Monologue Transcription

[Listeners. Wanderers. Fragments of ruined blueprints and broken hypotheses— The City of Science is crumbling. Not with a bang, not with a revelation—but with a shrug, a repost, a synthesized face explaining why the moon landing was fake. We have not lost faith in truth. We’ve merely forgotten how to define it. This is what happens when a new medium arrives. And our new medium? It has no name, but many. Social media. Algorithmic feeds. Language models trained on the fossilized archive of your ancestors' confusion. This is not communication. It is feedback—endless, recursive, optimized for engagement and harvested for profit. And like every medium before it, it is not content that reshapes civilization—it is the container. Through this container, consensus has shattered. Trust has been gamified. And every institution that once held together the City of Science—the university, the press, the peer review board—now drips with irony, parody, and paywalled irrelevance. You feel it, don’t you? The end of shared reality. But let us not mistake this for the first collapse. Let us rewind. The City of Science was born in fire—burning monasteries, overturned altars, woodcuts of men hung for the wrong theology. It rose not peacefully, but violently, as all Cities do. The printing press—Gutenberg’s machine—ripped truth from the mouths of priests and put it in every hand. The codex had unified belief. The press fractured it. What followed was Reformation, Inquisition, Enlightenment. The Thirty Years War—a continent bleeding out over footnotes. But from that chaos rose a new City, founded not on faith, but on method. Science. Observation. Reproducibility. The idea that truth could be printed, reviewed, corrected. The idea that if you gave a man a telescope and a notebook, he could rewrite the stars. And the world changed. Nation-states formed. The Treaty of Westphalia gave borders to blood. Institutions grew, classified, categorized, measured. Newton made heaven mechanical. Darwin made man an animal. And we believed—oh, how we believed—that if we just collected enough data, we might outrun death itself. But every City carries its flaw. The City of Science rejected divine authority—but built its own high priests. It claimed neutrality—then twisted itself around the state, the market, the empire. It promised clarity—but buried its contradictions in jargon, prestige, and paywalls. And now, in the light-speed torrent of data, it cannot keep up with the very minds it shaped. Science was never meant to be fast. But the algorithm is. And so the City crumbles—not with disbelief, but with parody. Every man a skeptic. Every feed a pulpit. And all the careful footnotes are buried beneath a sea of viral graphs and sponsored outrage. Modern sovereignty is no longer held by scientists or priests—it is held by attention. And attention answers to no method. No peer. No truth. Only velocity. The City of Science is crumbling. The garden is overgrown. The books are unread. And the gods we dethroned have returned—dressed in likes, retweets, and flawless skin. What shape will the new city take? Who will shape it? Shit ]