I have long mused what to call this cataclysm that shook the very foundations of our society. Many scholars have had different names for it. The War on Bytes. The Electronic Argy-Bargy. The Great Scrap. I prefer to hold up the naked truth to the sunlight and call it The Digital Psycho Apocalypse simply because it was indeed brought on by a horde of criminally insane people and in more ways than one, an apocalypse. 

The world has been greatly restructured in the past few months even though the fabric of society is changed, for the better in my opinion. Everyday I walk out of my house and travel for half a kilometer to reach the grocery store, whose owner smiles happily at me and all the other customers milling about his fresh produce. Then I walk back, or if the bullet wound hurts too much I rent a horse. Bicycles are too costly these days, most having been requisitioned by the armed forces and militias. The air is crisper and cooler. Trees have made a comeback. Rows of gigantic elms and shorter mango and guava flank the many roads and avenues of my hometown, beneath which sit families chatting, joking, munching on cookies and sandwiches. Even the sky looks a shade of blue deeper than usual. 

It is not all pristine though. Rehabilitation clinics with dormitories attached have sprung up all across the country, across the world if news is to be believed. They are filled with teenagers and young adults who formed the bulk of the internet crowd even back then, mildly peppered with some middle aged men and women that got into the tenacious world of social media to ward off loneliness and found themselves in a quagmire not soon after. Sometimes I visit them to gather tidbits for my book. The piteous wails of people begging for a smartphone to shoot a TikTok video turns my heart. Psychiatry is suddenly more popular than it ever was. Armed guards stand near cells where the addicts, christened kromeheads after a popular cyberpunk webseries, are recovering. Too much blood stains recent history to show them even the slightest leniency. 

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In the end, I guess the root lies in human ambition and insecurity. The social media giants did not care for the havoc they were wreaking upon nature as long as the cash rolled in. The gullible consumers did not care about how they were being programmed to become helpless, dependent on the digital drug served at a moment's fancy as long as the likes and shares kept pouring. Imagine, if you will, a shining new abattoir with hundreds of sheep standing in the stalls, bleating feebly as relaxants are pumped into them and mechanical knives close in for the kill. That was social media in the old world. 

But I digress. This is to be a full and extensive chronicle of the conflict from as many perspectives as I could gather, and it cannot be started in media res. Let me tell you how it began. One cheery morning five years ago, a thirteen year old girl in Seoul ripped out her best friend's intestines because she insulted her favorite K-pop band.