realinternetuser

English is limiting.

I say refresh and the word splits in two directions, like a glitch.

The syllables hold two different worlds, two different tempos of existence.

On one side, refresh is physical:

• hygiene
• beauty
• care
• routine
• the ongoing labor of maintenance
• effort that doesn’t ask to be applauded
• the invisible devotion of staying alive in a body

It’s tender and human.

Cyclical and unspoken, an intimacy with the self that doesn’t seek an audience.

The return to self.

But then, the same word speaks differently and suddenly the mood shifts from softness to static:

• reload
• haste
• comparison
• consumption
• data overflow
• micro-labor that accumulates into macro-exhaustion of the soul

Refreshing becomes reactivity, not rest.

It becomes the need to keep up with a feed that has already moved on.

It becomes hunger without satisfaction.

It becomes something vital through the flicker of a screen.

So I sit here with this word, in the middle of those two poles:

Care ↔︎ Consumption

Human ↔︎ Machine

Tender Routine ↔︎ Frantic Reload

And I realize something:

We build our tools, and then our tools teach us how to understand ourselves.

We start describing emotional states in technological language, our ‘batteries’ run low.

But when the interface becomes the metaphor, the metaphor becomes the way we understand ourselves. Once the self starts to think in systems, it becomes impossible not to talk about AI.

Because when I think about artificial intelligence, people around me shout through screens:

Are you for it against it? Is it the apocalypse? It’s theft. It is the end of art.

And I hear you, I hold those truths as well.

But here is another truth:

AI is accessible.

I’ve lived at the edges of class structures: where the door is technically “open” but you can feel the surveillance, the skepticism, the subtle ways belonging is denied.

I know what it means to be in a University where knowledge is both available and withheld for political posterity.

I am not using AI to avoid thinking.

I’m not erasing my voice.

To me, AI is like a contorted mirror that moves, molds, bends and warps to new dimensions of patterns I am learning to find peace with not recognizing.

But yes, I hear you, the fear is real.

But what I want is not to defend my identity like property.

And here is the part I had to say out loud to myself:

I am not responsible for balancing the moral failures of billionaires.

I am not the ethical clean-up crew for a world that was already uneven before AI existed.

I am not here to perform purity politics while the people in power do whatever they want.

My ethics are:

• relational
• embodied
• communal
• accountable
• deliberate

Not corporate.

Not extractive.

Not about producing innocence.

So yes:

Fuck the executives who talk about “the future of humanity” while treating actual humans as disposable.

Fuck the cult of genius.

Fuck the scarcity logic that makes us afraid to think together.

I do not orient my creativity around their shadow. I orient it around relationship.

So when I say refresh, I’m not talking about wiping the slate clean.

Just: continue, with presence.

And that is my ethic: Not to create perfectly. Not to think without influence. Not to be untouched by systems. But to stay in a relationship with myself as I move through them.