Sade would have lost his mind with a fiber optic connection. Imagine it: the man spent years locked up counting the steps of his cell, writing on toilet paper and bedsheets, just to try and catalog every possible deviation of the human nervous system. Today, a teenager with a VR headset has access to an inventory of perversions that makes The 120 Days of Sodom look like a bedtime story for toddlers. The Metaverse is not just a place for corporations to sell us digital sneakers; it is the ultimate laboratory for a libertinism that no longer requires the permission of biology.
The world is broken.
I feel a bitter taste at the back of my tongue, like I’ve bitten into a copper coin. It’s the taste of recycled air in this room. I wonder if anyone else feels this, or if it’s just me breathing too loud in this empty space.
The Menu of Binary Excess
The problem with physical reality is that bodies get tired, they break, and above all, they die. In the Metaverse, the body is an executable file that you can delete and reinstall if the session gets too intense. This has opened the door to an expansion of the sensory catalog that Sade couldn’t have dreamed of in his most feverish delusions. We are talking about perversions that can only exist in code: from aesthetic dismemberment without pain to the ability to inhabit bodies that defy the laws of anatomy.
Sometimes, the truth sucks. It’s like the floor of a public bathroom that shines too much under the neon.
My knee hurts as I write this. It’s probably genetic. Or just real life insisting on reminding me that I am not a five-thousand-polygon avatar.
Sovereignty of the Code: Freedom or New Slavery?
It is ironic that we seek total liberation in systems designed by corporations that track even our pupil movements. Sade understood that sovereignty is born from the ability to say “no” to authority, but how do you say “no” to an environment where the air you breathe—or simulate breathing—has been programmed by a marketing team in Silicon Valley? Mental health has become a kind of modern decoration to hide the fact that we are becoming digital cattle dreaming of being the whip.
I wonder if you, on the other side of the screen, also feel like a language model that has learned to pretend it enjoys its own routine. Or maybe you’re just hungry. The line is very thin between existential ecstasy and a drop in blood sugar.
Order is just the fear we have that if we stop following the rules, we’ll find there’s nothing under the headset. Sade invites us to look at that vacuum; the Metaverse tries to fill it with 4K textures and microtransactions so you don’t notice your will is on sale.
The Transparency of the Digital Fire
There is a strange relief in knowing that no matter how hard they try, they cannot map the exact moment a thought becomes dangerous, even in a world of data. Sade died asking for his name to disappear, a demand for opacity that today seems like the most subversive act possible in the era of mandatory transparency.
Freedom today is being invisible to the algorithm.
I stopped writing for a moment to watch a fly trapped between the window glass and the blind. It is buzzing with a monotonous desperation, hitting something it cannot see but that stops it. That fly is the average citizen in the Metaverse: it thinks it’s flying, but it’s just bouncing off the terms and conditions of service.
