Spirits, demons, shadows around the corner, all sorts of otherworldly entities… I used to be absolutely certain: they can’t stand electronics, and electricity itself is like garlic to vampires. I remember a cable burning out in my stairwell—sparks, smoke, the smell of burnt rubber. The neighbors were complaining, but I knew: it’s the demons messing around, they’re sickened by wires! And photographic film? Oh, you could capture things on it that would keep you up at night—blurred silhouettes, strange glares, faces where they shouldn’t be. But time passed, quietly, like a shadow on the wall. Electronics crept into our lives, became a part of us—like hands, like breathing. And then, a miracle: the tech no longer smokes, the wires don’t melt, the demons have quieted down, as if they’ve resigned themselves.

And what about film? It’s been replaced by cameras with their artificial intelligence. Now everything is smooth, everything is polished—AI smears the magic into sterile gloss, adjusts the shadows, removes the excess. And where are those blurred entities now? The magic is gone, burned away by algorithms. And so I wonder: how did this happen? Before, we couldn’t use this—spirits were repelled by the mere sight of a socket. But now, when electricity is in every pocket, are we using their world? Has our reality, our daily life rewritten the rules of their existence? Or have they adapted themselves to avoid disappearing?

That’s why I look beyond the usual frameworks. Does consciousness determine being? Not exactly. The example with electricity screams the opposite—first they hated it, and now they’re silent. But being doesn’t entirely shape consciousness either—after all, it’s our consciousness, our will that forced the spirits to bend under wires and microchips. Or maybe they tricked us, pretending to be meek? The circle closes, and it turns out that the only thing we know for sure is that we know nothing. And the deeper you dig, the thicker the darkness becomes.