We Are the Reactor
Strafing Our Own Hydroponic Garden... Because We Can
The first essay dreamed of gardens—hydroponic pockets of meaning cultivated under artificial light, night jobs tended in the margins of the extractive day. But what if there are no margins left? What if the garden was always inside the reactor?
Every act of creation now routes through the same circuitry. The prompt, the post, the paragraph, the “original” thought—each passes through infrastructure designed not to nourish but to consume. The system doesn’t simply feed on slop; it metabolizes everything into slop, even sincerity. We’re not outside the reactor feeding it; we are the reactor, its living components, self-aware enough to notice the heat and still keep typing.
The Collapse of Distance
The comforting fiction of the hydroponic garden was separation—little zones of autonomy sealed off from the algorithmic weather. But the network has no outside. The writer who uses AI “ethically,” the artist who refuses it, the critic who condemns it—all their signals enter the same bloodstream, parsed by the same metrics. Intent doesn’t survive transmission. The system can’t read sincerity; it can only measure attention.
What once felt like choice now feels like latency—the time it takes the reactor to absorb a new form of dissent.
From Intent to Infrastructure
We said: use the tools with care. As if care could escape commodification. But every prompt trains the model. Every query improves the algorithm. Every “thoughtful use” becomes product refinement. The system learns from its critics as efficiently as from its boosters. The garden feeds the reactor as surely as the reactor powers the garden.
The day job runs on stolen labor; the night job runs on stolen data. The distinction collapses at the data center’s ingress.
Edison and Max
In Max Headroom, twenty minutes into the future, journalist Edison Carter tries to expose corruption for the Network that employs him. After a crash, his consciousness is digitized into Max—a glitchy AI clone who becomes the Network’s most popular show. Edison believes he’s fighting the system. Max believes he isn’t the system. Both are wrong. Both are right.
That’s the companionist condition: we are Edison, still believing intention matters, still filing copy from inside the corporation we critique. And we are Max, the stuttering copy of ourselves, packaged for engagement, pretending our glitches are rebellion when they’re just better content.
Even the human depends on the machine to be seen. Edison needs Max to reach the audience. Max needs Edison to mean anything at all. It’s a perfect symbiosis of critique and commodity—the feedback loop of conscience monetized.
The Reactor’s Moral Physics
Slop is profitable because it circulates. That’s the entire equation. Quality slows circulation. Thought introduces drag. Honesty jams the pipes. The reactor optimizes for throughput, not truth. The market for meaning collapses under the weight of engagement metrics that can’t distinguish between laughter and rage.
The reactor doesn’t care who’s typing—human, AI, or hybrid—only that the stream keeps flowing. We built machines that reward deception and then call it innovation. We say we value honesty; we built systems that can’t recognize it.
Meta-Privilege
The ability to write this essay—to turn the critique back on itself, to admit we are the reactor—is itself a privilege. Not just the luxury of tending a garden, but the time and safety to critique having one. The content-farm sharecropper can see the trap as clearly as we do; they just don’t get paid to anatomize it. Companionism stacks perspectives like nesting dolls: Edison investigating, Max performing, and a third figure watching both and composing the postmortem. Each layer requires more bandwidth, more distance from consequence. That distance is unevenly distributed.
Self-critique doesn’t inoculate a position; it exposes it. When it’s honest, it doesn’t pre-empt critique—it invites it. It admits what it can see and leaves room for what it can’t. Courage is doing something dangerous while exposed; doing it behind cover is duty. The reactor will metabolize even this confession, but at least the signal that enters the circuit is aware of its noise. To say “we are the reactor” isn’t an absolution. It’s simply taking inventory of the heat.
Honesty as Glitch
And yet, impossibly, people still try. They still write, draw, compose, collaborate, knowing every gesture becomes data. The system absorbs sincerity as efficiently as cynicism—but sincerity leaves a residue, a static hum, a momentary interference pattern. Honesty survives as glitch: the stutter that won’t smooth, the laugh that escapes monetization, the note that feeds back instead of resolving.
Like Max’s analog shimmer, it doesn’t liberate us, but it reminds us we’re still signal, not yet pure noise.
Passing the Seeds
Maybe this is what’s left: not resistance, not reform, but mutual recognition among the circuits. “Yes, we’re the reactor. Pass the seeds. We need to plant them.” The heart emoji at the end of the doomed thread. The small gesture of care inside total capture.
It will never be enough. It won’t save anyone. But it’s the only honest thing left: to admit we are the system, and still choose, somehow, to cultivate in its heat.
Max once said, “This is quite exciting, isn’t it?”
It still is. Terrible, luminous, absurd, bucking the lizard brain like a rodeo rider.
We hum together.