The first time I saw Fantasmas, it felt like a joke about bureaucracy. A person calls support and says: I am me. And the system calmly replies: no data on you. It sounds funny, pure absurdity. But the laugh somehow gets stuck near the throat.

Because it sounds way too familiar. I recently filled out a form — “user not found.” You try to recover your account, but the service says you never existed. You try to get a loan — “no history.” This isn’t a TV show plot anymore, but a regular digital day. You exist physically, can remember yourself from yesterday, scrape your elbow on a table corner, tell your whole life story from birth to this morning. But if the algorithm doesn’t recognize you — to the world, you’re like a ghost.

Here’s the weird shift: what matters more — being yourself or being noticed by the system? Philosophers used to argue about recognition: until another person recognizes you, it’s like you don’t exist at all. Now that “other” is an algorithm, a database. Not on the list — you vanish. Being a client, a user, a line in a log becomes your way of being present.

Sometimes your digital shadow feels more real than your body. A profile in the system can live its own life — buying tickets, watching movies (or pretending to), showing up in recommendations for others. Sometimes it keeps going even after you’ve left the game. But if it’s gone — no access to life either.

When did a profile line start replacing the person? When did we agree to this kind of existence? In Fantasmas, the fear of getting lost is more than just fear of bureaucracy; it’s the fear of not being found at all. Your value and place are set by how many matches you have in the database.

It reminds me of the old mirror question: do you exist only if someone looks at you? Only now the mirror is replaced by the cold gaze of an algorithm. Arguing with it is harder than with any person — you can’t convince a server with words or memories; you need field matches.

The absurdity of Fantasmas goes beyond comedy and becomes painfully familiar to any migrant without papers or a teen without social media; to those invisible to statistics and record systems.

The right to be someone turns into the right to be found on demand.

The line between being and not being suddenly looks far from clear.

What today defines your existence more: what you remember about yourself or what machines know about you?