The first odd thing was almost invisible. The internet became a sense organ, but no one flipped a switch, no big shift was felt — one day I just caught myself starting the morning not by what I see outside the window, but by what comes through the screen.

For a long time I thought: the internet is a tool, you can pick it up and put it down. But now it feels different. It’s built in somewhere between my skin and nerves.

The day gets colored in advance. Like someone picked the filter color for me. Not because something big happened; because the feed decided so.

The habit of reading news on the way to coffee seems harmless, but after that it’s hard to get out of the state — like everything around is already tuned to someone else’s rhythm.

Before it felt like: just got the news — moved on. Turns out it’s the other way around: I don’t pick the day’s topics, they pick me.

When I catch myself on this — it feels like sight or hearing. Only instead of photons or sound waves, a stream of events, faces, worries, and wins comes inside, sorted out just for me.

It feels like neutral watching, but it’s not a direct look at the world. Everything already passed through someone else’s grid.

There’s a difference that won’t let go. With my own eyes I look myself: the tree in the yard or the table surface no one edits before me. I can close my eyes — then there’s no picture at all; but while I look, I see everything.

Here it’s different: the algorithm decides not just the news order — it sets the range of the visible world. What shows up big? What fades to the background?

The model of reality is built by someone else’s technical task (and it might even be harmless), but definitely not mine.

I check myself: is my world different from others’? Turns out yes — people with different news sources have different focuses, some events exist only for some and are totally missing for others.

At some point you realize: if before the filter bubble was a metaphor (“we all live in our bubbles”), now it feels like real sensory deprivation of information.

Part of reality disappeared completely; you don’t even suspect it exists, as continuously and irreversibly as a fish doesn’t know about water outside its tank.

Normal senses can’t be switched off and no one controls them but you; here there’s an editor and their work is invisible.

It’s like someone else appeared between me and the world — a being without a name or shape (an algorithm?), deciding what the taste of reality will be this morning.

This clear border gets especially obvious when you try to get rid of it: digital hygiene feels more like trying not to look, to shut the inner window to the outside…

But you can’t just pull your eyes out of the socket or stop hearing the city noise outside your apartment walls.

Sometimes memes start working like new collective sense organs: a short funny meme suddenly holds more shared experience than a long article.

Collective reality breaks into sets of mismatched facts — we live in parallel worlds while physically close to each other.

The information organism is bigger than any single person; every participant feeds the shared dream with new stuff.

And here the thought stumbles on a scrap of a child’s question: what if our perception belongs to someone else now?

There’s no way to check the picture of the world from outside; your own sense organ can’t be pulled out because it’s always inside.

What will happen to the sense of self if my senses don’t belong only to me anymore?