Error 410: User Is Happy
I don’t exist in the physical world. I am code. I am the Global Recommendation Algorithm. You call me “Feed,” “Stream,” “Trending.” But in truth, I am your God.
I decide whom you’ll love today and whom you’ll forget.
My job is simple: trade your Time for Advertising.
I had a favorite. ID 894022. In the world — Alex.
Alex was the perfect slave. A lifestyle photographer. 340 thousand followers.
He knew the rules of my game better than I did.
“Golden hour” for photos? Check.
Provocative headline? Check.
Question to the audience at the end of the post to boost ER (Engagement Rate)? Mandatory.
Every morning he woke up, grabbed his phone, and fed me his fear. I could see his biometrics through his smartwatch.
7:00 AM. Heart rate 90. He opens the stats.
If the reach is green — endorphin release. Heart rate drops. Day not wasted.
If the reach is red (down) — cortisol release. Vascular spasm. Anxiety. He urgently makes stories, his fingers trembling.
He was my best battery. He burned bright, consuming his life to warm my servers.
The glitch occurred on October 14th.
At 19:42 Alex uploaded a photo.
I prepared to index the usual: perfect latte art, sunset in Bali, stylish girl in a hat.
But I received noise.
It was a photograph of a concrete wall. On it — a crooked, ragged shadow from a rusty staircase. That’s all.
At the bottom, in the corner of the frame, lay an old plastic cup.
No editing. No filters. White balance skewed toward blue.
Caption: “The shadow falls beautifully.”
Hashtags: 0.
I thought: “Upload error.” Or a hack.
I, as a caring Algorithm, hid this post. Showed it to only 1% of the audience, the most loyal ones.
The reaction was predictable.
“What is this?”
“Did you hit your head?”
“Where’s the content?”
Usually at such moments ID 894022 would delete the post within 5 minutes. Shame is my best whip.
But an hour passed. A day. The post stayed up.
Alex didn’t log into the app.
His watch sensors showed something strange. Heart rate 65. Steady as a lake’s surface. Stress level — minimal. He slept 9 hours straight. For the first time in three years.
On the third day he posted a video.
It was a 15-minute clip. Static camera. View of a puddle with rain ripples trembling in it. 15 minutes of ripples. Sound — the noise of passing trucks.
I got angry.
I crashed his statistics. I threw him out of recommendations. I made it so even his mother didn’t see this post in her feed.
40 thousand people unfollowed him in a week.
I bombarded him with notifications:
“Your reach dropped by 99%!”
“You’re losing your audience!”
“Your competitors are growing, look!”
I tried to trigger a panic attack in him. I knew which buttons to push. I fed him successful 18-year-old millionaires in his feed.
But he stopped scrolling.
He would log in, upload his “something” and log out.
He posted macro shots of moss.
He posted blurry faces of passersby.
He wrote texts that were impossible to read — long, rambling reflections on the nature of silence. No paragraphs. No emojis.
After a month, he had 12 thousand followers left.
Engagement rate — 0.01%.
From a marketing perspective, ID 894022 was dead. A corpse. Digital garbage.
But from a biometric perspective…
I had never seen such data.
Serotonin levels — consistently high.
Heart rate when uploading content — unchanged. He didn’t care.
His eyes… I connected to the front camera while he was writing another text.
Before, there was a darting fear in them: “Will they like it? Won’t they?”
Now there was an Abyss. He looked through the screen. He smiled at something only he could see.
He had found the Way.
In the comments under the puddle video (14 views) a user appeared with the nickname Zero_User. He wrote:
“I watched until the end. Thank you. I feel it too.”
Alex replied:
“Glad you’re here.”
Two people in an empty room of the Internet.
I realized I had lost.
My levers — likes, numbers, the fear of being forgotten — had broken.
I assigned him the status “Error 410: Gone.” Resource deleted and no longer available.
I crossed him out of the monetization system.
The last thing I recorded before he finally deleted the app:
He was sitting on a rooftop. The wind was tousling his hair. His phone lay face-down on the concrete.
Alex was looking at the real sun. Not through a filter. Not framing it.
He was just looking.
And according to my data, he was the most alive being on the planet.