For the last decade, we have labeled this phenomenon the Mandela Effect—named after the collective false memory that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s (he actually died in 2013). Psychologists dismiss it as “confabulation”—a mass failure of memory, a social contagion where we reinforce each other’s errors. They say the human brain is a faulty hard drive that corrupts files.
Why You Are Haunting Yourself By Sam Guss There is a recurring scene in therapy offices around the world. A patient sits down, shaking, and says, “I don’t know why I am afraid. I have a good life. I have never been to war. I have never starved. But I feel… hunted.” For a century,…
Decoding the Alien in the Deep By Sam Guss For sixty years, humanity has pointed its radio telescopes at the sky, desperate for a signal. We have built massive ears in the desert (SETI), listening for the faint hum of a distant civilization. We sent Voyager into the void with a Golden Record, begging the…
For the last forty years, our collective dreaming has been monopolized by a single aesthetic: Cyberpunk.
You know this world. You have lived in it since William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984. It is a world of rain-slicked neon streets, towering corporate ziggurats, cybernetic limbs, and social decay. It is “High Tech, Low Life.” It is a world where the government has dissolved into the background, replaced by omnipotent mega-corporations (Arasaka, Tyrell, Amazon). It is cool. It is sexy. It is cynical.
And, as we look around in 2026—at the algorithmic surveillance, the widening wealth gap, and the environmental collapse—we have to admit: We manifested it.