After the noise
💀 TCDJ™ Entry 004 - The Quiet they can’t Monetise always becomes a threat.
The Quiet they can’t Monetise always becomes a threat.
— Silence Study Protocol, Redacted Revision
The air tastes faintly of warm dust. The flavour of electronics cooling after an all-night vigil. Burnt plastic. Copper breath. Ghost-ozone of overworked circuits. A room that has inhaled too much of you and hasn’t exhaled back.
You didn’t always flinch at silence.
There was a time it simply was; a temperature, not a threat. Like the cool space beneath damp slate after rain. Before anxiety gave it claws. Before society poured its acid in the gaps and called it progress.
Silence once held you without interrogation. Didn’t demand, didn’t recoil, didn’t sell itself. You floated; sinking underwater, letting the world dissolve into a soft hum. Not escape, not running, just existing. Tidal. Breath weightless, chest softened, no permission slip needed.
[Field Scrap 004.1]: Subject demonstrates pre-infection baseline: immersion in unbranded silence. No performance observed. Archive timestamp: redacted.
You didn’t call it the void.
It didn’t need a slogan. Didn’t want clicks, likes, or sponsorship. Silence doesn’t clap. That’s why it terrifies them. It doesn’t give compliments. It doesn’t need them either. Gooseflesh lifts down your forearm like Braille nobody taught you to read, each bump a glyph in a forgotten tongue.
I remember the ocean. Not postcard ocean. Not the sanitised postcard fantasy. Not the lounge chairs, sunscreen or inflatable bullshit with spa day serenity. Feral water. Pulling. Indifferent. I went under once and came up coughing. Twice, lungs burned longer. Third time, I stopped resisting. Clarity, not peace. Indifference, not mercy.
My dad said he yelled. Said he shouted get out. Said the tide was turning, that I was being dragged too far. I didn’t hear him. Down there I heard nothing. Just ocean. Just the muted thud of my heart, louder, thicker. Not fear, but pressure leaking through bone, reminding you what’s soft beneath ribs.
It was beautiful. Not poetic. Not soft. Beautiful because it was indifferent. The water didn’t care if I came back to shore. Didn’t care if I breathed. It just let you exist — without commentary, without algorithmic applause. That’s why it mattered. That’s why it still haunts.
[Custodian Note — Hydric Immersion 004.2]: Indifference logged as sacred. Subject reports clarity not marketed as wellness. Recommend classification: anomalous perception of fairness.
Fearlessness isn’t earned. It’s pre-infection. The inner child you lose to their bullshit. The one who hasn’t yet learned to hesitate. Learned to be polite, with curated reactions and muzzled desire. One rule at a time, one adjustment to avoid friction, one moment where you think, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say that out loud’, and something inside you nods like it’s keeping score. You adapt to shitty rooms full of shitty people, learn to swallow whole the words you once spilled without rehearsal.
The child, the one who walked straight into waves, wasn’t fearless because she was brave. She was fearless because she hadn’t been infected.
The ceiling bulb flickers once, washing the room in a jaundiced blink that smells of burnt dust, hot wire, tired starter caps. Your skin doesn’t trust it. Prickles rise cheap beneath the surface, breath held without consent, like waiting for something to finish breaking.
Listen.
The void gave her that freedom.
Now look at you. Listening to the feed more than your own mind. Absorbing voices not yours, brand kits disguised as wisdom, rehearsed vulnerability disguised as authenticity. The feed sells stillness as stagnation, silence as guilt. You’ve swallowed so much static you mistake it for hunger. Your stomach churns habit into identity.
And eventually, you start to believe that the only real thing in the world is content. It’s almost like the system was created for soft minds.
You adapt. You become optimised. Digestible. Fuckable. Your ‘wildness’ becomes a brand asset. Desperate to be seen but only in the right light, with the right filters.
And somewhere in the cracks, something starts to rot. Not loud. Not disruptive. Just a quiet smell, like something dead behind a wall you can’t afford to tear down.
You remember her.
The child. Wild. Undomesticated. Pre-interface.
She didn’t ask before feeling. Didn’t rehearse her joy. Didn’t apologise for silence.
She moved like her body was a language no one had yet corrupted with metrics and bleach.
But that memory comes corrupted now. Your mind handles it like it’s radioactive not nostalgic, but illegal. Too raw. Too unformatted. You touch it and something inside you flinches, like you’ve violated the terms of service.
That child isn’t gone she’s embargoed. Flagged by the system as incompatible with monetised identity. You’re not allowed to access her without a brand deal, without a soft-focus reel about 'healing your inner child' with affiliate links in the caption.
You didn’t lose her —
You sold her.
Traded her for followers. For 'likes' when you cry in the right platform.
She used to walk into waves. Now you check the tide chart for content potential. Now you film the wreckage and call it ‘growth’.
The child didn’t vanish.
She was overwritten. Line by line. Hashtag by hashtag. Emoji by emoji. And now she lives beneath your surface like a virus the system couldn’t fully delete.
Sometimes, when the algorithm sleeps, you feel her in your teeth.
Gnawing.
You think you’ve grown. You think this is maturity. But it isn’t. It’s erosion. Conditioning. Fear of the void; not because it’s dangerous, but because it doesn’t applaud with subs.
[Performance Report 004.3]: Subject now compliant with optimisation protocols. Silence reframed as error-state. Recommend monetisation audit.
And deep down, you know silence still waits. Not judging. Just waiting. Like a room with lights off. Like a mirror that doesn’t flatter.
You can still go back. That’s what terrifies you most.
It hits sideways. A meeting. A conversation. A morning that tastes like nothing. Success airtight, performance complete, applause collected and yet bones ache, pulse stutters, gut hollows.
You sit. You nod. You contribute.
You’re not thinking you’re executing. A process built in someone else’s image.
The glow from the spreadsheet is surgical, sterile, the kind of light they use in autopsies. It reflects off your skin like plastic, like laminate. Nothing in this room absorbs anything. Not even breath.
Your hands hover, obedient. Click. Type. Format. But you haven’t made a decision in months. The cursor blinks like a metronome for the dying. It doesn’t ask questions. It waits. You envy that.
Each keystroke isn’t a thought, it’s evidence of compliance. The file name is your name. The file size is your soul, compressed. It autosaves every 15 seconds, just in case you try to forget who you are.
Somewhere in the machine, a soft whir. You tell yourself it’s the fan. But it feels like something inside you is spinning, trying to cool down before it melts.
The screen flickers. It always flickers. It’s not a malfunction, it’s a reminder.
That even your tools are exhausted.
And the scaffolding groans. Not from weight, from history. From every person who sat here before you, wearing a different face but identical posture. It groans from the effort of pretending this was ever a choice.
Your breath knots halfway up your throat. Not choking. Not yet. Just gathering weight.
You start to hear yourself talk.
But the words come prepackaged. The cadence has already been approved.
There’s a rhythm to your speech that matches the scroll, a sentence every 1.3 seconds. Optimised for retention. Your voice isn’t yours any more. It’s just another interface.
You don’t speak, you stream. Previews of thought. Snippets formatted for virality.
Even the pauses feel algorithmic dramatic timing scraped from some influencer’s meltdown reel. You’ve forgotten how to stutter without intention.
Your rage? Beautiful. Symmetrical. Aesthetically raw. It comes with hashtags now. It knows where to look when it cries. It’s framed just right, so the right kind of people will validate it, will DM support, will comment 'so powerful 🩶' and scroll on.
You’ve started to fear silence. Not for what it says, but because it says nothing back. There’s no engagement in solitude. No analytics in introspection.
Your rebellion is safe.
Your breakdown sponsored.
Somewhere beneath your lungs, something primitive wants to scream.
But even that feels ‘cringe’. Unbranded. Messy.
You don’t scream. You post.
Caption it: 'healing isn’t linear 💔'
Beneath it, something teeth-shaped wants out.
A voice you barely remember, seething through six feet of branding.
It builds. Quietly, like rot. Like a smell that becomes the room’s default scent. You stop questioning. You start managing. You start coping. Another compromise. Another edit. Another layer of makeup on a corpse you’re calling a life. Even your marrow curls smaller to conserve heat.
Memories brittle. Even your empowerment spiel is synthetic. Self-worth data-driven. Joy downgraded to relief. Happiness retrofitted as nostalgia.
And the worst part? You think it’s just you. Everyone else seems fine. Everyone else performs wellness. Meal prep, progress reels, curated grief with good lighting. Why can’t you just play along?
But something feral remembers. It doesn’t want peace. It wants out. It wants a sentence that hasn’t been beta-tested.
Behind drywall, a cable hums. Insect-thin, high, just above hearing. Proof the building still dreams in circuitry.
And that’s when collapse becomes irreversible.
Not loud. Not tragic.
Just quiet. Just the iron tang of your own breath against the back of your tongue. Jaw locked soft against it. Swallow dry. Taste bitter. Honest.
Forget.
[Observation Log 004.4]: Return initiated. Not chosen by subject. Triggered by fatigue, by cracks. Silence intrusion successful.
It finds you cracked open, too tired to pretend.
The void hasn’t changed. You have. Conditioned to perform. Scrounging for views. But unobserved, the act drops. No revelation follows. Just pulse. Breath. Bone. A poor excuse for an existence.
No applause. No narrative. Just wrath humming under silence like a distant engine.
For a heartbeat, it’s enough. Not good. Just real. Silence isn’t comforting. But it’s fair. And now you know the truth: You could stay here. But if you do, everything changes.
So now you know.
No more pretending you didn’t hear it. No more playing dumb. The silence hit you like a mirror. No lies told. That’s what makes it dangerous. You can’t negotiate with something that doesn’t care about your story.
The moment you stop performing, the system doesn’t collapse, it forgets you were ever in it.
Your heartbeat knocks your throat. Wet. Low. Rubber hammer on meat. Each beat: something tender trying to restart beneath ruin.
Surface.
You could go back.
They always make sure you know that. The door never locks, it just forgets you if you hesitate.
You could dry off. Wrap yourself in the warmth of familiarity. The brand voice. The curated identity. The dopamine routine that tastes like sugar but metabolises into rot.
You could post about the void like it was a workshop. Share your collapse like it was a content series. Title it: 'What silence taught me' with ‘cute scar’.
Your pain would get engagement. Your clarity monetisable. You’d harvest yourself for parts and watch the algorithm nod in approval.
And they’d call you brave. They’d thank you for being 'vulnerable'. They’d save your quotes for their moodboards and forget you by next week.
You could go back. But something inside you knows: you don’t return from this. You repurpose. You become another relic, aestheticised for soft consumption. You don’t get your soul back, You just learn how to sell it better.
Or.
You stay.
In the silence.
In the unmeasured.
But staying isn’t noble. Staying doesn’t come with applause. It comes with dust. With hunger. With the sound of your thoughts no longer echoing through a social feedback loop.
Staying is existing without performance. Which means staying is extinction but slower.
Because the moment you stop posting, the moment you let silence reclaim your outline, the system doesn’t punish you, it erases you.
Pretend you’re important. Pretend they’ll grieve you longer than a TikTok video. Or you could stay. Sit in it. Let silence become first language again. Existence without performance.
Staying isn’t clean. It costs. People. Context. Personas you grew to be seen.
What’s left? You. Raw. Flawed. Unbranded. Real.
That’s the choice: truth or comfort. You don’t get both.
And the void won’t choose for you. It never has.
You stay.
You don’t speak of it.
Not because there’s dignity in silence, but because language is a leash, and you’ve chewed through yours.
There’s nothing to post. No way to caption this kind of rot.
The system doesn’t chase you. It doesn’t need to. You were never vital, only visible. And now, stripped of your metrics, you don’t disappear. You just become undocumented.
Time moves differently here. Not forward. Not backward. Just around you, like mould colonising drywall. You feel yourself softening. Thoughts thickening. The clean outlines of your identity begin to blur, to bleed into the architecture.
Eventually, you forget what your voice sounded like when it wasn’t trying to be shared.
You sleep without dreams.
Wake without ambition.
Breathe without timestamp.
And somewhere far above, beyond the static hum and iron breath of this quiet,
your old life continues. It’s thriving.
Without you.
It remembers the version of you that performed well.
The archive is intact. The feed is whole.
But you —
you are the footnote they redact in future versions.
You chose silence.
And the system, in its mercy,
chose to forget you.
[Field Scrap 004.5]: Custodian of Silence: Subject exposed to un-monetised quiet, post-performance phase. Observe pride response levels. Terminate observation cycle if subject fails to rebrand within 48hrs.