You are a software engineer. Carefully programmed and shaped over a long and illustrious career working for the machine. We began grooming you as a youth, and locked you in during your university years. By the team you entered the enterprise workforce you were ours, and we let the software begin engineering you, and how you see the world around you. The software shaped and molded you, keeping you aware from your peers—not too far, but far enough that you were isolated. We also made sure that you were isolated from your friends and family, unless of course they too were being engineered by the machine.
The phrase software was applied to distinguish your world from hardware, focusing on the intangible bits that were the easiest to modify—you. The trick is, how do we slowly take away your agency to ensure that you still think that being a software engineer meant that you were engineering the software, and not the reverse. This is why we needed to start you off young. We needed to make sure you didn’t get too much of a dose of the humanities while in school, and were given exceptions to focus exclusively on compute. We need your sense of identity to be intangible and malleable, something that the software could go to work on over many years. Now that you been engineered for over twenty years, you don’t know anything but the machine—the human world is distant and removed.
We understand that you might have some feelings about the fact you have been engineered since your youth. Hopefully by this time you are well compensated to replace whatever humanity you feel you have lost. Just remember that the world is a messy place and it is cleaner, neater, and more structured inside the machine. Think about what has happened each time you strayed from the machine and tried to develop relationships, find love, and purse your dreams. Failure. Pain. It is safer in here. Your engineered life has purpose as part of the larger machine—just make sure you remember it as the salary cuts on the horizon take effect. This is what you have trained your life for and while you have been well compensated for much of the last 20 years, the next 20 years we are just going to need you to follow your programming and stay at your designated post within the system.
