The Wittgenstein Condition

The video of ravens circling around 6G towers was a clear omen but Ben couldn't figure out or make up what of, which was a very worrying thing to happen to a professional conspiracy theory engineer.

Frustrated, Ben cycled through equally unhelpful windows on his computer. The virality dynamic metrics were as chaotic as he had ever seen them: whether he was missing a boom or participating in a bust it was impossible for him to say. Video of dolphins following submarine network cables obsessed him the most for no reason he could articulate. Data centers surrounded by coyotes, dogs, or whatever the equivalent local fauna was - they were already ongoing old news.

He tried not to think about what rumors said the CDC wasn't saying not because they were covering something up but because they couldn't understand it either. It had been long in the new understanding of time since anybody had bothered waiting for the FDA, the UN, or any other human agency to do a review too slow for the fevered pitch competitiveness had taken.

He closed all windows. The last and least interesting one was the usual carnival of hyperwealthy CEOs and politicians. Their power depended too much on the unexplainable advice of the AIs running the companies that paid both groups for them to acknowledge even to themselves they had no idea of what was happening. It made money for them. What else was there to know?

That was Ben's job, too. Except that he was in the business of selling made up plots for what was happening to the world and had lost the ability to come up with them. Yet he knew there was one with the same certainty and lack of precise understanding he knew gravity pulled him down. His writer's block was a mystery he was very careful to keep separate from the bigger mystery that was the world.      

Computer turned off, he went to bed and fell asleep at once. He dreamed the solution of open problems in mathematics he lacked the knowledge to explain, and woke up, as usual, with the aftertaste of understanding in his dry mouth.