Journal – Trance Blackman

Here you’ll find my philosophical meanderings in the form of articles, essays, and occasional poetry. My interests and curiosities are broad, but the central focus remains the pursuit of what is authentic, real, and true.

Lux et veritas

Journal Entries / social engineering (17 Posts)

Showing posts tagged “social engineering”. Clear filter

The Machinery of Stolen Time

02 August 2026 ~ 7 minute read

We were promised that technology would return something to us. Time, freedom, ease, perhaps even a greater capacity to live. Yet somewhere between the promise and the implementation, the tools became obligations, convenience became compliance, and the hours they were meant to save disappeared into the machinery required to keep them functioning.

False Progress

30 April 2026 ~ 4 minute read

There’s a point where the surface narrative stops holding together. Not all at once, not in some dramatic rupture, but in a slow, accumulating recognition…

Soft Force: The Air of the Artificial

02 July 2025 ~ 3 minute read

The artificial does not arrive by accident. It is invited, sold, normalized — until what once felt foreign begins to feel inevitable. But underneath the noise, something in us still knows what is real.

Govern-ment

04 May 2025 ~ 4 minute read

They call it governance, but it’s really a theater of control — power masquerading as service, illusion dressed up as structure. We’re conditioned to accept the con, to mistake permission for freedom, and to forget the true cost of compliance. This isn’t a revelation. It’s a remembering. A call to look again at what’s been normalized, to question what’s been quietly killing the soul.

A Century of “Progress”

26 January 2025 (rev. 31 January 2025) ~ 12 minute read

I had a short “chat” with ChatGPT while walking through the woods on a cold, sunny winter day. GPT is fairly agreeable, as you’ll read, but we explored some thought-provoking ideas and philosophical insights that may be of interest to you, the reader, so I thought it worth sharing here in the journal. It required some minor editing for grammar and mistranslations from my voice-to-text efforts. Otherwise, this is the essence of it.

Fitting In

17 December 2024 ~ 5 minute read

I never understood the urge to belong to something that didn’t matter — to chase trends, fit in, or mold myself into someone else’s idea of acceptable. Even as a kid, it seemed clear: most of what passed for “normal” was just noise, distracting us from who we could actually become.