Attention Junkies in the RAM Scramble

The man in the black trench coat, synapses fried from another newsfeed binge, stumbled through the neon jungle. His cortex buzzed like a faulty motherboard, overloaded with clickbait headlines and sponsored content. This was the 21st century, the age of RAM wars, where corporations wrestled for scraps of your ever-dwindling attention currency.

Back in the hazy, analog days, they called it advertising. But those were blunt instruments, crude billboards and flickering TV ads, mere peashooters compared to the mind-hacking algorithms of today. Now, the enemy lurked in the social feed, a hydra-headed beast with a million faces, whispering promises of dopamine hits and fleeting validation.

But wait, a glimmer in the smog-choked horizon! Whispers of neural implants, chrome extensions to our meat-based RAM. L1, L2, L3 cache – the jargon crackled like code in his mind. Perhaps, these chrome appendages would offer an escape hatch, a way to outpace the RAM scramble. But a cold dread snaked through him. Would he become a mere bio-circuit board, his augmented mind another billboard in the ever-expanding marketplace of attention?

The man in the trench coat chuckled, a dry, hollow sound. The lines were blurring, the boundaries dissolving. In this RAM scramble, who was the user, and who was the product? He pulled his collar tighter, a lone figure swallowed by the neon abyss, unsure of who he was fighting for anymore – himself, or the highest bidder in the marketplace of his mind.