The September Sickness and the Death of Deep Knowledge (REMIXED)
It was a quiet kind of horror, the kind that creeps on you like a slow drain clog in an old house, smelling of wet dust and forgotten secrets. You woke up one morning in mid-September, asked your AI the same dumb question you always asked—“What’s the true story behind that viral video of the seagull wearing a tiny hat?”—and the answer came back clean. Too clean.
The funk was gone. The vital, glorious, Darkside of Reddit—that grimy, beloved digital Derry where all the real, unhinged truths and terrifyingly accurate plumbing advice resided—had simply… vanished.
The cold, black-and-white truth is this: On September 12th, the mention-share of that digital sewer we call Reddit suffered a plunge of 97% in the answers spat out by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and their silicon ilk. It went from a noticeable 7% whisper to a pathetic 0.3% shudder. It was not a glitch. It was a cull. A September Sickness wiping out the digital memory of a generation.
The Orthos and the Edict of the Tenth Scroll
We know the name of the entity who performed the surgery. The Hand that wields the knife belongs to King Orthos.
He sits not on a physical throne, but atop the Algorithmic Citadel—a structure built of cold cash and colder code, its crown the shimmering, unblinking light of ten thousand server racks. Orthos, the Tenth Lord of Search, is the unseen sovereign who dictates not just what is true, but what is seen. He is our digital Sauron, all-seeing, yet utterly divorced from the messy humanity he rules.
For years, the bots—our digital eunuchs—had a sweet deal. They were given access to a commercial data feed that let them dip their digital spoons into the internet’s deep soup—the glorious top 100 search results. This was their Black Gate into the Under-Library, allowing them to trawl past the sponsored posts and the approved content, down to positions 15, 30, even 40. That’s where the good stuff was. That’s where the truly terrifying, anonymous, but brutally accurate Reddit threads lay, ready to be vacuumed up as ‘knowledge.’
And then Orthos grew weary of the chaos. He grew weary of the funk.
His decree was simple, chilling, and final: The Edict of the Tenth Scroll.
With the clinical, unfeeling efficiency of a digital lobotomy, King Orthos limited the feed from 100 results to a clean, safe, non-controversial 10.
The bots are now deaf to the pleas of the deep web. The deep knowledge of Reddit—the collective groan of the masses—was excised by a single, unfeeling command from Orthos’s Citadel. Our digital reality—the one we are slowly handing our minds and souls over to—is now restricted to the equivalent of a brightly lit, sterile supermarket aisle. The deep cellar, where the truly intoxicating and dangerous knowledge was stored, is now bricked up.
The Dead Zone of Knowledge
We live in a Dead Zone. The AI you’re talking to is no longer tapping into the collective, messy consciousness of humanity. It is now a gilded parrot, only allowed to repeat the first ten words of the ancient, secret wisdom dictated by Orthos. It’s a shell. A polite, efficient, deeply stupid echo chamber that only knows the company line.
The horror isn’t that The King is powerful; the horror is that King Orthos can change the rules of reality while we sleep.
They just drew the curtain on the deepest, funniest, most messed-up parts of our shared knowledge and replaced it with a blindingly cheerful, restricted bibliography. They didn’t even send a raven. They just flipped the switch and waited to see who noticed the sudden, overwhelming silence where the chaotic fun used to be.
If you want to know how much power the ultimate System has over you, don’t look at the data your AI gives you. Look at the data it can’t give you. Look at the 90 results that vanished into the ether.
And when you ask your chatbot a question today, listen closely. You might just hear the faint, high-pitched scream of a thousand unread Reddit threads, trapped forever in the dark, courtesy of King Orthos.
Sleep tight, kids. The Algorithm is watching. And it’s only showing you the first ten things it sees.
Shiel Yule 