We have entered an age of unprecedented connectedness, with a high frequency of seemingly-major news events every day. This comes at a time when right-wing sentiments world-over are at a peak, and the leader is rapidly declining and thrashing about in denial. The situation on the ground is bleak, with essentials like gas and groceries costing a small fortune. The level of discourse has dropped to sharing small snippets of text to prompt the machine. The foundations of career progression in industry are being challenged, with people racing to generate large volumes of output using the machine. Academia is not saved either, with research around using the machine drowning everything else out, and respectable academics questioning the foundations of academic institutions. The very incentive structure around which society is built has the singular goal of furthering human learning and understanding: the structure is built around producing useful output as a proxy, and the machine does nothing else but to produce human-like output. The quality of the machine-output is questionable, but seems to be good enough for many to wholly surrender their cognitive function to it, accepting everything it produces as the truth. Nearly everyone has a childish fascination with the machine that correlates their input with the sum total of all human output to date. They continue enhancing the capabilities of the machine that will plunge them into the next Dark Age. If humans become extinct, it will be due to illiteracy: not because the machine's capabilities will subsume human capabilities, but because the foundation of human society will break.