I noticed it on the radio. I used to drive a lot. Long commutes, empty highways, the kind of time where music mattered. At first, stations changed subtly. Fewer risks. Fewer strange songs. The voices were more and more tuned over the years, then replaced by entirely generated voices. The instruments followed soon after. They started to be replaced with generated samples more and more frequently. The same rhythms came back more often. Eventually I figured out that the same two rhythms were present in almost all songs. Two patterns that kept people awake, focused, mildly stimulated. People didn't want beauty. They wanted something that filled the silence without asking anything of them. Lyrics mattered less. For a while, most stations were only releasing songs with a single repeated word over the same beat. Then they all accorded to a common word, probably because it was the one creating the most engagement. The word "love" was everywhere. Not love as an idea, just the sound of it. Love. Love. Love. Dropped mechanically on top of the same beat. Until even that became unnecessary. People weren't listening to the word. They were responding to the pulse. So the word disappeared. Eventually there was only the beat. No beginning. No end. Just the same rhythm looping forever. Different stations played it faster or slower, like experiments. One day the speed stopped changing as well. It worked perfectly. I noticed my breathing matched it, as if they knew my pulse better than I did.

Movies followed. Series too. It took longer, because people still pretended to care. But the data didn't lie. Certain characters worked. Certain conflicts worked. Certain scenes caused people to keep watching. So they ran the numbers. They modeled the equations. They tested variations until there were none left to test. Eventually, they found the optimal story. One story. Not a genre. Not a formula. A single narrative arc, broken into interchangeable skins. The same protagonist. The same supporting roles. The same emotional beats, appearing in the same order, at the same minute marks. People said it felt familiar. Comforting. Creativity wasn't banned. It just never survived the selection process. New stories required attention. Attention was expensive. So every release became the same story again, wearing a different face. And after a while, even the faces stopped changing.

Books were the saddest to watch, at least for me. I grew up loving them. At first, nothing obvious happened. Just trends. The same topics everywhere. The same tensions. The same promises. Then writing stopped being a human task. Algorithms could do it faster. Better, according to the metrics. They discovered that readers didn't care about prose. Or themes. Or resolution. So the structures of the stories were simplified. Exposition bored readers. Rising action needed patience, falling action felt pointless. All that remained was the climax. Books only became plot twists. Did I say plot twists? It eventually was only one plot twist. One was enough. The same one. Everywhere. Then it stopped working, because everyone knew it was coming. So they removed it as well. Blank books. White pages. No text. Strangely, people bought them. Shelves were filled with these white books, everywhere.

Social media was their biggest concern for a while. It all started with bots. Not obvious ones. Convincing ones. They tested millions of interactions. Rage. Sympathy. Irony. False agreement. They measured which responses made people stay longer, reply faster, come back tomorrow. At some point, people knew most of the traffic on the platform were bots. But strangely, people didn't care, and continued engaging. Eventually they solved it. For every message, there was an optimal reply. The equation did not even factor in who they were responding to. Because it did not matter, we would react all the same. At some point the equation simplified. They found one reply, that would score the same no matter the question. It worked just as well. People logged in every day to talk. Not to each other, but to that same response. To cut some costs, the response shortened. And eventually it was gone entirely. Platforms became places where nothing happened, and everyone kept coming back anyway.

Real life conversations didn't escape it. Debates dissolved slowly. Nobody decided to stop arguing. Language just softened. Blurred. Certain phrases proved incredibly efficient. "Well, you know how it is, everything is complicated." "Nothing is black and white." They worked for everything. Politics. Ethics. Personal conflict. Someone would say one of them, everybody would ultimately agree, and the conversation would simply stop. Over time, those phrases became the debate. They would work no matter who you were talking to. Any topic led to them. Any disagreement collapsed into the same fog. Eventually, people stopped arguing. Not because they agreed but because arguing felt pointless. Embarrassing, even. Like trying to reason with bad weather. There was nothing left to debate. So we stopped using words entirely.