You know the moment. You have been holding the controller for four hours. Maybe longer. Your thumbs are moving, your eyes are tracking the screen, but somewhere in the last hour or so, you left the building. You are not really playing anymore. You are just… continuing. The victory screen flashes, or the defeat screen fades in, and you feel nothing. Not joy. Not frustration. Just a hollow, distant awareness that you have been sitting here for a very long time, and you are not entirely sure why. This is what I call Autopilot Gaming. It is the state where your physical inputs continue while your emotional presence drops to zero. You are not playing a game. You are operating a machine. And the machine is operating you. I have spent a lot of time in this state. I have looked up from a screen at 2 AM and realized I could not tell you a single meaningful thing that happened in the last three hours of gameplay. I have opened a game I did not even like because the alternative—sitting with my ow...
I have been watching something strange happen. Not on the news, not in some distant corner of the internet, but right in the mainstream of our cultural attention. A growing number of our most prominent influencers are, to put it bluntly, absolute disasters. A streamer whose claim to fame includes a roach-infested house and dead rats in his kitchen. A pair of brothers who built an empire on misogyny and now face extradition on charges of rape and sex trafficking. A man who livestreamed himself harassing Black people with racial slurs, then allegedly shot one—and received over $130,000 in donations after his arrest. These are not fringe figures. They are not obscure trolls hiding in the shadows. They are some of the most visible, most followed, most celebrated personalities on the internet. And the question I keep coming back to is this: What the hell is wrong with us? At first, I thought it was simple rubbernecking. The same impulse that makes people slow down to stare at a car crash. A...