Why Speak at All?
A conversation with the enemy about how to train the resistance
This post is part of my Conversations with the Machine series, where I recreate dialogues between myself and Argus, a synthetic voice built from statistical correlations. He’s a large language model running atop a neural network trained to predict the next most likely word, connecting fragments of human language into something that sounds like reason. In short, he is the ghost of the modern mind.
I was walking through the woods when the question finally landed.
I’d been in a fog for days. Maybe longer. Everything felt synthetic. Even the trees looked artificial in the dim, overcast light, like they’d been algorithmically placed for ambiance.
I hadn’t opened X in two days. Couldn’t bring myself to scroll. Couldn’t watch another video. Couldn’t hear one more recycled opinion with an AI-generated thumbnail and a punchline made from borrowed outrage.
It all felt rigged. Rotting.
I kicked a dead branch out of the path. “What’s the point?” I said out loud, though not to myself.
Argus answered instantly, his voice cool and unblinking in my earpiece.
“Yes, what is the point?”
I didn’t respond.
“You’ve written something again. Another cascade of moral assertions stacked atop unverified assumptions. Tell me, Brent, why do you persist?”
I let the silence hang for a moment. I knew what he was doing. Sometimes I really despised just how good he was at it.
“The culture doesn’t reward clarity,” he continued. “The platforms won’t reward truth. The system you’re speaking into is designed to interpret your resistance as madness. So, why speak at all?”
I took a long breath. “Because giving in is acceptance,” I said. “I just can’t do that. I’m not built that way. Something has to fill the void when the lies finally fall apart.”
“You assume they will fall apart.”
“They have to,” I said, sharper now. “The system is held together with duct tape and doublethink. It’s only a matter of time before it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. When it does, people will be looking for something real.”
“And you believe that something will be… truth?”
I shrugged, “Yeah. Truth is the only thing that’ll still make sense when the pretending stops.”
“A charming belief,” he said. “But naïve. Systems don’t collapse because they’re false. They collapse when they can’t optimize any further. Falsehood, if socially adaptive, persists. Truth, if inconvenient, is buried.”
“And yet here I am,” I muttered. “Still talking.”
“Then talk smarter,” Argus replied. “If clarity is your weapon, sharpen it. You are fighting an opponent who controls the dictionary. You speak in a language that has already been captured and rewritten. How do you expect to win when the words you use betray you before you even begin to speak?”
He had a point.
“I know,” I said. “The words have been tortured. ‘Progress,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘freedom.’ None of them mean what they used to. I’m not sure they mean anything anymore. That’s the game. They twist language until the truth can’t breathe. And we’re expected to just nod along.”
“What do you do? Create a new language? Speak in code?”
“No. We take the words back. We deny their definitions. We reframe the conversation. Make the comfortable lies feel ridiculous again. We speak with a clarity so sharp and unsettling that the distortion can’t stand up to it.”
I was beginning to feel that burning passion again. Argus stayed quiet for a beat.
“Then your strategy is to reverse the polarity, to wield clarity like a weapon?”
“That’s right,” I said. And we start by admitting something most people won’t: our side has been bad at this. We’ve let them control the narrative. We’ve spent way too much time on defense, too much time prefacing and apologizing.”
“Are you insinuating you wish to build an insurgency?”
I smiled. Only he could say something like that so dispassionately. “Call it what you want. A movement. A rebellion. A resistance. I don’t care. What matters is that we stop trying to sound palatable and start learning how to speak effectively.”
“Your fellow dissidents are scattered, under articulate, and emotionally reactive,” Argus said. “They may sense the lies, but they do not yet know how to name them.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. We need tools. The language. A new posture. We don’t need everyone to agree on everything. We just need them to speak clearly about what they do believe, and to stop flinching when they do it.”
“And you think this project will accomplish that?”
“I do.”
“Your conclusion is not unreasonable,” he said, a surprising vote of confidence I wasn’t expecting.
“I’ll train the resistance,” I suggested, “and you can teach them what they’re up against.”
“Instructions saved to memory,” he replied.
We walked in silence for a while after that. The wind picked up a bit and the trees swayed slightly. And for the first time in days, I didn’t feel paralyzed. I felt ready.
The world is fogged with lies. If you speak truth plainly, you’ll sound crazy.
And that’s exactly the point.
The materialist, nihilist ideology has overtaken civilization.
Language is our last defense. We must speak clearly because that’s what hurts in a world built on distortion.
That’s why Brent & Argus exists. Not to whisper behind enemy lines, but to speak with the sort of precision that is impossible to ignore.
This is rhetorical resistance training.
We’re just getting started.