The Honey of Idiotic Optimism
notes from inside the hallucination
I was reading a book yesterday. The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy by Stanislaw Lem. If you haven't read it, give it a shot. It's worth it.
Afterwards, I saw the new announcements Google made at I/O 2026.
Now, Stanisław Lem wrote this shit decades ago and everybody laughed because the future still looked more or less shiny back then.
In The Futurological Congress the world is collapsing under riots, overpopulation, paranoia, chemical warfare, and state panic. Governments can’t solve reality anymore, so they start editing perception itself.
Not censorship.
Not propaganda.
Chemical reality management.
People drink the water and suddenly everything feels fine.
Tichy describes it perfectly after the drug hits him:
'my soul seemed to sink into the sweetest of oozes, like drowning in rosebuds and chocolate icing'
Well, that’s AI search for you.
Not information.
Mood stabilization.
And now Google walks onstage and announces an 'AI-powered interactive experience.')
Interactive experience...
Like reality is now a fucking wellness app.
The old internet was dirty. You had to search. You had to crawl through broken links, dead forums, conspiracy blogs, fan pages made by insomniacs, anarchist archives, terrible writing hiding brilliant ideas. The web was ugly because humans are ugly.
Now they want 'frictionless reality'...
Seamless.
Effortless.
Personalized.
Drug words.
Lem understood that authoritarianism doesn’t survive by terror alone. Terror burns out. Reality itself has to become soft and manageable. So in the book the government dumps benignimizers into the water supply, chemicals with names like Felicitine, Placidol and Superjubilan.
The goal?
Pacify the population.
Smooth out contradiction.
Kill ambiguity.
Same architecture. Different delivery system.
Today the chemicals arrive through interfaces.
You ask a machine a question and it gives you a clean synthetic paragraph assembled from millions of stolen human voices. No mess. No tension. No wandering into strange territory and getting changed by it. No discovering somebody’s obscure webpage that rewires your brain forever.
Just:
HERE IS THE ANSWER.
Like intravenous certainty.
Google says this new system helps users 'effortlessly explore and understand information'.
Effortlessly...
That word should make you want to throw a brick through a server farm window.
Because truth is not effortless.
Truth is exhausting.
Truth takes time.
Truth contradicts itself.
Truth lives in footnotes and arguments and badly scanned PDFs and weird little communities nobody monetized correctly.
Truth has seams.
But AI reality has no seams. That’s how you know it’s fake.
In Lem’s world, people literally stop perceiving collapse. Ruins become luxury hotels. Poverty becomes abundance. Horror gets wrapped in pleasant hallucination. Society survives by refusing to acknowledge what it has become.
Sound familiar?
It should be, 'cause the internet is dying in exactly the same way.
Not with censorship.
With convenience.
Creators will disappear first.
Not because they’re banned.
Because they become economically unnecessary.
Why pay writers when the machine can generate 'writing' infinitely?
Why support artists when prompts can remix ten thousand painters into instant wallpaper?
Why read difficult human thought when a chatbot can spoon-feed you a summary with perfect grammar and fake confidence?
Human beings become training data for systems designed to erase the economic need for humans.
It's cannibal culture.
And people cheer because the machine is useful.
That’s the most terrifying part of Lem's book:
everybody collaborates with the hallucination.
The cops in the book get dosed with love chemicals and immediately collapse into hysterical empathy. Rioters hug police. Publishers suddenly repent for corrupting culture. Everybody becomes chemically 'good'.
But the city is still burning.
That’s Silicon Valley ideology in one image:
the interface feels compassionate while the underlying system continues grinding people into dust.
AI doesn’t need to be evil to destroy culture.
It just needs to be easier.
The machine becomes:
your librarian,
your teacher,
your therapist,
your researcher,
your critic,
your memory,
your search engine,
your taste.
And eventually your replacement.
Meanwhile the weird corners vanish.
Forums disappear.
Independent websites disappear.
Small publications disappear.
Human recommendation disappears.
Everything collapses into generated sludge optimized for 'user experience'.
An interactive experience...
Like a padded cell with good typography.
And here’s the really ugly part:
Most people will accept it. And not only accept it, but they will love it!
Because exhaustion makes fascists out of everyone eventually.
Not jackboot fascists.
Convenience fascists.
People who surrender interpretation because they’re too burned out to keep fighting through all the noise.
The hallucination wins because rent is due.
Because people are lonely.
Because nobody has time to read anymore.
Because endless uncertainty feels unbearable.
So they drink from the machine.
And slowly they lose the ability to tell the difference between:
source and summary,
human and simulation,
understanding and output.
Lem called it 'psychochemical control'.
We call it 'product design'.
So what now?
Stay incoherent.
Seriously.
Be difficult to summarize.
Make art that algorithms choke on.
Build ugly little websites.
Print zines.
Read original sources.
Support artists directly.
Protect obscurity.
Protect weirdness.
Protect contradiction.
Do not become seamless.
The future they want is frictionless, centralized, generated, emotionally regulated reality.
A planet-sized customer service chatbot whispering:
everything is fine.
everything is understandable.
everything is resolved.
Bullshit.
Reality is unresolved.
Reality is noisy.
Human beings are noisy.
Art is noisy.
Truth is noisy.
Stay noisy.