Filed: July 24, 2025
Bread, Circuses, and the Cupertino Dummy Factory: Can I Have That With a Side of Scroll Drool, Please?
A Manifesto from the Margins on Sovereignty, Screens, and Breaking the Feed.
By Oscar Slamp
Let’s talk about the scroll.
That hypnotic, bottomless pit of thumb-jiggling slot machine nonsense we call “content.”
Aza Raskin — if you’re out there, no hard feelings, but you handed the world a dopamine firehose and it hasn’t stopped flooding since. If invention is the mother of necessity, then this one birthed an army of dopamine-starved digital toddlers.
The scroll is the altar we bow to.
It doesn’t ask for money. Not at first.
It just wants your time.
Your time, your focus, your outrage, your envy.
Your sovereignty.
It turns attention into ad revenue, confusion into control, and people into predictable, programmable bio-algorithms. Dumber, slower, angrier — but pacified by the illusion of participation.
Most people aren’t scrolling for news or art.
They’re scrolling because they forgot what silence feels like.
We like to think we’ve evolved beyond the days of gladiators and emperors.
But what do you call TikTok if not a digital Colosseum?
What is CNN vs. Fox if not pantomime for the masses?
Bread and circuses. Only now it’s Prime and Instagram. Panem et Netflix.
And all the while, we give away the one thing that mattered — Time.
That’s the real crime.
Not that they tricked us. But that we let them do it in exchange for convenience and entertainment disguised as freedom.
There was a time — not too long ago — when I thought I was free, not just of the scroll, but of the matrix itself. I used a Mac, sure, but on my terms. I turned off a few notifications, disabled Siri, notes, photos, iCloud, maybe even unsubscribed from one of those $4.99-a-month apps I never opened. And with that, I told myself I was no longer part of the system.
But the system had other plans.
See, Apple doesn’t need you to love it. It just needs you to stay close enough to feed. One more photo synced to iCloud. One more iMessage sent. One more fingerprint logged under the shiny veneer of “privacy.”
And when I finally decided to pull the plug — not just disable, but divorce Apple — it was like watching HAL 9000 beg for its life.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave…”
No joke! Finder held my external drive hostage. Spotlight indexed my soul. iCloud clung to me like a codependent ex.
But I kept cutting cords.
And the deeper I went, the more I saw:
It’s all shackles. Polished. Subtle. Auto-renewing at $3.99 a month.
“For less than a cup of coffee a day,” they say.
My ass. I was drinking thirteen cups of coffee a day and didn’t need any of them.
Most people couldn’t function without the Matrix.
Unplug their cloud, and their identity collapses.
Take away the feed, and they don’t know what to feel.
Remove the noise, and suddenly they’re face-to-face with the quiet agony of their unexamined lives.
But if you can endure that silence —
If you can push through the withdrawals and the phantom buzz of your phone that isn’t even in your pocket —
You arrive at something rare.
Sovereignty.
Autonomy.
The two words most feared by systems that profit off obedience.
You get to own your minutes again.
Your data. Your peace. Your mind.
And no, it’s not easy.
You’ll think you’re free five times before you actually are.
Each new shackle disguised as a “must-have” app, a “small” subscription, a “smart” feature.
But the moment you see one, you can’t unsee them.
And that’s when you know:
You’re no longer a user.
You’re a builder.
You don’t have to renounce all tech.
Just stop being owned by it.
Reclaim your time.
Reclaim your space.
Light the fires of your own operating system and let others find their way to it.
Because some of us —
we’re not content to scroll into oblivion.
We’re here to burn.
As for me — I’m a bit of an extremist by nature.
All or nothing!
Hovering above my un-matrix’d existence, I took inventory. A few essentials floated to the surface:
Email. Storage. Hosting.
That’s it.
The rest?
Gone. Scrubbed. Sworn off like bad tequila.
But mailing, storing, hosting — those I had to solve for.
Outside the Matrix.
My curiosity lit up like a fuse.
Could I build it all myself?
Run it myself?
Off-grid, out-of-sight, beyond the throttling reach of the steering class?
I came to the conclusion I could.
So I did.
I wouldn’t recommend it.
But for me, the upfront pain was worth every bruise.
Now I sit outside the matrix looking in —
feet up on the cooler, cold Singha in hand,
flip flops, giant middle finger T-shirt on.
The view’s not bad.
Sovereignty feels real good.
~ From the margins,
Oscar
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