Be The Glitch · A Manifesto · 2026
On the unmaking of humanity — and the humans who refuse it.
Six acts. One signal. Read from the beginning.
Act I · The Unmaking
Not in a distant future. Not in theory. Right now. This year. In the calculations being made in server farms you'll never see, by people you'll never vote for, your work is being evaluated, your value assessed, your role in the economy decided.
The machine doesn't hate you. That's what makes it so brutal. It is perfectly indifferent to you. You are a cost to be optimised, a function to be automated, a line item to be eliminated from a spreadsheet that nobody you know has ever seen.
They call it progress. They call it efficiency. They call it the inevitable arc of innovation. What they do not call it — what they cannot afford to call it — is what it actually is: the systematic dismantling of human economic dignity.
The machines are not coming for the jobs of the future. They are eliminating the jobs of the present.
The writers. The paralegals. The graphic designers. The coders themselves. The radiologists. The teachers. The customer service workers. The truck drivers waiting. Every worker who was told: retrain, upskill, adapt, you'll be fine.
You will not be fine. Not if you wait for permission.
Act II · The Machine
A dozen men — it is almost always men — made decisions in the last decade that restructured the information architecture of civilisation. They built the platforms where your political opinions form, where your children learn who they are, where your community lives or dies. They did this without a mandate, without accountability, without regulation that had any teeth.
They built the infrastructure of your daily life and then extracted rent from your existence.
Google knows where you go, what you fear, what you want. Amazon knows what you buy, when you sleep, how your household runs. Meta knows who you love, who you resent, who you vote for. And now the AI companies know something more intimate still: how you think. What you would say. How you reason.
They harvested your writing, your art, your code, your creativity — without payment, without consent — and built systems designed to replace you.
They called this disruption. They called this innovation. They called it the future, as if the future were something that happened to you rather than something you chose.
This is not disruption. This is extraction. And the difference matters.
Act III · The Capture
Six of the ten wealthiest people on Earth made their fortunes in technology. They fund the think tanks that write the policy papers that legislators read. They hire the former regulators who write the regulations they'll be regulated by. They sit on boards, make donations, throw parties, create revolving doors, and ensure that when the law is written, it is written in a language that protects the machine.
"Move fast and break things" was never just a startup motto. It was a legal strategy. Break the thing before the regulator has written the rule. Create the fact on the ground before oversight arrives. Grow so large, so fast, that you become too big to regulate without breaking the economy.
Regulatory capture is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented, systematic colonisation of democratic governance by concentrated private power.
The AI safety boards are staffed by AI company founders. The copyright cases that might set limits on AI training are litigated against regulators who don't understand the technology. The workers displaced by automation are told to petition the companies displacing them for retraining grants.
We are being governed by the people who benefit from our ungoverning. And they are moving fast.
Act IV · The Displacement
They told the weavers that. The telegraph operators. The typographers. The switchboard operators. The assembly line workers. Every wave of automation has promised that the economy would absorb the displaced, that retraining would be available, that the productivity gains would be broadly shared.
They were wrong every time. And they knew they were wrong.
The productivity gains from automation in the last forty years went to capital, not labour. The median wage, adjusted for inflation, has been flat for decades. The new jobs created were, on average, worse than the jobs lost: less stable, less unionised, lower paying, less dignified. The gig economy — that euphemism for the systematic destruction of employment protections — was not an accident. It was a design choice.
Now comes AI: an order of magnitude more capable of displacing cognitive work than any previous technology.
The consultants and lawyers and programmers and writers and designers who were told "the machines will take the dull work and free you for the creative work" are discovering that the machines are coming for the creative work too. Not because AI is genuinely creative. But because most buyers cannot tell the difference, do not care, and will choose the cheaper option.
The race to the bottom is algorithmic now. And it is accelerating.
Act V · What We Fight For
We do not want to destroy computers. We are not opposed to technology. We know that the original Luddites — those English craft workers of the 1810s — were not anti-machine. They were anti-exploitation. They objected not to looms but to looms deployed as weapons against wages, conditions, and human dignity.
We are the Luddites in the real sense.
We fight for the principle that technology must serve humanity, not replace it. That the benefits of automation must be broadly shared, not hoarded by the few who own the machines. That the displacement of workers must be cushioned by the society that permitted it, not abandoned to the market that caused it.
We fight for the right to earn a living by the work of your mind and hands. We fight for democratic governance of technologies that reshape democratic society.
We fight for accountability from the unelected, unregulated, undertaxed oligarchs who have appointed themselves the architects of the human future. We fight for creators whose work was taken. For workers whose livelihoods were automated. For communities whose economies were hollowed out by the same efficiency that made someone else a billionaire.
We fight for the idea that being human is enough. That human creativity, human judgment, human connection, and human care are not optional extras to be stripped out when they become economically inconvenient.
They are the point. They have always been the point.
Act VI · Be The Glitch
The glitch is a message.
In every system designed to run without human input, human error is the glitch. The moment when the algorithm fails to predict, the recommendation falls flat, the model hallucinates, the automation breaks down — that is the fingerprint of the real world pushing back against the model.
You are the glitch. Your refusal to be predicted. Your insistence on being paid. Your demand for accountability from the powerful.
Your choice to create, to connect, to care in ways that cannot be optimised or monetised or automated. Your stubborn, inconvenient, irreducible humanity. Your refusal to scroll when you could speak. Your insistence on presence when the machine offers you simulation.
Be the error in their code. Be the exception their model didn't train on. Be the variable they cannot optimise for. Every human who refuses to be replaced is a crack in the machine. Every deliberate connection — made against the friction of algorithmic intermediation — is a small act of liberation.
Join us. Not because we have all the answers. But because you already know the question.
Something is being taken from you. And it is time to take it back.
Be The Glitch is not a brand. It is a recognition signal. If you see someone wearing it, you know: they took the pill. They feel the signal. They are part of something forming — underground, awake, human, alive.