A Failure of Attention

In this world, the most consequential scenes would not involve violence or revelation. They would involve appeals that go unanswered, errors that cannot be traced, and decisions that arrive without explanation. That is difficult drama. It resists heroes. It resists endings. But it is precisely the story that now demands to be told.

The result is a cultural archive that is vast and repetitive at the same time. Even when television finally names the condition directly, showing worlds organized around continuous evaluation and social credit, the horror is not death but a low rating. Characters are not hunted. They are deprioritized. Lives contract through friction rather than force. We have imagined thousands of artificial beings and almost no artificial bureaucracies. We have rehearsed rebellion endlessly and accountability hardly at all.

What is needed now is not restraint of imagination but redirection of attention. Better questions rather than louder warnings. How do systems age. How do they accrete power. How do they absorb human labor while presenting themselves as autonomous. How do they shift legal norms without formal debate. How do we cross-examine a proprietary trade secret in a court of law? These are not cinematic questions. They are civic ones.

We are telling the wrong stories at the wrong scale. And until that changes, governance will continue to chase spectacle while the real machinery hums along, unbothered.

The final recognition is not a climax. It is a realization of inertia. It feels closer to resignation, or vertigo.

It is a failure of attention.