One. Zero. Zero. One. One.

We spend our entire lives 

trying to escape the wrong side of a hyphen.

A success, instead of a failure.

A winner, instead of a loser.

Somebody, instead of nobody.

As though existence 

were a ballot with two boxes,

and a lifetime to shade one in.

We resent the little categories 

the world keeps our names in,

then spend entire lives trying to qualify for one.

We demand 

that our own contradictions 

be granted daily conveniences.

We want our failures 

read with radioactive precautions,

our mistakes handled with white gloves,

our crimes considered in carefully crafted context.

We want the whole messy sum of us admitted as evidence.

But look at what we do with the evidence of others.

We take a single disagreement and sharpen it into a blade.

A hesitation becomes a betrayal.

A reservation, an act of war.

A question mark, a raised fist.

You may stand with me, or you may stand against me.

There is no longer a square inch of ground

for standing beside me,

and looking at a horizon I cannot see.

A hundred per cent total submission is the entry fee.

Anything less, and the conversation draws blood.

We have built a hate economy 

where outrage is legal tender,

allegiance earns compound interest,

and the benefit of the doubt is an inflation-ruined currency.

We don’t merely disagree anymore.

If we do not worship, we must loathe.

If we do not subscribe, we must abhor.

We delete, we cancel, we blacklist, we un-person.

We turn living people into flat positions,

and then punish them 

for not being human enough to fit inside them.

Perhaps this is why we have become so fond of machines.

We built code 

to separate the things we like 

from the things we don’t.

Yes and no. 

Accept and reject. 

Relevant and irrelevant.

We fed the machines our preferences,

until they returned our prejudices 

wearing the plastic face of prediction.

Then we gave them intelligence and called it artificial.

As though the artificial part were the intelligence,

and not the act of flattening entire existences to meagre data points.

We complain 

that algorithms cannot comprehend the human condition,

while we actively teach them to recognize us

solely by the things we click, 

the things we buy, 

the things we love, 

the things we hate.

We have outsourced our judgments to a system

that never has to lie awake at night

with the consequences of being wrong.

We want our binaries read with nuance,

and everyone else read literally.

We have made nuance a privilege of proximity.

The closer someone is to us, 

the more beautifully complex their reasons become.

The further away they stand, 

the fewer words we need to condemn them.

In a world that doesn't experience but processes, 

difference is death, 

and sooner or later,

everyone becomes a stranger.

Everyone becomes far away.

Everyone defaults to a zero.

We want to be the exception 

without ever questioning the rule.

We mistake choosing a side for having a mind.

And somewhere 

between the person we hope to become

and the person we refuse to understand,

the spectrum vanishes, the walls close in.

There are truths that can live in the same room.

A person can be loved and be entirely wrong.

A cause can be urgent and its methods indefensible.

A thought can be worth considering without being worth believing.

But we have become too impatient 

for anything that refuses to arrive at a verdict.

The ultimate tragedy of the modern human

is not that we have built machines 

that think in ones and zeroes.

It is that we are training ourselves to match them.

We wanted to be the exception.

Now everybody is just another data point.

Pixels in a Polaroid

playing Russian roulette,

with bullets shaped like photocopied beliefs.