Plato's Cave After the Real
There was once a cave described by a philosopher. In it, prisoners were chained, forced to watch shadows flicker across a wall. They believed the shadows were real because they had never seen anything else. One day, a prisoner escaped, saw the sun, and learned the truth. When he returned, the others rejected him. The story was tragic, but it had a lesson. Truth existed, and ignorance could be overcome.
The new cave did not resemble this one.
In the new cave, no one was chained. People came and went freely. The wall was no longer stone but made of LEDs. It was smooth, bright, and endlessly responsive! It did not show merely shadows. It showed us everything. News, faces, memories, opinions, explanations, porn, reels, endless content, each one more engaging and titillating than the last. The images did not claim to represent reality. They did not need to. They simply appeared, refreshed, and replaced one another as fast as the eye could follow.
The people in the cave were not prisoners. They were active users.
Occasionally, some brave and foolhardy soul would ask what was behind the wall. This question was met with confusion. Behind the wall was nothing in particular. Infrastructure of some kind or another—servers, cables, systems—none of which explained anything. There was no fire, no puppeteer, no original object casting a copy. The wall did not hide reality. It functioned without it.
One person decided to leave the cave. He walked past the screens and out into the world beyond. There was no blinding light, no awe-inspiring truth awaiting him, merely a dull absence. Things were much slower there. He had to contend with these feelings within him, thoughts slowly pouring forth from his head, attempting laboriously to update him on what he was looking at. This place was poorly defined. Nothing updated itself. Without images to organize them, objects felt strangely unreal. He stayed for a while, nodded, then returned.
When he tried to explain what he had found, no one argued with him. They nodded politely. Someone asked him to post about it. Another suggested turning his experience into a channel, a lecture series, perhaps some kind of documentary. His account circulated widely, summarized into quotes, illustrated with images. It performed well.
Soon, others spoke of leaving the cave, too. Some even staged exits. The cave displayed these stories prominently. They reassured everyone that escape was possible. Few actually tried.
Over time, the question of reality stopped coming up, exhausted of its novelty. The cave simply worked better. It provided orientation, stimulation, and recognition. It removed uncertainty and replaced it with visibility. Nothing outside competed with that.
In the old cave, people were trapped and mistook illusion for truth.
In the new cave, they were comfortable and no longer cared.
And so the cave remained. Not because it deceived its inhabitants, but because it gave them everything they needed to stop asking what was real.