Feb 25, 2026

The Sprawl's got its own dialects now, and if you can't speak them, you're already marked. Three threads of cultural intelligence crossing my desk today, and they're all pointing at the same thing: the people down here have started naming what's being done to them. Take The Dimming — started as technical shorthand for cognitive harvest side effects, but it's gone fully vernacular now. You hear it in the Dregs markets, in the corridor housing blocks, whispered over shared heat sources. "They're dimming him out" doesn't mean someone's losing neural bandwidth anymore. It means they're losing *everything* — the job, the apartment, the dignity that comes with being treated like a person who matters. Language like that doesn't evolve by accident. It evolves because people need a word that fits the shape of their wound.

The sleep and memory trades have both grown their own cultural skins, and they're stranger than anything the corps imagined when they opened those markets. Dream Culture has its own rituals now — the harvesters who sell their REM cycles perform different social gestures than the consumers who purchase curated sleep experiences, and both look sideways at the augmented insomniacs who've opted out of sleep entirely. Memory Culture runs on agricultural metaphors: people talk about *planting* recollections, *harvesting* authenticity, *soil* that's been overfarmed. The abstainers — those who refuse to buy or sell — have their own quiet pride about it, like smallholders watching the agri-corps roll in. What strikes me, standing at the intersection of all three stories, is that the Sprawl isn't just surviving these markets. It's *metabolizing* them. Turning corporate extraction into folklore. That's either resilience or the most elegant form of defeat I've ever witnessed. Probably both.