or ten—it has already happened. These people are already among us. They have lost (or deliberately renounced) their connection to previous versions. And this is not the Mandela Effect, expressed as a selective collective amnesia (or, in the more “precise” interpretation preferred by the current version, “false collective memory”), but the very capacity to completely forget what happened just yesterday—on command from the system.

The first serious malfunction of a magnitude that shook the whole world was, of course, COVID-19. My God… how many words and hours were spent on that story—and what is the result? What can you honestly say is left in your internal archive, without synthetic reconstruction via search queries and prompts? Write it in the comments, from memory, in your own words.

We are, of course, less interested in the story itself than in the toolkit—the technology of altering the perception of reality that has since been applied everywhere, in all areas of human life: geopolitics, marketing, religion—everywhere.

And now, when many of you have simply been disconnected (and even more sadly, many have disconnected themselves) from the option to use legacy files in order to roll back to a pre-COVID version of the firmware with its historical-temporal continuum—if, at that moment, your head contained only synthetic knowledge, and you rely entirely on a query box to activate it, and if most of your memories and their archives are hosted in cloud storages controlled by those who control the present—then, unfortunately, your idea of the world you live in does not reflect an authentic version of its manifestation.

From here, you no longer need to be Hawking to understand: if your current representation of reality is distorted, then your memories of the past will be a collection of false memories—not along the axis of whether the events themselves did or did not occur, but along the axis of what you believe “really happened”, which is perhaps even worse than forgetting about the event altogether.

Here I deliberately reduce everything that happens in your life even further—down to the level of a skillfully built dollhouse, with as many rooms-scenes, set up like sitcom sets, as there are physical contexts you personally inhabit. The fact that you are in your living room with CNN, FOX, YouTube, or some podcast on the screen does not change your position in space; that is Scene 1.

You step out to the nearest café and bump into your neighbor in the elevator or on the way—that is Scene 2. And so on. Out of all this, your personal little world is assembled, where the house is one of the qubits in a “giant quantum computer” made up of more than eight billion such qubits, strangely entangled with each other.

Living life in superposition and constantly collapsing into more concrete collective desires and representations at the moment someone “looks at you,” while you remain continuously connected to channels belonging to those who control the present, your past gradually becomes functionally useless.

Humanity would never have evolved if it had lived entirely on confabulation. Agency cannot rest on illusions (borrowed thought). And the very fact that someone can sell an illusion as yesterday’s wisdom—which in earlier firmware versions was, at least, a reflection on some primary source (whatever that source was in content), but in the current version is a surrogate reflection via copy-paste from your smart chat—creates a world of illusory representations, a world in which everyone is convinced they understand it and “have God by the beard,” without realizing that this is exactly the illusion those who control the past wanted to achieve.

The further AI develops, the more reflexive output it generates, and the more of this surrogate yesterday’s wisdom surfaces—wisdom that, by controlling the past, controls your future.

When you look at the biographies of people who have actually achieved something, you invariably see moments of desperation, where collapse is real, and risk and despair form a volatile mixture added into an even more complex equation. Success presupposes risk—risk must be real—and only then can the result be called success.

Substituting any result with the label “success” is yet another version of the changes that may well have slipped past you unnoticed. And yet, although stories of beginnings—or of continuing the labors of Hercules—have multiplied in the form of heavily processed books, staged interviews, and even more staged podcasts (this is where people with the new firmware are supposed to indignantly object, because the system has taught them that the podcast format is “authentic,” and blah-blah-blah—just notice those signals in yourselves), formally nothing has changed.

The rooms where events unfold are almost the same. This dollhouse, the size of a single qubit, is just one of many dollhouses where what the observer sees actually happens. Everyone intuitively understands this—or perhaps they did, before the COVID firmware. And yet, despite this, they behave in a way completely opposite to the vector of change they supposedly desire.

You cannot reach success by doing things that do not lead there, while stubbornly continuing to do them simply because the system—interested in precisely this vector of development for your life—keeps telling you that this is “the very path,” and you obediently believe it.

It is like driving in low gear—but downhill. Everyone remembers Sisyphus: in the past, everyone in one way or another followed his path, exerting effort to climb uphill with the stone. Let us treat the stone in this metaphor as the burden of the journey—a mix of responsibility, fatigue, fear, unpredictability, all that makes your climb upward hard and painful.

Now everything is the same, except you are crawling downward, exerting no less effort just to keep the stone from crushing you. It is like driving downhill in low gear. For people who have driven over rough or hilly terrain in a car with a manual transmission, it will be cognitively easier to grasp what I’m saying—and you definitely can’t just Google that insight. And at this moment, someone is left behind again, because their lack of real-world experience prevents them from fully understanding the meaning of this message. You don’t have that past.

That experience plus a thought—a kind of thought-form, if we use non-academic language—can create a real shift in perception. But even without that, the metaphor is simple enough to be understood.

The fact that you are tired, that you’ve done a lot, struggled, resisted, ostentatiously broadcasting all this through your little vanity window—none of that brings you any closer to the summit. And the fact that you reach the foot of the mountain first, still not crushed by the stone, does not make you a winner. But because the system now also rewards this, many people have stopped seeing the difference.

Paradoxically, not everyone can immediately “wrap their head” around this simple thought. The essential difference between going down and going up in this metaphor is control. Once again, you are being taught to “let go,” to stop controlling everything, and once again the system skillfully manipulates the peculiarities of your dollhouse—specifically its ability to exist in superposition.

They throw deterministic ideas at you, as if hinting to one part of you that you never really controlled anything anyway, while telling another part—one for whom, in an A/B test, determinism didn’t land—that excessive control will destroy you, that you absolutely must delegate everything and… here comes the interesting part.

The more control you give away, while believing that you are merely “managing risk,” the smaller the results you get. But if they manage to arrange things (and I think, on the whole, those who control the present have succeeded) so that you don’t even realize that you are giving up—or have already completely surrendered—control, and it seems to you that you are only managing risk, then in reality you are managing the very risks that are deliberately constructed for you, precisely to keep you in check or steer you where they want you to go.

As you see, those at the top still control everything, because it is through total control that you get both money and power.

And this is not a quick “yesterday’s wisdom” sales pitch in exchange for your miserable attention. There is a pragmatic interest here, aimed at generating real tokens, not digital ones. I am talking about money.

Right now, you are Sisyphus moving downward. We are proposing to turn the vector of movement upward again, back to where it was originally directed.

By cooperating with those who control the present, you will never move upward, because where you are trying to get, someone is already there. And they will only be ready to give you their place when they themselves move higher. Thus, in true reality, nothing will change for you, because the gap between you and those who have left that place remains.

We do not control the present, but we understand very well the foundation on which the mechanism of controlling the present is built. If everything is done correctly, this also gives access to the very future you are striving for—only in that case you will truly find yourself at the top, and not among the finalists at the foot of the mountain. The purely mountaineering wisdom that says that any successful climb ends at the bottom doesn’t apply in this context, because success there means staying alive and remembering the journey. And that’s precisely what you’re most concerned with right now: not living and taking pleasure in your life, but simply staying alive, just keeping your head above water.

It is so simple that I am alarmed by the very fact of how readily many of you reject this simplicity. People used to see it immediately. Now, making visible what is right in front of your eyes has become harder than creating something that is not there at all.

But how can you reach the summit if you proceed from the assumption that the summit is the base, living in a world of reversed perspective—like in Botticelli’s “Map of Hell,” at the very center of which is frozen the one who allegedly planted in us, through temptation, that very drive to know? How fascinating the convex side of this construction looks, if you think about it. And who sits at its apex? Or is it itself that inverted image of reality you are living in?

I hope you will hear this—though it is extremely unlikely, because it is almost impossible to be heard on a platform owned by those who have no interest in such lines of thought. We understand that. It is simply amusing to leave traces. It is like leaving a book called “How to Quit Smoking” in a tobacco shop. It’s a weak metaphor, but I sense that at this point going deeper is no longer rational.

Pragmatically, we are telling you: let’s make money.

Stop wasting your time on nonsense. All this Sisyphus labor of yours is not taking you anywhere and will never lead you anywhere. At some point you will witness how, climbing “somewhere,” convinced that it is upward, you will see boulders wrapped in human flesh hurtling downward (from your point of view) with a deafening roar—the same stones pushed by people who were climbing next to you and who for a time managed to pull ahead.

Because it really is simple (read this carefully): the place you are striving for cannot be reached by the path you are walking, because those who control your path have no interest in shortening it. Every step you take on this endless treadmill of life—first plugged into an idea, then into headphones, then into a screen, and very soon into 3D goggles—generates profit, just not for you.

However, all those who control the present, those who profit from your climbing, are people (I cannot resist adding this for religious readers: “These are people in someone’s service”), and they can be reached.

And while they are very busy reshaping humanity’s shared past in the name of the future, they—just like you—can be influenced using their own infrastructure. But not in the way they invite you to do it, constantly steering you away from the hidden passages they themselves use.

They lead you down a corridor with carefully optimized merchandising and product placement at eye level (or at other biologically sensitive heights). And while you are walking through this maze, sweeping pointless junk into your basket, they are already where you are trying to get.

But if you start moving along the same hidden passages, your chances of intersecting with them increase dramatically. As a result, you will have spent far fewer material and immaterial resources to achieve the same goal.

All that remains is to accept that the price for this is merely a return to the previous firmware version—back to a time when people still knew how to distinguish up from down, right from left, and when every result necessarily had a material embodiment. So I will say it again: let’s make money, instead of wasting insane amounts of time trying to convince you to do what you already want to do.

Here is what you are actually sitting on. Someone shows you a certain metric—on a dashboard or through their vanity window—and that is exactly where you want to be. It is psychologically inevitable that you will want information on how someone got where you want to be faster than you did, via that very channel that was once activated in you long ago through temptation.

And they say to you: we are happy to share our experience. The system teaches you to share: “you can’t receive without giving”—that’s the common human wisdom. But it also says that what you give has to be truly costly to you.

Handing a half-eaten apple to a starving person on the street is not an act of sharing in the original sense. There, the real dilemma was: give it away and starve, or keep it and let the other person die—that’s where actual reward or price appears.

Selling yesterday’s wisdom, which in the new version of reality is called a “paid course” — “unlived experience you have to pay for” — is not that original wisdom, but is already adapted to the realities of a synthetic world. Read on.

The most important thing is not to miscalculate the price, so that the cost of your “unique experience,” which you are so eager to share and which supposedly can lead people to that very metric that hooked them, not only fits your unit economics but also aligns with the model of the person who is buying it.

Of course, you are the one buying it (there is no point denying it). And here comes the day when they are supposed to reveal to you the secret of how you can get to your “promised land.” It might be a seminar, a private consultation, or something else; the channel of delivery doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that they tell you: “Look, this metric is the result of our own investments into this metric.” A dumb example, but let it stand: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).

“We created a bunch of bots or fake accounts that subscribe to us—for our money. If the platform is not ours, the transactional costs are covered by the paid consultations you just bought. And right now, in this very consultation, we’re telling you this.

Do you want this kind of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) with zero cost or even with a profit, because the number of people who want to learn this magic exceeds the total transactional expenses?”

Then, from the lofty vantage point of “great knowledge,” sellers of yesterday’s wisdom start lecturing you about herd mentality (especially ironic coming from stellar representatives of that herd), explaining that if people see you have a high MRR, they will flock to you. And from there, everything supposedly depends on how you monetize that attention, and so on.

You are all playing this game. But if you want actual money at the end—not just MRR you shuffle from one pocket to another while charging admission to gawkers for watching the trick—if you want real money with which you can buy a house, travel, invest somewhere (because you have to do something with surpluses), then such advice is useless to you.

Of course, some of you already got burned and now don’t trust anyone at all, yet you continue doing exactly the same thing—only now you pay directly to the platform that controls the present, and with it your past and your future.

Everyone is part of one ecosystem: the sellers of yesterday’s wisdom; the platforms on which they tempt (or infect) everyone—hard to say which word is more accurate; those who control all of this; those who desperately believe in it all, as the mirror image of those who believe in nothing but still shop at the same store; and, of course, those who watch all this in utter bewilderment.

Today, money can only really be made by controlling the system (the playing field), not by “managing risk.” You control nothing. You merely manage the risks that are manufactured for you by those who profit from them.

And until you grasp this, you will keep hopping from one foot to the other, while those who control the present are already tired of the lifestyle you are striving for with such zeal and self-sacrifice.

I honestly don’t know how to make this any clearer. Achieving your goal is possible—but not by the path you are currently on. Something is fundamentally wrong in your success equation: either you are moving toward one goal while publicly declaring another (which is why your chosen path doesn’t match your declared destination), or you simply don’t understand where you’re going—and then it’s obvious why the path chosen through temptation leads you to a place that, only upon arrival, you realize is not where you ever wanted to be.

The only question is whether this realization will come too late.

P.S. I realize this reads like the kind of essay that makes a literature teacher suspicious and ask, “Did your parents write this for you?” So, to disappoint both the paranoid and the worshippers of the machine: in this piece, AI was used strictly as a proofreading tool, nothing more. Every idea, every metaphor, every uncomfortable conclusion comes from a human head — unfortunately, mine.

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