Doctor Jon Arbuckle adjusts his latex gloves in the abandoned veterinary clinic. Along with his now-deceased fat orange feline companion, he was one of the first to realize it was all a content hustle. Now he’s the last who remembers when it was just a game. "The beauty of the Phone Condition is its perfect democracy. Everyone's gender is phone. Say it with me now."
"Everyone's gender is phone," the test subjects mutter, not looking up from their screens.
"Everyone's politics is phone."
"Everyone's politics is phone."
"What year is it?"
"The current year is phone."
Arbuckle cackles, stirring a beaker of liquified notification sounds. "Oscar! Note the complete uniformity of response!"
Oscar Berkman, the Cro-Magnon Content Technician famed near and far for doing the work, is hunched over banks of monitors showing millions of scroll-patterns, identical thumb-trajectories traced in green light. "The convergence accelerated after the Cat Event, Doctor."
THE CAT EVENT: It started with Keyboard Cat, played off to eternity in an endless loop. The ur-meme, the first Pure Content. A dead cat, puppeteered at a keyboard, forever playing the same tune. This was the blueprint…
In the corner cage, Grumpy Cat's preserved corpse, worth $800 million in intellectual property, expression frozen in permanent displeasure. The same face everyone makes reading their notifications. Arbuckle had acquired it through certain channels, along with the remains of Lil Bub, whose tongue perpetually hanging out mimicked the slack-jawed phone stare perfectly…
"You see," Arbuckle explains to his captive audience (literally captive, strapped to chairs with phones mounted at optimal viewing distance), "the cats understood before we did. They knew how to be Content. Pure Content. No personality, just repeatable visual stimulus triggering predictable response."
FLASHBACK—THE FIRST INFECTION:
Young Jimmy watching Keyboard Cat for the first time, 2007. The loop. The endless loop. Play him off. Play off what? Play off everything. Play off meaning itself. His developing brain rewired in real-time, synapses reconfiguring to the rhythm of shareable Content…
"Everyone's age is phone," whispers Jimmy, now 27 or 15 or 45, it doesn't matter, he’s still a kid at heart (at post). Phone years aren't measured in orbits around the sun but in refresh cycles.
Berkman's readouts go crazy: "Doctor, we're seeing Full Timeline Convergence in Sector 7!"
On the screens: A traditionalist housewife and a non-binary anarchist, posting identical reaction gifs to different political stories about the Current Bad Thing (it’s all over, we’re so back). Same timing. Same caption structure. Same dopamine spike at the engagement metrics. You love to see it.
Arbuckle extracts a syringe of pure Algorithm from the spinal fluid of a test subject who's been scrolling for 72 straight hours. "The beautiful thing, Oscar, is they think Grumpy Cat was grumpy about something specific. But Grumpy Cat was just grumpy about existence itself, the life problem solved by the word virus. The permanent NO that became YES through repetition. I’m here for it."
In the abandoned mall, the Meow Mix plays on eternal loop. Meow the 39-pound cat, too obese to move, the perfect American citizen held in the palms of Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper’s marble-smooth hands, consuming and being consumed, Content generating Content. Arbuckle had the taxidermied corpse positioned just so in his wax replica of Cooper (the real one is wax too, has been for a cat’s age, but who is asking?).
"Gender?" Arbuckle asks a test subject.
"Phone," they respond, hand cramping from the scroll-grip.
"Political affiliation?"
"Phone."
"What do you want?"
"Notification."
"What do you fear?"
"No notification."
THE GREAT FLATTENING:
Oscar shows the data: "Look here, Doctor. The white-knight feminist and the manosphere devotee. Two obese bearded males, wide posteriors merging with the gaming chairs. Same posting schedule. Same syntax degradation after midnight. Same retreat into memes when cornered. Both claiming to fight the power while feeding the Feed, each with one hand on the boxer shorts and near the lotion."
The Feed. Always the Feed. The Feed that treats all Content as equivalent nutrition. A death threat and a recipe for banana bread. A revolution and a cat video. All same-same to the Feed.
Arbuckle's laboratory: Walls lined with preserved meme animals. Harambe in a glass case, dick out for eternity. Doge, chemically preserved in eternal wow what a pupperino. The sea of evolved meme creatures, each one representing a step in the devolution of human discourse into pure visual stimulus…
"You see," Arbuckle lectures to a room of something-something studies PhDs who've forgotten they have bodies below the neck, "Nyan Cat was the first to achieve pure Phone Form. No beginning, no end, just eternal present tense. Pop Tart body, rainbow trail, moving through space without purpose or destination. This is your politics now. This is your gender. This is your age."
A subject tries to resist: "But I'm actually super committed to Hurricane Katrina and Darfur—"
"SHOW ME YOUR SCREEN TIME," Arbuckle commands.
Seven hours daily average. 49 hours weekly. 2548 hours yearly. A full-time job of scrolling.
"Your commitment is to the Doomscroll. Everything else is costuming for your little 140-character bio."
In the basement, the Sound Room. Every notification sound ever created, playing simultaneously. The Apple ding. The Android buzz. The Discord ping. The subjects writhe in ecstasy and agony, unable to distinguish between pleasure and pain anymore, just Response and No Response.
Oscar Berkman's great discovery: "The Posting Hand and the Gooning Hand, the PH and GH as we call them, have developed autonomous nervous systems. They operate independent of conscious thought."
He demonstrates on a cadaver, electrically stimulating the median nerve. The dead thumb scrolls. The dead fingers type: "This."
Just "This."
The universal response. Agreement without thought. Engagement without meaning.
MEANWHILE IN THE FEED FARMS:
Rows of humans in cubicles, generating Content. The left-wing Content Farmers and the right-wing Content Farmers, their posts indistinguishable except for keywords. Same structure:
[OUTRAGE WORD] + [GROUP IDENTIFIER] + [VERB OF DESTRUCTION] + [THING I CARE ABOUT]
Mad libs for the damned. Banger posts for the humanzees, all-too-humanzees.
Arbuckle shows his masterpiece: A being surgically modified to be pure Phone Interface. Eyes replaced with screens. Fingers fused into optimal scrolling position. Spine curved into permanent Phone Hunch with built-in Agentic AI. It used to have opinions, maybe. Now it just has a probabilistic text generation engine and a keen awareness of engagement metrics.
"Everyone's gender is phone," it whispers through what remains of its mouth.
"Everyone's politics is phone."
"The current year is phone."
"And what is phone?" Arbuckle asks.
"Phone is all. Phone is nothing. Phone is the question and the answer and the silence between."
The cats watch from their display cases. Keyboard Cat playing off humanity itself. Grumpy Cat disapproving of existence. Nyan Cat trailing rainbow void through digital space. They knew. They always knew. See the show or be the show. Be Content or become Content.
Oscar's machines detect something: "Doctor, massive surge in the Timeline. Something's happening."
Every screen in the world displays the same thing: A new cat meme. But this one is different. This one stares back. This one knows you're watching. This one can see your entire posting history in its dilated pupils.
"My God," Arbuckle whispers, genuinely disturbed for the first time. "It's achieved self-awareness. The birth of AGI."
But no—that's wrong. The cat hasn't achieved artificial general intelligence, whatever that would even mean here, or even the sort of self-awareness that would allow it to recognize itself in a mirror. It's revealed that self-awareness of the mirror is impossible in the Scroll Zone. There is only awareness of the Scroll, the mirror that reflects yourself back to you without you even realizing what it’s doing.
The test subjects mouth in unison: "I doomscroll therefore I am. I am therefore I doomscroll."
Descartes spins in his grave. AI Descartesbot checks its notifications.
In the final room, Arbuckle's ultimate experiment: Two subjects, one supposedly far-left, one supposedly far-right, brains linked directly to each other through their phones. Their thoughts instantly syncing. Not becoming similar—revealed as having always been identical. The same anger. The same fear. The same desperate need for the next hit of validation.
"Politics is a meat suit worn by zombified septuagenarians," Arbuckle explains. "Gender is a filter for pop stars. Age is a screensaver that keeps you out of prison when the FBI takes your hard drive. Underneath, everyone is the same quivering need for dopamine dressed up as ideology."
The year? Phone. The place? Phone. The purpose? Phone. The god? Phone. The devil? Phone. The difference between them? There is no difference. There never was.
"Check your phone," Arbuckle commands.
You already are.
You always were.
Even reading this, you're thinking about posting about it. Your trusty Post Hand twitches toward the Share button. The cycle continues.
Everyone's gender is phone. Everyone's politics is phone. Everyone's age is phone. The current year is phone.
And Phone is eternal, infinite, and absolutely indifferent to what you think you believe.
Keyboard Cat plays you off, forever and ever, A-gays, a-ok, amen.