We're Being Devoured
From Black Holes to Billionaires, and the Forces In Constant Battle.
Don’t you feel it? Don’t you see it? It’s always been there. From our cosmic beginnings to our wits’ end. There are forces at play here. As primitive beings, we perhaps first observed them as hot and cold sensations. Then, visually, as light and dark. Day and night. As we evolved and began to develop moral complexities, we looked inward and labeled these forces as good and evil. We called upon deities to help explain the phenomena at work. That comforted us for a while. It allowed us to reach an intellectual point at which we could better observe and study our earthly realm.
In 1704, a man by the name of Isaac Newton proposed a “corpuscular theory of light,” which posited that light consists of minuscule particles. In 1783, drawing on Newton’s theory of light, a man named John Michell proposed the existence of celestial bodies he called ‘dark stars’. While on the front lines of World War I in 1916, a man named Karl Schwarzschild was the first to derive an exact solution to Einstein’s field equations and mathematically define the event horizon of these ‘dark stars’. But it wasn’t until 1964 that one of these ‘dark stars’, later aptly given the name black holes, was astronomically observed by a man and woman, Paul Murdin and Louise Webster. There they were, these black holes, out there in space… swallowing all the light. It’s always been there, the constant battle between light and dark, hot and cold, day and night, good and evil, call it whatever you want. We’re being devoured.
In late 2021, the richest man in the world was not happy. He had just separated from a woman who had given birth to his child the year prior. He had also been keeping secret twins he had just had with another woman, and managing co-parenting arrangements with a third woman, his ex-wife. He faced financial pressure and had to sell $16 billion worth of his car company’s stock to pay his tax bill. A car company that had been a passion of his, but which was no longer meeting expectations. By that time, he had fully shifted his focus to a space venture and built himself a self-sufficient city in Texas, which he named Starbase. He was spending most of his nights sleeping alone in the empty offices of Starbase. Was it to keep that entrepreneurial hunger alive, or was it because he could not bear to sleep in an empty home without a loved one, without his children? During this time, his activity on the social media site Twitter increased dramatically. Fully inserting himself into the culture wars plaguing the site he had become obsessed with. Here, he found people who could keep him company, who would not leave him, who he could mold and take under his wing as if they were his own. One night in early 2022, the world’s richest man gets a bright idea… There in his dark, empty office bedroom, with only the dim screen light from his phone illuminating a smug smirk on his face, “Why don’t I just buy this platform?” he says to himself. Surely this will fill the void; this will make him happy. There are forces at play.
It’s happening all around us at this very moment. Read the latest headlines from your trusted news sources. It won’t take long before you see your elected officials lying to cover up the truth. Ah, that’s another way to call the forces: truth and lies. There is no extent to which a devoted liar will go to obscure the truth. In late 2024, the world’s most powerful man was happy. He had just been elected to lead his country once again, coming off a campaign that promised a golden age, full transparency, and peace. In 2025, he launched global tariffs on the promise of a manufacturing boom and enormous revenue for his country. In the midst of this trade war, private deals were secured, like a $2 billion Saudi investment into his son-in-law’s firm. His administration also received a $400 million luxury Boeing from Qatar as a gift. That same year, as the nation demanded truth and justice about a child trafficking ring that appeared to implicate many elites, including the world’s most powerful man, the case was closed by his administration, which issued no indictments or further investigations into the matter. It’s now early 2026, and the tariffs were ruled illegal, with the revenue likely to be refunded. His family gets to keep their private deals, and he keeps the luxury plane even after leaving office; tough luck for everyone else. The elite trafficking ring remains an ongoing, slow investigation by Congress. Although his name appears the most in the exposed files, the world’s most powerful man gets to continue calling the shots; tough luck for everyone else. He also goes back on his promise of peace and wages a war with Iran, which destabilizes the entire region, putting at risk not just the global economic outlook but the lives of millions. Despite the challenges that face his new term, the world’s most powerful man looks out from the windows of his bedroom and sees construction continuing for the extravagant ballroom he ordered to be built. He thinks about his deceased dad, a much more successful real estate developer from whom he inherited most of his wealth, and wonders how proud he would be of him for developing a project at the one and only White House. He can’t help but think to himself, “I’m happy, why isn’t everyone else?” We’re being devoured.
Look further down your trusted news sources, and you may also see headlines about the acquisitions of mega media conglomerates. Devouring upon devouring is how these media conglomerates came to be. It’s always been there, even down to the intricacies of our economic systems. When a foreboding monopoly swallows up a bright startup with a promising future, do you not see it? In 2019, someone all too familiar with startups, the former president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, and the world’s prominent tech mastermind, wasn’t satisfied. His AI non-profit venture needed more funding to meet the computing power required for Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI). He and his founding team decided to transition to a capped-profit model, allowing massive investment from companies like Microsoft and SoftBank. So, as their machine devoured enormous datasets of publicly available text from the internet, it wasn’t long before their product became the world’s leading AI tool. With multiple competitors starting to catch up in the rising industry, the tech mastermind wasn’t complacent; he knew he still needed more out of his product. Luckily for him, perhaps the world’s most prestigious media company, The Walt Disney Company, agreed to allow the integration of its iconic characters to be used in his new AI video generation platform. What would originally take a talented animator thousands of hours of meticulous hand-drawn work, users would now be able to churn out in seconds with a simple text prompt. To the tech mastermind, the deal was a win-win for everybody, and the possibilities now seemed endless, so why stop there? There are forces at play.
These are but a few examples of the phenomena at work on a human level. The great devouring doesn’t just take place at the center of galaxies, where supermassive black holes are often located. There are those around us whose souls are tuned more to the dark and others to the light. The devourers and the luminaries, everyone plays their part in the cosmos. At any moment, with every action we take, we tip the scale to one side or the other, so behave accordingly. Luminaries may develop a promising social media platform, or design a revolutionary system of governance, or create beloved animated characters. But whatever light these creators bring to the world, there will also be the devourers who can’t help but extinguish them for their own satisfaction, ego, or greed. Still, despite its inevitable devourment by dark forces, the light always inspires more light to proliferate throughout the world. According to recent physics research, all light and matter once thought to be completely eradicated upon entering a black hole is actually likely to be totally deconstructed and recycled back into the universe as raw heat. The devourment, whether on a human or universal scale, may not be the end-all be-all of the story, if there’s an end at all. Consequently, the idea and importance of being a bright soul in a world full of dark ones has never been as evident as it is now. So, however large the dark forces might get and however hopeless it may feel to escape them, always remember that once it was all dark… and yet still, out of almost nothing, a dot smaller than an atom, as if in complete defiance of the status quo, suddenly expanded at rapid speed, and then, in every direction of the universe, there was nothing but light.
This post was written by a human.
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