Performance

Profile picture, flag overlay. "I stand with them." Them being the dying, somewhere you've never been, in a war you learned about from a fifteen-second clip.

Count the bodies since you stood. You don't know the number. You never checked. The stance doesn't need a body count, it needs a color.

Now you're against AI. It drinks a bit more power than the app you used to watch the war clip between two ads. Cobalt dug by a kid, in a country you couldn't find on a map. That phone in your hand cost more than watts. It cost a kid's hands.

Nobody handed you that opinion, you inherited it like a rash. It was in the room before you walked in. You picked it up off the floor, called it a belief, wore it to look alive.

Zero deaths prevented. Zero grams of cobalt unmined. The war continues exactly on schedule with or without your overlay. The company ships the update whether you're against it or not. Your stance moved nothing, not even your own ass off the couch.

You never once checked if it did anything. You checked how it looked.