I found them everywhere.
Leaning against walls.
Sitting at café tables.
Standing at bus stops.
On a bench.
In front of the sea.
In the middle of a party.
Beneath the sun.
In the dark.
Beside someone.
Completely alone.
All with their necks bent at the exact same angle, as if an invisible thread ran from the chin into that fucking glowing rectangle clenched between their hands.
Thirty times I raised my camera.
Thirty times, on the other side of the lens, someone was looking at a smartphone.
Almost no one looked at me.
Almost no one looked at anything.
That is the great advantage of photographing the hypnotized.
You can approach.
Move around.
Focus.
Wait for the right light.
You could probably steal their shoes without them noticing.
They are elsewhere.
Always elsewhere.
The first time, I paid little attention.
A man leaning against a wall, a woman passing by, traffic in the background, and the phone held like a small vital organ.
An ordinary scene.
Then I saw another.
And another.
And another still.
A woman sat at a table with coffee before her.
The place was full of light, the world kept happening beyond the windows, and she kept her eyes lowered.
The coffee grew cold.
Her thumb did not.
At another table, a couple leaned over the same screen.
Perhaps they were looking at a photograph.
Perhaps the location of a restaurant.
Perhaps a video of a dog falling into a swimming pool.
They laughed.
And they were even beautiful, so close, intent on sharing something.
Then an unromantic thought came to me.
Somewhere in California or Ireland or the basement of a building full of servers, a machine had decided what deserved their attention.
Not them.
A machine.
A sequence of calculations had chosen which image to show, how long to keep them waiting, what to suggest next, and which advertisement to shove up their ass while they were still distracted enough to call it freedom.
That was when I understood I was not photographing people.
I was documenting a religion.
The phone was the altar.
The thumb was the rosary.
Scrolling was prayer.
Influencers were the saints.
Algorithms were an invisible, omnipresent, particularly asshole god.
Heaven was going viral.
Hell was one percent battery.
Salvation, naturally, was finding the Wi-Fi password.
There were women photographing each other in the street.
One arranged the other.
One step back.
Chin higher.
A slightly spontaneous smile, but not so spontaneous that it actually looked spontaneous.
Then everyone gathered around the screen to inspect the result.
Not the moment.
The result.
The difference is subtle only if you do not think about it.
A moment happens.
Content is manufactured.
A moment can be crooked, ridiculous, blurred, full of wind, imperfect teeth, and people looking the wrong way.
Content has to perform.
It has to be liked.
It has to resemble something that has already worked.
It must say you are happy, desirable, interesting, free, in love, fulfilled, and preferably somewhere other people wish they were.
Even when you argued five minutes earlier.
Even when your feet hurt.
Even when the day is treating you like shit.
Even when all you want is to take off that dress, tell everyone to go fuck themselves, and eat something straight from the refrigerator.
Real life is not enough.
It must be proven.
Shared.
Filtered.
Corrected.
Published.
Then you must wait for a few hundred near-strangers to certify that yes, for twenty-four hours, you existed.
We spent thousands of years wondering about the meaning of life.
In the end, we decided it was red hearts.
Congratulations, everyone.
Social networks are among the worst failed abortions in human history, perhaps second only to the atomic bomb and wars waged in the name of God.
They should never have been born.
They promised to unite the world.
And the world, naive asshole that it is, believed them.
We would reconnect with old friends.
Meet distant people.
Share ideas.
Discover cultures.
Build communities.
A beautiful advertisement.
Too bad it ended with billions of people locked in bathrooms watching strangers dance while an artificial voice explains the seven symptoms proving beyond doubt that you are an alpha male, a wounded empath, or an entrepreneur destined for success.
Facebook became a global apartment building where everyone shouts from the balcony.
Relatives sharing conspiracies.
Former classmates posting photographs of children no one asked to see.
People who have not read a book in twenty-five years but hold definitive opinions on economics, medicine, wars, vaccines, international politics, and the proper preparation of carbonara.
Instagram is the mausoleum of lives never lived.
Bodies never possessed.
Trips spent choosing photographs of the trip.
Couples who despise each other but dedicate captions about gratitude.
Homes where no sock is ever left on the floor.
Breakfasts that take longer to photograph than to digest.
Sunsets squeezed dry of every trace of melancholy to obtain a better-performing shade of orange.
TikTok, meanwhile, is a slot machine inserted directly into the nervous system.
You pull the lever.
One video.
Another.
Another still.
A girl dances.
A psychologist with a degree from the University of Who-Gives-a-Fuck diagnoses your childhood trauma in seventeen seconds.
A cook puts cheese on something that did not need it.
An idiot licks an airport floor.
A guru explains why you are poor.
A child opens a box.
A man falls.
A woman cries.
A cat speaks in a human voice.
And you continue.
The thumb rises.
Life descends.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
Three different faucets connected to the same sewer.
The logo changes.
The color changes.
The average age of the morons changes.
The shit, however, comes through the same pipe.
In the photographs were young women outside markets.
Men sitting on work vehicles.
A delivery rider stopped on his scooter, orders behind him and eyes nailed to the screen.
A girl leaning against lockers during a break.
A man crouched in the bed of a truck.
They all had a few minutes free.
And the phone had already stolen them.
This is the most elegant scam.
It does not take your entire day.
That would not be discreet enough.
It takes the pieces.
Thirty seconds while you wait.
Two minutes while you drink.
Five minutes on the bus.
Ten minutes before sleep.
The length of a traffic light.
The length of a cigarette.
The time in which, once, nothing happened.
And that nothing mattered.
In nothingness, you grew bored.
You watched people.
You thought.
You remembered something.
You invented something.
You might even feel like speaking to the person seated beside you.
Now we are never bored.
We anesthetize ourselves.
Every crack in the day must be filled with images, voices, notifications, faces, shitty music, advertisements, and unsolicited opinions.
We cannot remain alone with our thoughts.
God forbid.
We might discover we have some.
I saw a woman and a little girl sitting on the same bench.
Each holding her own small altar.
The succession to the throne had already occurred.
Nothing needed to be taught.
Children do not do what we say.
They do what they see us doing.
They watch us touch the screen while we eat.
While we walk.
While someone speaks to us.
While we drive.
While we should be playing with them.
Then, when they start doing the same, we become indignant.
We say young people today are addicted to technology.
Of course.
They were born watching us caress a phone more consistently than we caressed the people we love.
They did not invent this shit.
We served it to them.
We set the plate before them.
We poured colors, sounds, rewards, filters, and social approval over it.
Then we said: consume in moderation.
Like placing a mountain of cocaine on an addict’s table and trusting his sense of restraint.
At the bus stops, the liturgy continued.
A woman in a pink coat.
A girl lit by an advertisement.
Another alone on the wet street while two people walked away ahead of her.
All still.
All waiting.
Not only for the bus.
Waiting for a reply.
A notification.
A sign that someone, somewhere, remembered they existed.
Perhaps that was the real product.
Not connection.
The fear of being forgotten.
Social media convinces you that if you stop posting, you disappear.
That silence is death.
That a dinner not photographed is a dinner wasted.
That a trip not shared is a trip that never happened.
That a thought not posted does not deserve to be thought.
So we fill the world with evidence of our presence.
And paradoxically, become less and less present.
A woman looked at her phone behind the window of a café.
Outside were reflections, people, and traffic.
Inside was her.
It looked like a small exhibition on contemporary loneliness.
Title of the work:
“Reachable by everyone and truly with no one.”
They could have sold it to some gallery for an obscene sum.
At least it would have been more honest than much contemporary art.
Then came the sea, the squares, the markets.
Places full of smells, wind, voices, and life.
A woman seated before the water looked at her phone.
A man crossed a market without raising his eyes.
Another sat behind a low wall, a bicycle beside him and the whole afternoon wide open ahead.
But the world had become a backdrop.
An irritating stage set around the only thing that truly mattered.
The screen.
We built a device capable of containing libraries, maps, music, cinema, love letters, and much of human knowledge.
Then we used it to watch a guy point at words above his head while lying to us about how to earn ten thousand dollars a month without doing a fucking thing.
Homo sapiens.
Never was a name more optimistic.
Naturally, there were them.
The bullshit gurus.
Jackals with whitened smiles.
The prophets of mindset.
The ones photographed beside a rented car who explain that you are poor because you do not wake up at five in the morning.
The ones who discovered the secret of wealth but, instead of enjoying it, spend their day selling you a course for ninety-nine dollars and ninety cents.
The ones who talk about financial freedom from a hotel room booked for forty-five minutes.
The ones ordering you out of your comfort zone while repeating the same four pieces of bullshit copied from an American who copied them from another American.
Wake up early.
Take a cold shower.
Cut out negative people.
Visualize success.
Buy my method.
If it fails, you did not believe hard enough.
The perfect religion.
The miracle belongs to the guru.
Failure is always the believer’s fault.
They sell a life they do not possess to people who cannot afford it, through platforms that profit from both parties’ dissatisfaction.
It is almost poetry.
Poetry written with shit, but poetry nonetheless.
Then artificial intelligence arrived.
Because apparently natural stupidity was not producing enough content.
Now you do not even have to live a fake life.
You can generate it.
The guru does not need to rent the car.
He creates it.
He does not need to rent the penthouse.
He creates it.
He does not need to read the book he recommends.
He can have a machine summarize someone else’s, turn it into ten motivational lines, and publish them over an image of a lion with abs.
Faces that do not exist.
Bodies that do not exist.
Trips never taken.
Homes never built.
Quotes never spoken.
Stories that never happened.
All produced on an industrial scale and vomited into a feed no one will remember five seconds later.
I do not hate machines.
Machines are not to blame.
At least, not yet.
I hate the idea of using a tool capable of extraordinary things to manufacture a thousand tons of nothing and call that nothing “content.”
One machine generates the image.
Another writes the caption.
An algorithm decides who sees it.
An army of bots comments “incredible.”
And in the middle remains a real human being moving a thumb, swallowing the mush, and believing he has been entertained.
We have become delivery drivers for synthetic information.
We carry machine-produced shit from one platform to another.
We share.
Repost.
React.
Tap a heart.
Then go to bed with our heads full and our brains completely empty.
At fairs and festivals, the scene became even more absurd.
Lights.
Music.
Tables full of people.
People who could have drunk, talked, argued, fallen in love, told an interesting lie, or committed at least one mistake worth remembering.
Instead, they looked at their phones.
A girl showed something to a friend.
They laughed.
Another table had glasses, food, and screens everywhere.
I do not want to pretend there was nothing real in those laughs.
Perhaps they were reading a message from someone they loved.
Perhaps from a distant friend.
Perhaps a photograph capable of carrying them back, for a moment, to a happy day.
The phone is not the devil.
It is an object.
It can contain your mother’s voice.
Your child’s face.
The final message from someone who can never write another.
It can help when you are lost.
It can make you feel less alone.
The problem is everything we built around it.
The slot machine.
The market.
The surveillance.
The need to perform.
That industrial sewer which takes the human need to be seen and turns it into minutes of engagement, personal data, and advertisements for hemorrhoid cream.
I do not think the people in the photographs were stupid.
That would be a convenient explanation.
They were people.
Tired.
Curious.
Lonely.
In love.
Bored.
Some laughed together at the same screen.
Others ate alone with a phone beside the plate.
One had several cans on the table and her eyes lowered.
A muscular man alternated between lunch and whatever he was watching.
Perhaps he was messaging his wife.
Perhaps checking work.
Perhaps looking at asses.
None of my business.
But the posture was always the same.
Head bowed.
Shoulders closed.
Eyes captured.
As if, regardless of age, country, job, or the life they had led, someone had installed the same switch behind the back of their necks.
When the phone lit up, they went dark.
There were couples huddled around the same screen.
Friends laughing.
Strangers alone on enormous benches.
A very young girl.
An old woman.
The future and the past seated in the same position.
No one was spared.
We like saying this is a disease of the young because it lets us feel superior.
But adults do the same thing with larger type and worse photographs.
Teenagers watch idiotic videos.
Fifty-year-olds argue with fake profiles.
Retirees share good-morning pictures with glittering roses and quotations attributed to poets who would turn in their graves if they still had a stomach to vomit with.
There is no innocent generation.
We are all inside.
Trained monkeys of different ages.
A sound.
We look.
A vibration.
We check.
A red dot.
We press.
Reward.
Wait.
Reward.
Wait.
A laboratory experiment the size of the planet.
And the monkeys bought the cage themselves.
On installments.
With the better camera.
Meanwhile, I kept taking photographs.
Which makes me a hypocrite.
I too had a machine in front of my face.
I too turned those people into images.
I too would take the shots home, select them, edit them, and put them on a website.
I am no saint.
Saints are generally unbearable people with excellent publicists.
But there was a difference.
Before pressing the button, I looked at them.
I waited for a gesture.
A light.
A relationship between body and street.
I tried to understand what was happening.
I did not ask them to perform a better life.
I did not filter loneliness to make it more marketable.
Photography can lie.
It always has.
But at least an honest photograph preserves the trace of a gaze.
Social media, meanwhile, turned looking into consumption.
We no longer observe.
We scroll.
We do not remember.
We save.
We do not live.
We document.
We do not desire something because we lack it.
We desire it because we have watched it pass before our eyes enough times.
Even our dreams have been given a marketing strategy.
At the end of the day, I had thirty-two photographs.
Thirty-two different people.
Thirty-two small absences.
Seen together, they resembled an autopsy report.
Cause of death:
chronic distraction.
Complications:
permanent comparison, addiction to approval, progressive loss of the ability to sit still without consuming something.
Time of death:
probably when we began calling thousands of people we would not recognize in the street “friends.”
The worst part is that social media will not disappear.
It will grow deeper.
More invisible.
More personal.
It will know our fear before we do.
Knowing we are alone, it will show us happy couples.
Knowing we are poor, it will show us the rich.
Knowing we are aging, it will show us twenty-year-olds.
Knowing we feel like failures, it will offer us a course.
Knowing we are angry, it will give us someone to hate.
It does not want to make us happy.
A happy person puts down the phone.
It wants to leave us dissatisfied enough to keep scrolling and hopeful enough to believe the next video, photograph, or motivational asshole might finally tell us what we lack.
It will not happen.
The answer is not farther down.
Nor in the next piece of content.
Nor the one after that.
The answer, assuming it exists, might be in the coffee growing cold.
In the person seated before us.
In the market smelling of spices.
In the wind beside the sea.
In the road we have not yet traveled.
In the silence we keep filling because we are terrified of what it might tell us.
Perhaps the true rebellion today is doing something without showing anyone.
Drinking without photographing the glass.
Traveling without providing evidence.
Falling in love without a caption.
Reading a book without posting its cover.
Entering a place without first checking the reviews.
Keeping a memory and allowing it to become imprecise.
Letting something belong only to us.
No audience.
No reaction.
No fucking story destined to disappear after twenty-four hours.
The world does not need another piece of content.
We already have enough to fill every landfill in hell.
It needs someone to look at it again.
So the next time your phone vibrates, let it vibrate.
No one will die.
The algorithm will survive without you.
The guru will continue getting rich by explaining to other poor bastards how to become rich.
The influencer will photograph breakfast anyway.
Artificial intelligence will produce another ten thousand images of people who do not exist while real ones keep passing beside each other unseen.
Let it vibrate.
Look at the person in front of you.
Look at where the fuck you are.
Look at the world before someone permanently turns it into a vertical backdrop with shitty music over it.
And for once, lift your fucking head.