There is a specific feeling that defines the mid-2020s.
It’s not just anxiety. It’s not just burnout. It is the distinct, unshakable sensation that the world around us is rendering in 240p resolution, and key features—like logic, consequence, and seriousness—are failing to load.
We are watching geopolitics turn into meme formats. We are watching economics turn into a casino. We are trying to do serious work in an unserious time.
I call this state Reality in Beta.
It is the recognition that our operating systems—political, social, informational—are running on legacy code that can no longer handle the complexity of the modern world. The software is full of bugs, the servers are overheating, and the patch notes for 2026 are just a 404 error page.
The Symptom: The Shitpost Era
When reality is in beta, “truth” is too heavy a file to upload. So the system compresses it into something easier to transmit: The Shitpost.
The shitpost is the perfect unit of communication for a beta reality. It is post-ironic. It doesn’t ask to be taken seriously, yet it is often the only way we handle serious things.
When a global crisis becomes a background aesthetic for an influencer video, that isn’t just “the internet being weird.” It is a symptom of a culture that has lost the ability to process depth. We are skimming the surface of history because plunging in feels too dangerous.
The Challenge: Maintaining the Human Stack
The danger of living in Reality in Beta isn’t that the system crashes entirely. The danger is that we adjust to the glitches.
The danger is that we become so accustomed to the absurdity that we lose the ability to distinguish between a meme and a moral crisis. The danger is Dissociative Professionalism—becoming so good at compartmentalizing the madness that we forget we are doing it.
My work, and the purpose of this site, is to document the glitches. Not to fix them—I don’t think we can right now—but to ensure we don’t mistake the buggy software for the actual world.
We have to keep our own internal code clean. We have to maintain the “human stack”—empathy, critical thought, and the ability to sit with discomfort without immediately turning it into content.
The simulation is going to keep glitching. Our job is to remember that we are the users, not the code.
