To a certain degree, I think consciousness ended up being a wound for us. You see, there are things I would rather no longer see, but I don’t even have the luxury of blindness anymore. I am condemned to see what is happening, and I have seen it all. Little by little, I have watched Man fall.

What is ironic is that none of our science fiction films, not even the big Hollywood productions, anticipated correctly what would happen. I remember, back then, everyone could feel that something was brewing, oh yes. We thought it would come from the climate, from disruptions in the biosphere or from a disease, why not from the technological inflation of AI or from a nuclear war. The usual things, let’s say. But all that, all that was far too big. The truth turned out to be much more insidious. Man did not destroy himself. He negated himself, which may be considerably worse when you think about it. Everyone thought we would end in a grand finale that would at least aspire to tragic “grandeurs,” but even that, we could not seem to manage.

If you remember, everything accelerated in the early 2020s. We had reached a critical threshold: the widespread use of recommendation algorithms, the diversion of desire. A sort of cognitive capitalism. All that, you know it well, we were all right in the middle of it without seeing it. We started creating immense tunnels of realities in which we placed several generations of people in a row. But the effects of those tunnels, we had no idea how far they would go. Literally, without anyone grasping its scale at the time, we anesthetized the consciousness of hundreds of millions of human beings around the globe.

We slowly, but mechanically, destroyed all the preconditions for the development of a functioning and critical mind. Dopamine, endless content, dwindling attention, psychomotor development reduced to a minimum… I remember thinking that all this was so frightening. We managed to reverse the spiralling process of growing human consciousness on a general scale, an industrial one, I would even say, and all that in less than 10 years from the early 2020s. We created a new human type, without seeing it, without admitting it.

I was in my twenties when all this really began, and I remember already feeling that shift. I had the impression that a good half of the people my age I came across were as if asleep, or something like that. At the time, well, it was just a vague feeling. On the surface, everything was fairly normal, but when I came into contact with them, well, it was as if part of their mind had a slight lag. I would have trouble explaining it to you precisely. It was as if someone had switched on a perfectly functional form of autopilot in them, one that made them impeccably adapted to their immediate environment, but any departure from it would crash the machine.

With them, any deviation from the usual neural pathways, through disruption, through a turn in the conversation, through novelty, provoked a kind of apathy, an incredulous widening of the eyes. And I spent a good part of my life afterwards documenting and observing this phenomenon. A phenomenon that was in fact a process, but that, at the time, well, I hadn’t the slightest idea of.

Back then, I often reacted with anger regarding this, pissing off some people around me, surely. I had a feeling I was making a huge drama over very little, and that, deep down, humans had always had a somewhat automatic mode, more or less switched on depending on the era, that all this was normal and, deep down, not all that alarming.

But the more the years went by, the more the process seemed to accelerate. The predictions I had made were outstripped by reality, by a long way. I saw more and more utterly aberrant things around me. Reality quickly surpassed my fiction of an imaginary ego. What was initially meant to be fiction became a study, then a documentary, then a resistance journal. My phantasmagorical anxiety became my life, life itself, as if I were painting reality against my will.

I would say that from 2030 onward, we began entering a tunnel with no way back. A whole section of humanity had set in motion a phase of psychic devolution, or something like that. At least, that’s how I had imagined it at the time. Dopaminergic inflation and the entertainment society reached such deadly efficiency that they ended up splitting humanity in two. On one side, we had the devolving “algorithmized”,, and on the other, those somewhat on borrowed time, worried (and lucky?).

And we, we knew when we were talking to an algorithmized person, because we could clearly see that their level of abstraction was getting lower and lower, that their emotional reactions were becoming more and more primitive and inappropriate, more and more caricatural. We could feel a gulf opening up, something gigantic and ugly, putrid. And it wasn’t just a matter of education, intelligence or any of the words we could have used at the time. No, it was far worse than that. It was a matter of consciousness, as if we were dealing with another human type. And that gulf, nothing could bridge it. It wasn’t just devolution, it was a deviation of human consciousness that we were watching, helpless. It was as if, as a species, our consciousness had shifted to another dimension.

But all that, ALL that, we didn’t dare talk about it, except perhaps sometimes among ourselves, in half-spoken words. We were afraid of coming across as reactionaries, or pedantic elitists, or worse, madmen. So we said nothing. At the time, I had not understood that self-censorship paved the way for madness. I was convinced I was on the side of “Good”, as I watched people around me melt on the spot, all while giving them hearty, encouraging pats on the back. I thought I had to stay well-behaved and avoid setting anyone’s teeth on edge at all costs. Perhaps that was my greatest mistake: being conciliatory rather than being truthful.

So I said nothing. I watched, like a coward. I watched several generations in a row regress in vocabulary and in their ability to express themselves, without saying a word. I watched young people become more and more imprisoned in their damaged inner worlds, with no way out, prisoners of their dysfunctional consciousness. I watched the slow and miserable death spasm of humans who had almost nothing human left, but who had become receptacles for influence, who grunted or used more or less primitive onomatopoeias and emojis as their last means of communication. I saw with my own eyes millions of sorrowful human beings, and nobody said anything, nobody did anything. Everyone fell silent.

Humanity organized its own devolution. Vulgarity, aggression, and domination exploded everywhere. Modern (clinical) psychology could do nothing, because it was using tools designed for beings with an awareness, however minimal, of themselves. And as we sank deeper into the abyss, it had less impact on our behavior and words. Incomprehension and the impoverishment of expression rendered four centuries of exploration of the human mind obsolete in barely 20 or 30 years. Words became insurmountable barriers. By continually flattering what was most primitive in us, well, we all ended up taking refuge in it and being satisfied with it. That’s all, it’s as simple as that. We became idiotic, stupid, simple.

After all, now I realize it and it seems very clear to me: why would you expet us, as a species, to keep striving toward a form of excellence and awakening if a primitive mediocrity made us beings perfectly adapted to and integrated into an automated society? Everything that serves no purpose inevitably atrophies and disappears. Nature does not preserve, it optimizes. And that applies to your toes, but also to your consciousness. Except that, as far as the latter is concerned, well, the process is fast, much faster than anything we had imagined. Devolution took place over a few decades at most, and that, nobody had anticipated.

Consciousness had become unnecessary for our survival as a species. We no longer needed to think or to be aware of ourselves, to handle concepts, or, obviously, to forge new ones. The environment had become soft, accommodating, adapted, perfectly adapted. The phenomenon of consciousness consumes a considerable amount of energy within the human structure. So, as soon as we no longer needed it, well, it began to atrophy. It had done its job. We had algorithms, the belief in unlimited availability of energy, delivery services, and endless entertainment. So we were almost bored, we were all almost too intelligent for our ways of life. The generalized melancholy was an alarm signal that nobody saw. So nature did what it does best: it corrected its course, it adapted. From dinosaurs to chickens, I’ll leave you to imagine the rest.

In 2060, humans under 40 all had chronic difficulties expressing their inner states. Every day, language was growing poorer at a dizzying speed. I came to think that consciousness always follows language, that the two are intimately linked. Words are the images of the mind. The average number of everyday words used by an adult thus fell in less than 10 years from a rough average of 4000 words for an adult to 2000 words, and every year, the the gulf keeps deepening. The “word,” properly speaking, is the phenomenon of human consciousness. That is what nobody had precisely understood at the time. The primitivization of consciousness began with the radical impoverishment of vocabulary. Stupidity followed, and the end of beauty too. All of it formed a clammy atmosphere, the clammy atmosphere of the end of a reign.

The Kali Yuga, in its final quadrant, strips man of the use of words and locks him up, locks him up in his own Promethean secretions gone mad, seemingly relieving him of the need to speak or to conceive in favor of repetitive algorithmic consent. You had to be there. You had to see them, see us. You had to walk the streets, prick up your ears. Everything was clear to the discerning eye, everything that was and everything that would come.

On top of all that, AI developed, of course, but it didn’t have to go very far. We left it all the room. Technology could almost have stagnated and the result would have been the same. We left it all the room.

I’m talking to you, reader, about language, but it goes without saying that sensibility, the entire range of second- and 3rd-order feelings, was swept away. Sincere love, contemplative happiness, empathy, argumentative and maieutic thought, poetry: all of it was completely swept from the spectrum of reality. Pleasure, displeasure, dominating or bowing one’s head, taking or giving, interest or disinterest: that, without exaggeration, is what an immense proportion of my contemporaries are reduced to today. Back to the primal circuit.

I’m an old man now who no longer cares much about the fate of the world and humanity. So I will leave these words as a cry or a muted testimony to what I saw with my own eyes take place and what everyone will have forgotten in just one or two centuries. For the slumber of consciousness is only beginning, and with the generational dance, no one will really notice it. That is the whole cold and tragic beauty of this underlying process. Humanity will fall peacefully asleep, disappear as it arrived: calmly, in silence.

Nobody takes offence at a theft when he has forgotten that he was, once upon a time, the very happy owner of what’s now stolen. Unconsciousness protects the madman from his despair. Forgetting is the happiness of the simple mind. The treasure here is human consciousness, the gift, the origin, the white “coup de pinceau” on the black canvas of the world, the “word,”, speech, the concept, the idea. Mankind is rich only in its ideas, it is free only through its words, but soon it will no longer even be able to speak or think of its misery.

The end, the end will have no scent. It will be neither sad nor melancholy. We won’t even make a book of it, we will make nothing of it. The book of despair is the one that no one will be able to write anymore. So perhaps consider that I have written it. The end will be natural, neutral and mute, for the word will have long since left us. There will be nothing to say about it. The end will be gentle, for no one will know anymore what we have lost. Stupidity and ugliness themselves are only transitory and will eventually leave man. Morality will fade away and, finally, in one last effort of negation, the conatus will crumble. Mankind will forget that it is. Natural amnesia: the veil will save it from itself.

We will not disappear, we will go back to sleep. First, we will awaken from a strange dream, from a lucid dream. Still numb with sleep, we will carry with us for a while the vague memory of our glory, reminiscences, stray impressions, dreamlike visions of a past life, of an immense state that time and its slow decay will eventually erase entirely from our systems. Man will cease to be a man when he ceases to remember and to hope. He will then become an immediate creature, no longer having to carry either the burden of melancholy or the weight of duty. He will forget that he can forget, he will forget that he was and, ultimately, he will forget that he is. He will step out of time and the “word,” which were perhaps, in the end, more human than he was, for longer than he was, in any case. He will become the beast again.

And all this will happen very calmly, almost poetically, although no one will be there to make verses out of it. The tragedy, you see, the tragedy, I am the one writing it, it is my voice that makes it. But in truth, there will then be no one left to say it, to sense it, to feel it. Stupidity, forgive it, it is my soul that denounces it so harshly. But all that, all that is utterly trivial and will no longer have any existence, any importance in the times to come. As long as there is still a soul to judge the disappointing or nauseating nature of our negation, well, that means humanity’s pulse will still be beating, however faintly.

In the end, the ones most to be pitied will be the stragglers, those ill-adapted to the new negation. Me, on my bench, sometimes, yes, I would like to devolve faster, fall asleep, anesthetize myself. For what use is lucidity about the silent and incurable disaster? And I know it, I am not alone in suffering from being out of tune. I see the eyes of old people, and sometimes even a few young people. Deep in their eyes, I see that they see, that they know, that they understand very precisely and lucidly what is happening. We are on the shores, less alive than the newly living, less willing to consent to the demands of the new stupidity. The Greeks had seen the end. Man will calmly return to nature, he will retreat into the cave without another word, and Plato will be left breathless.

All this was only a mischievous hope, of which only the cosmic scent may remain somewhere. For a moment, there was art, the “word” and the idea. Somewhere, the impossible sprouted, and nature took fright. What else could it do? Then everything fell back into order. Of course, only the old poets were disappointed. Man accommodated himself perfectly well to his return to silence. The pulse of the universe skipped a beat and man rushed into the void, which he populated with himself, with cathedrals, with lyrical jealousy and hope. Man: the one who populated the void and returned to silence. That is what may be said of us, and that is already something. Cosmic renegade, inventor of time and words, touching egotist, such was man. Here is the cycle: nothing, word, something, genius, stupidities, melancholy and nothing again.

What I leave here, then, is the “word,” for man is the sound of the universe’s creaking bed frame as it turns over in its infinite sleep, and nothing more. From that creaking, he made sure that no one could ever again say: “There was nothing.” For if man existed, for a time, somewhere, I assure you that, even if no one can naturally remember or conceive of it anymore, it will remain no less true that there was a time when a gigantic verbal orgy of magnificent intensity took place in the sidereal cold of the stern and silent whole.

That is what we can hold on to in our laments: for a moment, all this existed, all this was tangible, all this was beautiful. We will retain the honor that that, one must hope, will know how to do without us. So let the last man on Earth not be saddened, but take pride in it instead. Thus, we will be beautiful, and we will have done our part. Pride will make man the forbidden secret of the universe, and who knows, perhaps we will go so far as to become a cosmic taboo, a fantasy. Perhaps the universe will miss us, perhaps it will end up longing for us, hoping for us, perhaps. And from the incongruous anomaly will be born a form of nostalgia, then perhaps, who knows, a form of will, a return, a renewal.

I have no idea. I don’t know to what degree all this was orchestrated by something greater, but I am certain that we have done everything to make ourselves missed. I find it hard to believe that the universe will be able to forget the word “forever.” To whoever tastes time and the “word,” silent eternity must seem very soporific. So yes, we have played it well. There is something to console us in the great disappointments to come. In all aspects of life, it is first and foremost the “word” that will make YOU a free man, a decent man. It is the “word,” the secret. It is the mystery, the architect, the fire, consciousness. Man has only the “word,” the sole daring barrier between him and the icy cold of the stellar void, between him and animal transience. Cultivate the “word,” my revolutionary friend, for it might be your only gift.

Man will die at the same time as these metaphors. Man will die when he ceases to esteem himself, to tell his own story, when, declining at the height of his glory, he looks at nature below and cannot help but feel guilty and gently return to it. That is what we have never been able to admit about ourselves: consciousness, beautiful consciousness, has nothing natural about it. It is an intruder we carry inside us, an anomaly, a parasite. And from that flows everything else. Man is a magnificent parasite who has never fully digested the illusion of his “separate status” and all that it entails. Man is a timid, gifted creature who prefers to negate himself rather than embrace his Promethean destiny.

Humanity will fall asleep in a guilty oblivion, for to be a man has always meant being great, or more precisely, it has meant accepting greatness. We have only come this far, to the inflection of vertigo, through audacity. I will tell you the origin of it all: three little letters, i, s, m. “Ism.” A putrid “ism” that was added to a sublime word: elite. And from the moment we turned man’s magnificent burden, the elite, into a disease, elitism, we set in motion the slow, irreversible agony in which we bask today. Man remains man only on condition that he persists in impressing himself every day.

That is what I wrote at the bottom of my page with a sense of apprehension, for perhaps that is all this meditation is: a premonition, a “ah, shit!” muttered between two terrified lips. So, my revolutionary friend, you find me harsh, but morality is an act of life. You are the dead ones. Death withdraws from speech, it begins by relativizing, then goes as far as shrugging its shoulders at the world. And shrugging one’s shoulders at the world, I’m sorry, but that is dying. Death does not judge. The eye that judges is an eye still alive. Anger is an act of life, judgment is an act of life.

So yes, I resent those who no longer deem it useful to speak, those who have agreed to let their minds die, those who fall asleep and those who let others sleep. You are the propagators of the gentle death to come. And as far as I am concerned, I esteem my species too much not to speak, not to speak and not to speak again.

I wish I had woken up earlier.