They say the soul is free, but in the year of our Lord 2026, the lease on your daily life is due every thirty days. I look out from my window, not at Harlem rooftops, but at the glowing rectangles held in tired hands on the Chicago ‘L’. We are living in a new kind of kitchenette building, one with invisible walls built of code and “Terms of Service.”
The data tells a story of a Great Deception. The average man thinks he’s spending eighty-six dollars to stay connected to the world, but his bank statement whispers a different truth: two hundred and nineteen dollars. For the young ones, it is nearly four hundred. We are being bled by a thousand “Subscribe” buttons, a modern sharecropping where we don’t even own the tools we use to speak, to think, or to dream.
And who are the overseers of this digital plantation? They are the men in high-rises and the politicians who carry their bags. They stand on stages and drape themselves in “values” while their hands are deep in the pockets of everyone else. They speak of freedom and equality but yet they build their platforms on the “othering” of the immigrant and your neighbor, while continuously feeding rage to their users to stoke the engagement.
They tell the white worker in the Midwest that his enemy is the man crossing the border, or the man with a different shade of skin, all while they quietly raise the rent on his digital existence. They want us looking sideways at each other so we don’t look up at the ledger. They sell us hatred because it’s cheaper than paying a living wage. They give us a target for our anger so we don’t notice that the “American Dream” has been repackaged as a monthly subscription we can no longer afford.
The “woes of society” aren’t coming from the person seeking a better life; they are coming from the boardroom where greed is the only scripture.
We are being sold a version of faith that has no room for the merciful, only for the profitable.
It is time to stop buying the lie.