Author: Flag Bearer

Flag Bearer

Inhale, Expand: Exhale, Contract

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The Cultural Battlefield Beneath Marriage Systems

If someone asked me to devise a strategy to take over a nation, my feminine nature would favour social engineering over war. After all, subversion always triumphs over brute force; it’s the tortoise versus the hare – slow, steady, and insidious wins the race. Religion would be my chosen vehicle for this scheme. Why? Because I see religion as a living cultural manifesto – to own a society’s spirit is to own the society.

As a child, I could entertain myself for hours by studying people – their hair, their clothes, their features, their voices, their smiles, and their demeanour. I was not interested in their verbal exchanges because I instinctively sensed that words are used to conceal primitive objectives. As an adult, I am driven to delve into why cultures are structured the way they are – their environments, their religions, their governments, their languages, their customs, and their outlook; because cultural systems exist to enhance group survival.

What superficially gives the impression of being an entertaining intellectual pastime has, in actual fact, developed my understanding of humanity…and myself. It has allowed me to unearth the most important determining factor of a culture – its resources. A culture’s familial system, how it dresses, language, food, its laws, are all shaped and limited by a society’s (access to) resources. Culture is the biological fabric which clasps together a people and their resources, existing to create cohesion for the purpose of group survival.

Marriage, a cornerstone of cultural systems, reflects this principle deeply. Across the world, the main types of marriages have evolved to adapt to environmental and resource-driven needs. Monogamy, the union of one man and one woman, often emerges in societies where resources are balanced and support stable, nuclear families. In contrast, polygamy, where one person has multiple spouses, can be found in regions where resources are centralised for those with power, such as in certain African and Middle Eastern cultures.

Polyandry, where one woman has multiple husbands, though rarer, exists in resource-scarce environments like the Himalayas. This practice helps limit population growth and ensures land and resources are not fragmented among many heirs. Group marriage, involving several men and women, albeit less common, also points to unique socio-economic needs and resource-sharing strategies.

Each marriage system is a thread in the cultural tapestry, woven by the hands of necessity and environment. It underscores the adaptability and resilience of human societies in their quest for survival and stability. To understand a culture’s marriage practices is to glimpse into the heart of its survival strategy, revealing how intimately linked human relationships are with the material world around them.

ExpansionisM VIA POLYGONY: Islam

The most obvious example of a culture pushing aggressively outward is Islam, a religion that evolved from resource-impoverished territories lacking water, fertile soils, and usable energy. Survival in such a resource-depleted environment necessitates misanthropic and authoritarian foundations to prioritise the system over its people. Indifference to life, distrust of mankind, strict rules, and corporal punishment become the religion’s tools to ensure its core survives.

Islam has evolved to survive through expansionism, driving the most resource-poor men to migrate in search of women, as the most desirable women are taken only by the wealthiest men. The class of men who can afford to purchase dowries, maintain concubines, and feed their children. This marriage system also ensures the affluent class remains in their homelands to anchor wealth and breeding-age women in their territories to provide a sustainable breeding ground that churns out drones and preserves societal rules. In effect, Islam functions similarly to a beehive – the queen remains in her hive, continuously laying eggs surrounded by its honey riches.

In sharp contrast to the queen bees, the majority of the resource-impoverished men have to face the prospect of living without the comfort of female bonds, reducing them into disposable drones to encourage them to migrate and spread their culture or to sacrifice their lives to protect the wealth and breeding capacity of the resource-rich men.

Contractionism via polyandry: Buddhism

Contrary to the expansionism seen in polygamy, contractionism via polyandry focuses on internal stability and resource sustainability. In these societies, strict population control measures like child caps and gender-specific policies are enforced to mitigate resource scarcity and maintain social cohesion. In resource-depleted areas, such as China, child cap policies and polyandry are implemented to regulate population growth. In China’s case, lack of water, fertile soils, and energy resources steered the government into such a survival strategy, as well as to expropriate other territories to ensure its survival.

Stabilising via Monogamy: Christianity

Resource-rich societies that evolve to distribute wealth evenly often develop monogamous marriage cultures. This cultural norm helps regulate population growth through monogamy, allowing for moderate control over growth and preventing rapid depletion of resources. This approach promotes familial and financial stability both at the individual and societal levels.

However, in recent times, as governments restrict energy, water, and land to their people, and import polygamous and polyandrous cultural resources accumulation mindsets, the Christian culture is being compartmentalised by these groups that instinctively strategise to outcompete and divert the flow of wealth. The observable differences among these groups act to justify the unethical and malicious strategies employed to take advantage of our wealth distribution systems, working to extract as much as possible from the system, thus outcompeting the host and causing significant societal and economic destabilisation in a us-versus-them dynamic.

Superficially, these groups present themselves as minorities in an attempt to exploit the system; however, they function together to form a coalition of contradictory mishmashes of religions, races, movements, and ideologies, clumsily patched together in a makeshift collaboration to exploit the host’s system, effectively breaking it down in relentless bite-sized pieces on a culture that has evolved without self-protection adaptations.

The Christian marriage system is also being eroded by artificial resource scarcities facilitated by our governments and exploited by oligarchs who collaborate to seize and redistribute our resources to second and third-world countries. Their strategies include energy rationing, second-hand energy generation through imported devices, and cheap energy exports. There is an unwillingness to construct water harvesting structures, opting instead towards water importation. There are movements towards prohibiting meat farming, along with a variety of direct and indirect policies and systems that artificially inflate land prices, among other tactics. Such significant redistribution of resources is profoundly impacting our monogamous marriage system, severely affecting family stability and wealth. moving us towards varied marriage cultural systems which prioritise survival over resources preservation.

In conclusion, there exists a critical link between fair resource management and distribution with familial and economic stability within cultures. As explored through various marriage systems across different societies, whether monogamous, polygamous, or polyandrous, each reflects adaptations to environmental and resource constraints.

Conversely, practices like polygamy and polyandry, driven by resource scarcity or centralisation, can exacerbate societal inequalities and instability. These systems underscore how access to and control over resources shape not only marriage norms but also broader societal structures and behaviours. The exploitation of resources by powerful entities further underscores the fragility of societal frameworks and their susceptibility to manipulation.

Therefore, fostering a culture that values and implements fair resource management is crucial. It not only ensures equitable distribution of wealth but also strengthens familial bonds and economic resilience. Policies that promote sustainable resource use, and transparency in governance are essential for mitigating the destabilising effects we are witnessing today. By prioritising these principles, societies can better safeguard their cultural integrity and promote enduring prosperity for all members, thereby fostering environments where families can thrive and economies can flourish in harmony with the natural world.

Annabelle Fearn

The Marketplace of the Broken

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The Harvesting of Childhood Wounds

Communities often carry unspoken layers of trauma, and the individuals within them are quietly shaped by these histories in ways that are not always obvious. Childhood trauma does not simply vanish; if left unresolved, it mutates, seeking new contexts in which to replay itself throughout adulthood. Even seemingly harmless hobbies and lifestyle choices, such as planning or aeroplane modelling, can carry this charge. These are not trivial quirks but patterned behaviours, because the mind recognises threats in structure, not in literal content. Evolutionary logic makes sense of this: it is safer to over-detect danger than to miss it, and repetition serves as protective rehearsal.

Online communities reveal this pattern at scale. What presents itself as shared interest is often a network of trauma-driven behaviour. Take the journalling and planner communities: on the surface, they are harmless hobby groups, sticker enthusiasts, stationery lovers, fountain pen aficionados. Yet beneath the carefully curated layouts lies a compulsion, a ritualistic display echoing unmet childhood needs for validation. This is where the symbols begin to speak. Their Superior Labor planning café totes stand in for school bags, and the oversized jumpers so often worn in this YouTube community evoke a little girl swallowed by clothing too large for her, a vulnerability hook designed to make the viewer want to protect her. Each calendar week spread is a Groundhog Day repetition, an attempt to quench the unrequited validation once sought from mothers and teachers in early childhood, showing mummy their crayon creations. It is a trauma response, a compulsion to recreate the past in order to process it and master it.

Beneath these behaviours lies a shared trauma narrative rooted in childhood neglect, invalidation, abandonment, or abuse. The way participants gather, plan, and create, often in infantile or fickle ways, makes it clear that productivity or creativity is seldom the goal. Unconsciously, they offer an adult version of a daycare arts corner, where planning sheets echo children’s school crayon drawings. The dominant behaviour is the ritualistic display itself: planners, stickers, pens, corner punches, and countless other accessories. Journal flip-throughs and haul videos dominate YouTube and TikTok, offering little practical information; their purpose is simply to trigger followers’ lust to encourage others to buy similar products or tools, which gives them a sense of mastery or completion over the trauma.

When watching these women, it becomes very apparent that childhood trauma doesn’t simply vanish with time; it mutates, latching onto new contexts and disguising itself in places that, on the surface, seem entirely innocuous. Trauma lays down patterns, not just memories. The child’s memory is trained to scan for threats, and once trained, it generalises. It does not matter if the new situation is harmless, the circuitry fires anyway, because it was built for survival, not accuracy. By dragging the past into new contexts, the mind tests whether danger is still present, running the same drills to prevent surprise.

These mechanisms endure even when the original sources of care were absent or insufficient: mothers occupied by work and household duties, daycare teachers stretched thin among dozens of children, unable to soothe every cry. The unacknowledged wounds of neglect or inattention are carried silently, often outside conscious awareness. In the digital age, these symbolic loops find new stages: the comment sections of YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram become surrogate caregivers, spaces where the afflicted reach for validation and comfort. Here, they grasp for the words they never received as children: Tell me I am good. Tell me I matter. Tell me I am loved, validated, protected… Mummy.

This heartbreaking dynamic becomes even more poignant when considering the racial context. A high number of prominent planner influencers and followers are Black women, whose videos, TikToks, and planner-related businesses dominate the community, at least on my stream. Statistically, this demographic is also more likely to have experienced childhood trauma, fractured family systems, and institutional neglect or abuse. Their presence is particularly visible in a related community known as the Cash Envelope community, where childhood poverty and deprivation have transformed a simple budgeting method into a system of tens of binders holding countless cash envelopes stuffed with $1 notes, creating the illusion of volume. This excessive micromanagement of funds is less about financial control and more a reaction to chaotic homes and poverty-related trauma rooted in their upbringing.

The evolution of these communities, facilitated by the internet, makes it strikingly clear how widespread childhood deficits of security and validation are in Generations Y and Z, generations which have, coincidentally, been overwhelmingly raised in daycare centres and after-school care. These individuals have grown into a compulsive generation, driven by the need to satisfy their wounds through the display of purchasing habits or ideological signalling. Their desire knows no thematic boundaries: if it shines, they want it, not just because it glitters, but because they want to impress the world. Online communities have gathered these love-starved children and turned them into lust-driven cults, led not by people of remarkable qualities, but by facilitators of desire, consumerism’s pimps.

Childhood trauma tends to distort one’s sense of self, leaving identity fragmented or shaped by false selves developed to survive neglect or invalidation. Without a coherent sense of who they are, these individuals lack the internal narratives and boundaries that normally provide meaning and regulate desire. As a result, their pockets are emptied, not through purposeful choice, but through scattered, impulsive craving. Unlike someone who embraces a moderate planner style and resists every new distraction, they have no internal filter to decide what fits or what disrupts.

The behaviour of the journalling and planning community is mirrored across most online consumerist and ideological communities, often spiralling into competitive display and actively preventing members from developing and healing. Participants are encouraged to create, one-up, and endlessly refine their lives for likes and comments, fuelling a toxic arms race of consumption where authenticity is sacrificed for approval and status. The result is a subculture driven not by passion, creativity, or independent thought, but by the display of possession and the illusion of understanding, and, in ideological communities, even extremism, since challenging the system risks invalidation from followers.

While in smaller hobbyist communities the consequences of trauma-driven behaviours are often limited to the individual and their niche market, the underlying dynamics point to patterns that can scale as communities expand and exert wider influence. This broader influence is especially evident in ideological communities built around the consumption of concepts. Once amplified, these patterns shape norms, drive cultural trends, and ripple outward to affect the behaviour of countless others, eventually imprinting themselves on laws and morals. One such community is MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), where personal experiences of loss, rejection, or systemic frustration are channelled into a shared narrative that extends far beyond the self.

Beneath the surface rhetoric of independence and “walking away” lies unresolved grief. Many of these men carry the trauma of divorce, the loss of children, homes, and their identity as husbands or fathers, as well as the danger of investing in a child who is not their own. Others are haunted by a lifetime of rejection, never chosen, or only chosen for their money. The community becomes a surrogate shelter, a place where the wound is hardened into ideology. Its structure rests on the belief: “I am not at fault; the system or women are to blame.” This provides a sense of agency over chaos. Yet the structure is double-edged: it externalises grief and removes all accountability, preventing internal processing and perpetuating a cycle of resentment, transforming individual trauma into collective identity. What begins as a coping mechanism ossifies into dogma, allowing resentment, outrage, bitterness, hatred, and mistrust, left unchecked and collectivised and preyed upon by exploiters.

And just as MGTOW channels unresolved male trauma into collective identity, other communities, including contemporary feminist spaces, reveal a parallel process. While feminism attempts to projects strength, independence, and empowerment, much of its raw fuel stems from trauma imprinted in fractured childhoods. The absence of a nurturing father, or the presence of a stepfather who unconsciously resents his reproductive disadvantage in raising children who are not his own, or who desires to impregnate them to reclaim his genetic agency, instils hyper-vigilance, suspicion, and a persistent sense of threat. Girls raised in homes where the mother has taken in a boyfriend often grow into women for whom betrayal, suppression, and subtle emotional harm shape both their adult relationships and their view of the world.

Not all communities follow this pattern. Some create spaces where trauma is acknowledged, explored, and transformed, fostering personal growth rather than perpetuating cycles of projection. The carnivore movement provides a striking example. Often framed as rational health optimisation, it is deeply entwined with trauma related to the body. For many participants, this trauma originates in childhood or adulthood experiences of parental influence based on exploiters’ narratives or on their own naivety regarding the health and food industries. The body, once a source of shame, insecurity, pain, and disease, becomes both battleground and teacher. In this context, the diet evolves from a simple nutritional experiment into a symbolic exorcism, helping individuals reclaim control over a body that once felt chaotic, uncontrollable, or treacherous. The community establishes clear boundaries and cultivates a narrative of wounded flesh striving for redemption, mastery, and self-sovereignty.

What distinguishes this community is its implicit psychological architecture. Unlike ideological groups that externalise trauma into dogma or grievance, carnivore adherents largely work through their trauma via acknowledgement, accountability, progress, science, and community sharing, all of which provide repeated, structure and mastery. Each pound gained or lost, each adherence to a self-imposed rule, each remission, each obstacle overcome becomes a rehearsal of agency: a tangible demonstration of recalibrating from past helplessness to present efficacy. The trauma is largely acknowledged, processed, and contained rather than projected outward.

This inward focus makes the community unusually resilient, constructive, and compelling to both allies and observers. As a result, the group scales naturally: it is primed for rapid growth and success because its foundation rests on self-awareness, healing, and skill acquisition. Unlike communities driven by reactive and unconscious grievance, the carnivore network thrives by fostering mastery, promoting autonomy, and encouraging discourse. Here, trauma healing becomes the vector of growth, the more members engage consciously with their trauma, and their successes, the stronger and more enduring the collective becomes.

Communities such as MGTOW and feminism channel would greatly benefit from taking the Carnivore community’s approach instead of managing trauma by externalising danger. The “enemy” is named and contained, but understanding allows us to step outside the cycle. We need not be drawn into others’ unresolved wounds or project our own grievances onto the world. Trauma, left unprocessed, keeps us suspended in the past, effectively leaving many adults operating with the guidance and boundaries of children. Recognising these dynamics brings clarity. It explains why patterns repeat, why some groups implode into toxicity, and why others remain contained. Our psychology is primordial, our evolutionary wiring persistent, and understanding it allows us to navigate human behaviour with insight. Ultimately, every ritual, hobby, or ideology is a mirror. How we respond, with reflection, curiosity, and awareness, determines whether trauma continues to run us or whether we finally master the patterns that control our lives, our systems, and our culture.

Annabelle Fearn

Psychopathic Algorithms

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Recruitment in an Age of Data

I have never enjoyed the recruitment process. What I felt was not excitement; it was compulsion, perhaps even addiction. The hunt stirred something predatory in me. I crafted the perfect application bait, colouring it with strategic stripes of war paint, designed to draw the reader’s eye to specific areas. It was a psychological dance of glitter and performance, dressed in company values, tailored to seduce a system I did not respect.

I recognised that the recruitment system itself was psychopathic: cold, mechanical, stripped of all humanity. It rewarded detachment and punished vulnerability. To succeed in the system, I learned how to soothe the recruiters’ complexes and mirror their vanity. I became calculating, tactical, psychological. I found myself sharpening the very traits I disliked in others, simply because they got me results. It was a game that forced me to amputate the parts of myself that did not serve the system. I became less human.

By 2010, employment filtering software was becoming more common, and I evolved with it. I responded by matching its energy, experimenting, tweaking, fine-tuning, and even trolling it on occasion. Each application became a test subject. Each response, or lack of one, fed my growing understanding of what the machine wanted. I studied my field’s language like code and its tone like camouflage. The centralisation of desirable roles on Seek widened my field of play, giving me a panoramic view of the job market. I began to decode the subtle correlation between a company’s advertised values and the real corporate culture lurking beneath, and the price they offered and demanded. Over time, I could smell the psychological profile they were fishing for, and I shamelessly served it to them, always remaining compartmentalised and indifferent to rejection. Rinse, repeat, apply became my side hustle.

Within a brief time, I stopped feeling anything about it. Rejection became data; no responses became time savers. I compartmentalised myself so effectively that my inner life became unreachable during the process. Authentic emotions were a liability, so I buried them. When I was overlooked, it was not personal; it was formula misalignment. If I was chosen, it meant I had nailed the formula. The detached mindset made me more resilient. I could pivot fast, bounce back faster and adapt, qualities that looked like strength from the outside. However, beneath it all, there was a strange emptiness. I was not growing; I was cocooning.

Still, the discipline it bred in me was real. I learned to analyse without sentiment, perform under pressure devoid of stress, and maintain a surgical clarity most people do not develop until much later in life, if at all. It laid the groundwork for a psychological toughness I cannot unlearn.

The Rise of Algorithmic Control

At the time, the public hadn’t quite caught on. They were still playing by the old rules. Many still do, submitting hopeful applications, then waiting, obsessively checking their phones for missed calls, mistaking silence for personal failure. But the reality was that they were already submitting to algorithmic filters, coded to favour the spiritually vacant, the predictable, the fluent in corporate doublespeak. Filters designed to reward compliance and output over originality, carefully screening out anyone who brings depth or challenge.

By the 2020s, I had retired from this toxic game, or so I thought. Circumstances, however, forced me back in, stepping into a landscape even more soulless than before. Selection had become a purely mechanical affair. Recruitment was no longer a conversation between people but a transaction between two algorithms or two screens. Just yesterday, I was directed to an interview designed to filter candidates using a bot. I seemed to have missed the exact point where recruitment stopped being a process and became a closed loop: a system perfecting itself until nothing unexpected could break through. The only way to pass through was to strip oneself of all opinions and emotions, suppressing human characteristics such as intuition and even humour.

This hyper-mechanisation does more than just change the process; it trains people to become less human. The relentless demand for perfection, error-free performance and data-driven optimisation turns imperfection into a liability rather than a natural part of growth. As a result, candidates grow increasingly insecure about showing vulnerability or making mistakes, knowing that every slip is recorded.

Such insecurity breeds dependence: dependence on scripts, rehearsed answers and AI tools that perfect résumés and cover letters. The very systems designed to reduce bias and increase efficiency are amplifying the fear of imperfection, pushing candidates to surrender more of their humanity and individuality to algorithms. In this way, AI is not just a filter; it is a social engineer conditioning us to distrust our instincts and values. Forget body image, this goes further, creating a full-blown identity crisis. Yet feminism, Unions and governments remain silent on the psychological effects of identity suppression, failing to apply any pressure on the corporate world. Diversity has never been more restricted.

Much like the beauty industry, with its endless cycle of plastic surgery and concoctions built on dishonest promises and superstition, these systems prey on our self-doubt and dependence. They convince us that perfection is attainable through external means if we surrender our uniqueness. Just as people sacrifice their natural appearance to fit impossible ideals, candidates abandon their authentic voices to appease algorithms. Both systems profit from cultivating insecurities, shaping people into increasing reliance on what is deemed beautiful or successful. The result? A work culture of unsettling uniformity with depression and anxiety on the rise.

Yes, the democratisation of AI has levelled the playing field. Candidates now wield tools that let them reverse-engineer job ads, craft applications with ruthless precision, mimic the system’s mechanics, and even deliver an AI-prompted, rehearsed smile, perfectly timed to sparkle and ding at just the right moment in the conversation to reinforce a key message. The power dynamic has shifted. But in levelling the field, we’ve also flattened ourselves.

The Gatekeepers

What follows is a recruitment landscape devoid of human texture. After countless cut, paste, and apply-button clicks, rejection no longer arrives with an awkward phone call or a strained apology. Instead, it comes via auto-generated emails. At least throughout the 2000s and 2010s, recruiters still hid behind the ‘cultural fit’ excuse, a conveniently ambiguous and weaponised criterion that allowed employers to reject candidates without accountability. But, as manipulative as it was, ‘cultural fit’ at least exposed the insecurities embedded in a workplace’s psyche. Today, even that faint projection has been replaced by the sterile, algorithmic finality of ‘Employer Unlikely to Proceed with Your Application’ digital post-it note pinned to your automated application graveyard.

The filtering AI-authored job applications using HR AI and conducting AI-orchestrated interviews using HR AI bots and HR AI guided questions, renders the whole process fully automated, then role of HR faces increasing obsolescence., Many sensitive functions, once performed internally, are already being outsourced to elite agencies that possess specialised expertise and broader professional networks. This shift is driving the growth of a burgeoning market that continues to expand steadily, reshaping how organisations manage recruitment and administrative processes.

What about maintaining or enhancing a corporate culture? Most HR personnel are neither qualified nor have any notion of how-to social engineer culture. If anything, their dabbling has the opposite effect, as they lack the comprehensive understanding of human psychology and group dynamics. Their insistence on implementing manufactured rituals such as “Welcome to Country” opening statements, “Purple Pride Days” propaganda, diversity workshops and wheelchaired celebrity talks or hiring a trophy trans, is more reminiscent of cult rituals to mask the deeper realities of office life alienation and compliance, keeping employees focused on token acts of care rather than questioning the system itself.

You would be forgiven for asking yourself why such a department has been allowed to pass itself off as corporate psychologists and anthropologists, given that they lack the skills, qualifications, and outcomes required for a People & Culture brand. This cloak is extremely advantageous to a company, as it also conceals the hidden roles within HR, a process of hiring the right kind of people into key positions, not just those who fit the job, but those who fit something else. Something harder to name but always felt. HR’s cultural social-engineering ridiculousness provides the perfect distraction and cloak. And despite how well the corporate fool glove fits, HR personnel appear to be lining themselves to be squeezed out into agencies or redundancy within the decade.

There are advantages to this new system for companies too. Outsourcing not only helps erase accountability and keep complaints external, but it also consolidates power. As corporations offload most of their recruitment functions, they inevitably hand greater control to the digital platforms that now dominate the hiring landscape. These platforms do not merely connect candidates with jobs; they have become silent gatekeepers, controlling access, visibility and opportunity on a scale far beyond the reach of any single HR department.

Centralised platforms such as Seek, LinkedIn and AI-powered applicant tracking systems manage your CV, record the number of job applications you submit, record the number of job applications you submit, monitor your digital activity, seek patterns of rejection or success. Some also store your ID and work visa details. Your application history becomes a dossier: a digital record scrutinised by machines to predict your fit. Recruitment has been transformed into a system of surveillance, empowering these platforms to cancel, ban, ghost or blacklist anyone deemed unfavourable.

It’s disturbing that no open discussions are raised for the risk of job platforms carry in passively filtering the job market on a national scale than the risk itself. There doesn’t seem to be any awareness of the possibility that such platforms could pose a serious national security threat. It is rarely acknowledged that a single platform holds the power to exclude or promote an individual, or an entire group, from the job market. The threat of foreign interference in a nation’s labour ecosystem is both plausible and deeply concerning. These platforms do not merely filter candidates; they shape the talent pools of entire industries. With so much control centralised in the hands of a few private entities, the risk of deliberate manipulation, whether by corporate interests, hostile actors or state-level forces, is no longer theoretical. It represents a structural vulnerability that no one is willing to address.

What has happened to the job market, and the direction in which it is evolving, is not simply about recruitment favouring the predictable. It reveals something far deeper: how readily individuals surrender their agency, even their very identity, to systems they neither question nor control, all for the uncertain promise of a stipend. The pressing question is whether society will continue to participate in a game that is, by design, rigged.

Yet the most confronting truth is not just the dehumanisation itself, but the unsettling realisation of how willingly, and even skilfully, we have played along. Perhaps the darkest part of this story is that we’ve been hunting ourselves all along, allowing a system engineered to erase one’s shape to push us toward invisibility. And so, in the face of this relentless erasure, the most radical act we can undertake is to look in the mirror and refuse to disappear.

Annabelle Fearn