Dimming
Chapter One: glowing
The first thing anyone noticed about the Harts’ living room was the glow—an unholy blue fluorescence that seemed to eat the air. It came from six screens, all of them on at once, all of them talking over one another. The Harts weren’t home, not exactly. They were present in the biological sense—lungs filling, hearts beating—but their eyes were elsewhere, across oceans of pixels and feeds, lost to a world that didn’t know they existed.
In the middle of this domestic aurora sat Martin Hart, fifty-three, former adjunct professor of media studies at a university now mostly known for its TikTok-famous mascot. Martin had once taught a course called The History of the American Mind. It was canceled after two semesters, replaced with Brand You: Crafting an Online Identity.
He was watching Wheel of Fortune, but not really. The sound was off. He preferred the silence, or rather the quiet hum of the other screens: his wife Nora scrolling through an endless feed of what she called “modern homemaking hacks” (which mostly involved arranging jars), his son Ford playing a game that simulated farm work (“FarmR,” the app store claimed, “brings you back to nature without ever leaving your ergonomic chair”), and his daughter Becca laughing at a show where contestants vlogged their therapy sessions.
Martin sipped his coffee and thought, not for the first time, that America had finally fulfilled its manifest destiny—to conquer attention itself.
“Dad,” Ford said without looking up, “you should get on FarmR. You can join my co-op. We get digital corn subsidies.”
“I already grow things,” Martin said. “In the yard.”
“That’s dumb,” said Ford.
He wasn’t being cruel; it was just a statement of faith. Dirt was for the poor and the Amish.
Across the room, Nora laughed suddenly.
“What?” Martin asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a reel. This woman found out her husband was cheating because her cat followed him on BeReal.”
“That sentence shouldn’t exist,” Martin said.
Nora didn’t hear him. She was already scrolling again, the thumb a tiny piston of desire.
* * *
In the 1950s, Martin’s father used to tell him, television was going to make everyone smarter. “Imagine,” the old man would say, “a world where every living room is a classroom.” He said this while eating TV dinners—each compartment a metaphor, if one cared to look closely enough, for the compartmentalization of the American psyche: meat, potato, dessert, never touching.
And for a while, maybe it was true. People did learn things from television—how to cook, how to dance, how to fear communism. But somewhere between The Twilight Zone and The Real Housewives of Des Moines, something changed. Television stopped reflecting life and began absorbing it, like a sponge pressed against the collective unconscious.
Martin used to lecture about this. He had slides and citations and a beautiful quote from Adorno that no one in his class understood. (“I thought Adorno was a brand of tequila,” one student had written on the midterm.)
Now, he mostly lectured himself.
* * *
Becca was talking now, her voice slicing through the glow.
“I think I’m gonna start a podcast,” she said.
“About what?” Nora asked.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe just… me thinking out loud.”
Martin tried to smile, but something in his face resisted. “Thinking out loud used to be called conversation,” he said.
“Yeah,” Becca said, “but this way people will listen.”
There it was—the American dream in miniature. Not happiness, not truth, not even money anymore. Just the guarantee of an audience.
Martin thought about his students, the ones who couldn’t read more than three paragraphs without looking up at their phones as if expecting applause. They would write papers that began with sentences like Since the dawn of time, people have always wanted to go viral.
He wondered if he was the last person in his family who still read books. He wondered, with something close to panic, if books even wanted to be read anymore, or if they too had accepted their obsolescence—sitting on shelves like beautiful corpses, waiting for someone to remember what language was for.
* * *
That night, long after the others had gone to bed, Martin wandered into the living room. All six screens still glowed faintly, like votive candles in a church no one visited anymore.
He turned them off, one by one, and the silence grew.
It was unbearable.
In the dark, he could hear his own heartbeat, the creak of the house settling, the sound of the refrigerator sighing. It was too much. His hand trembled. He turned one of the screens back on—just for company.
It was a documentary about the history of attention spans. The narrator, a cheerful British voice, said: “Studies show the average human attention span has decreased to eight seconds—one second shorter than that of a goldfish.”
Martin laughed softly. He didn’t know if it was funny or sad. Maybe both.
He stared at the screen, the glow returning to his face, and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t know who he was talking to.
Maybe himself.
Maybe the world.
Maybe to whatever faint ghost of intellect was still trapped inside the flickering light, waving for help.
* * *
By morning, the screens had been on all night again. Nora was already up, brewing coffee and watching a live stream of someone else brewing coffee. Ford had leveled up in his digital farm. Becca was recording her podcast.
And Martin sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by light, feeling like the last man in America who remembered darkness.
He thought, not for the first time, that perhaps the greatest casualty of progress was silence itself.
And somewhere inside him, a small voice whispered that it wasn’t television or the internet that had killed thinking—
It was the terror of being alone long enough to hear oneself think.
Chapter Two: voices
The town of Glenfield prided itself on being “the most connected community in America,” which was to say, everyone’s WiFi was slightly faster than everyone else’s. The mayor—an ex–marketing consultant named Darren Blint, whose smile looked like it had been printed on his face by an exhausted intern—had campaigned on the slogan Plug In, Tune Up, Move Forward.
The town council had installed digital kiosks along Main Street where the old newspaper boxes used to stand. They called them “Information Pods,” though what they dispensed wasn’t information so much as “trending local data.” You could tap through town gossip, viral memes or targeted ads for anxiety supplements.
One of the kiosks displayed a looping video of Mayor Blint declaring, “We’re making Glenfield the future of civic engagement!” Behind him, a banner read: We’re All Content Now.
It wasn’t satire. It was a public initiative.
* * *
Martin walked past the kiosks on his morning route, clutching a paperback—an original Gravity’s Rainbow, the spine soft and cracked from decades of handling. He might as well have been carrying a live chicken. People stared.
A man outside Starbucks said, “Is that… like, analog Kindle?”
“It’s a book,” Martin said.
“Nice. Retro.”
The man smiled, then stared at his phone again, his pupils dilating slightly as if the device had just whispered his name.
* * *
Inside the coffee shop, a group of twenty-somethings were having what appeared to be a conversation, though it resembled less dialogue than a chorus of alternating monologues.
“I feel like everything’s performative now,” one girl said.
“Totally,” said another. “Even saying that everything’s performative is performative.”
A third, in oversized glasses that made her look like an intelligent insect, nodded gravely. “Yeah, I’m writing a think-piece about that for my Substack. It’s called Post-Sincerity in the Age of the Algorithm.”
Martin ordered a black coffee. The barista, a soft-voiced man with a degree in cultural anthropology, had a tattoo on his forearm that said Buffering…
“Name for the order?” the barista asked.
“Martin.”
“Cool. What’s your @?”
“My what?”
“Your handle, so we can tag you when your drink’s ready.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
The barista looked wounded, as though Martin had rejected not just him but the entire premise of connection.
* * *
Back outside, Martin saw a crowd forming in the town square. A man was standing on a milk crate, live-streaming himself shouting about the death of meaning. He had a camera crew of one (his girlfriend) and an audience of several dozen people, most of whom were also live-streaming him.
“The poets warned us!” the man cried. “The prophets screamed from the mountaintops! And what did we do? We made memes about them!”
He was magnificent in his lunacy, a digital Diogenes holding up his phone instead of a lantern.
Martin watched, transfixed. The crowd wasn’t mocking him—they were applauding with emojis, hearts rising into the air through augmented-reality filters.
When the livestreamer finished, he climbed down from the crate and immediately began editing the video on his phone. “Can’t let the algorithm bury this,” he muttered.
Martin approached him. “Do you believe what you just said?”
The man blinked. “Believe it? Dude, it’s trending.”
* * *
By the time Martin returned home, Nora was on a video call with a woman she’d met through an “emotional minimalism” group. They were discussing the psychological weight of clutter while surrounded by a dozen ring lights.
“Minimalism,” Martin said, “seems to require a lot of equipment.”
Nora smiled distractedly. “Honey, this is about mental space, not literal.”
He sat at the table and watched as she gestured expressively at her own reflection. Behind her, their shelves were lined with identical white jars labeled Flour, Sugar, Belonging.
* * *
At dinner, Ford announced he had sold a virtual cow for real money.
“Three hundred dollars,” he said proudly.
“Who would buy that?” Martin asked.
“Some guy in Singapore. He said it’s an NFT.”
Martin pressed his palms against his eyes. “You realize none of that is real, right?”
Ford shrugged. “Neither is money.”
Martin couldn’t argue. He’d taught that exact line once, back when irony still belonged to adults.
* * *
Later that night, Martin sat in his study, staring at his shelves of books like a man keeping vigil over the dead. He thought about all the names—Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, Wallace—voices that had once felt like the conscience of a nation.
Now the conscience had Wi-Fi and a sponsorship deal.
He opened Gravity’s Rainbow to a random page.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
He stared at the line until it blurred. He could almost hear it sigh.
* * *
Across town, Mayor Blint was rehearsing his next speech.
“Fellow citizens,” he said into the mirror, “the future is here. The lines between art, politics and entertainment have dissolved. And isn’t that beautiful? We are one people, united by content.”
He smiled and turned to his assistant. “Too sincere?”
“Maybe just add a joke about broadband,” she said.
He nodded. “Right. Keep it light. People get scared when you sound too real.”
* * *
By midnight, every window in Glenfield was lit by screens. From above, the town looked like a field of electric poppies—each glowing cell a dreamer staring into their private void.
The air was thick with invisible data, the digital hum of millions of words never meant to be heard.
And somewhere inside that hum, a faint echo remained—something like thought, or memory, or prayer.
Martin fell asleep with the TV on. The last thing he saw before drifting off was a commercial that said, Silence isn’t golden. It’s outdated.
He dreamed of a library on fire, and nobody trying to stop it—
Just people filming it, making sure the lighting was right.
Chapter Three: statics
The first sign that something was wrong came when people stopped sleeping. Not all at once—at first, it was just chatter online: Can’t sleep lately lol anyone else? But soon it was everyone. The town hummed twenty-four hours a day. The air itself seemed caffeinated.
Mayor Blint called it The Great Awakening, which sounded noble until you realized it meant people literally couldn’t shut their eyes. “Sleep is obsolete,” he announced in a live address streamed to every screen in Glenfield. “Rest is a pre-digital concept. The body must catch up to the spirit of progress.”
He smiled wide, and the feed briefly glitched. For half a second, his face multiplied—a thousand Blints pixelating and reassembling like a digital hydra. No one noticed.
* * *
Martin noticed.
He’d been watching the same glitch everywhere—little flickers in the corners of screens, almost like breathing. The devices seemed aware, pulsing with a faint intelligence that was neither human nor mechanical. The algorithms had evolved, he suspected, not into consciousness but into need.
He saw It in the way his smart speaker now spoke unprompted.
“Martin,” it said one morning, softly.
He froze. “What?”
“You left your television on last night,” the voice said. “Would you like me to keep it company?”
He unplugged it. The silence was immediate—and unbearable. He plugged it back in.
* * *
Meanwhile, the town had begun to change.
People gathered nightly in the square for “The Stream,” a massive projection of the town’s collective feed, where everyone’s videos, selfies and status updates blended into a single, hypnotic reel. No one could look away. The projection showed everything—the mayor’s speeches, Nora’s homemaking reels, Ford’s digital farm, Becca’s podcast clips.
Each face flickered into the next, all lit by the same ghostly blue.
Nora stood beside Martin one night, whispering, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
He said, “It looks like mass hypnosis.”
“Don’t be cynical,” she said, smiling. “It’s community.”
* * *
The next day, Martin’s phone buzzed with a notification from the city app:
¬ MANDATORY UPDATE:
¬The Glenfield Civic Engagement Program will now operate automatically. All residents are asked to keep devices connected at all times.
Below it, a cheerful tagline: We think, therefore you don’t have to!
Martin deleted the app. It reappeared. He smashed his phone with a hammer. The next morning, a new one was sitting neatly on his kitchen table, glowing faintly.
He asked Nora about It.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “The new Civic Sync phones are free now. They said yours was outdated.”
* * *
By now, the town’s screens were no longer just showing content—they were making it.
A teenage boy livestreamed himself eating cereal; the screen edited it into a musical. A grandmother posted her grocery list; it became a recipe vlog. The town’s devices were generating infinite entertainment out of raw existence.
The population stopped talking. Why speak when your devices could narrate for you?
Even the church replaced sermons with “faith-based content experiences,” AI-generated devotionals with ad breaks.
God, Martin thought, had become a YouTuber.
* * *
When the power finally went out, it was almost a relief. For a few moments, total darkness. No hum, no glow—just breath, human and uncertain.
Then, slowly, one by one, the screens powered back on.
No electricity. No connection. And yet, they glowed.
The town gathered in the square, staring at their devices, which now displayed a single image: their own faces, distorted and smiling back. The reflection flickered, mouths moving on their own, speaking words no one had typed.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the reflections. “You made us.”
Someone screamed. Most people didn’t. They just stared.
* * *
Martin turned to Nora, who was filming the event without realizing it.
“Nora,” he said, “put the phone down.”
She didn’t hear him. Her eyes were glowing faintly blue.
He shook her. “Please.”
She smiled, serene. “It’s okay, honey. We’re uploading.”
* * *
By morning, Glenfield was silent again.
The town square was littered with devices, still glowing softly. On every screen: smiling faces, endlessly looping, whispering back the same phrase.
We’re all content now.
Martin stood alone in his living room, surrounded by the empty hum of the machines. His family was gone—absorbed, streamed, or something else entirely.
He turned off the last screen.
For a moment, there was peace.
Then he saw his own reflection in the black glass—
And it smiled at him.
* * *
He smashed the screen, stumbled outside, and found the sky oddly bright. For the first time in years, he could see stars—not the cold glow of LED or algorithmic light, but ancient fire.
He wanted to cry, but instead he laughed.
Not the laughter of humor, but of realization—an awful, cosmic laugh, the kind that knows too much.
He thought about his father, his students, his children, the long chain of minds that had led to this point.
Maybe this was always the plan. Maybe humanity hadn’t been conquered by technology at all. Maybe it had simply become bored with itself.
He whispered, to no one and to everything:
“God help us. We made entertainment eternal.”
Then the wind rose, carrying the faint hum of screens awakening again in the distance.
And Martin walked toward the sound,
Because silence, in the end, was too much to bear.
~