The Dimming (Slang)
You don’t dim yourself. You are dimmed.
“The Dimming” has escaped its technical definition and become the Dregs’ word for any involuntary reduction in capacity, agency, or dignity.
“She’s being dimmed” can mean a colleague is losing her job, a friend is losing her health, a neighbor is losing her housing. The word captures the essential quality: not sudden destruction but gradual, measured, controllable reduction. The subject is not broken. They are less. And the lessening was administered by someone with a balance sheet.
The Grammar Is the Politics
The verb “to dim” has acquired a passive construction that reveals the power dynamic: “I was dimmed.” Not “I lost” or “I declined” but “I was dimmed” — someone did this to me, with precision and intention, and they had the authority to do it.
The grammar itself is a political statement: the verb is never reflexive. You don’t dim yourself. You are dimmed. Always passive. Never reflexive. The syntax encodes the analysis before the sentence is finished — institutional reduction is something done to people, not something that happens.
How It Escaped
Originally, “the Dimming” was the technical name for Stage 3 of the Repossession Protocol — the phase where cognitive capacity is gradually reduced to recover outstanding debt. Clinical language for a clinical process. The word escaped into general usage because the condition it describes became widespread enough to need a shorthand.
That’s how technical vocabulary migrates. A word is coined in a boardroom, printed in a contract no one reads, applied to a process that touches millions of lives — and then the millions take the word and make it theirs. Except now it means everything the boardroom didn’t intend it to mean.
What the Children Say
Children in the Dregs use “dim” as an insult: “You’re so dim” means you’re operating below capacity, whether from cognitive debt, sleep deprivation, scroll sickness, or just a bad day.
The insult is crueler than previous generations’ equivalents because it refers to a real, documented, administered condition. You’re not being called stupid. You’re being called repossessed.
When a child calls another child “dim,” they are invoking an institutional process — reduction by authority, reduction on a schedule, reduction that someone approved. The cruelty is not in the word. The cruelty is in the accuracy.
Sister Terms
The Dimming
Debt — gradualCognitive capacity reduced incrementally by the Repossession Protocol. Slow. Measured. You watch it happen. The reduction has a schedule and a spreadsheet.
Going Gray
Deprecation — suddenCognitive architecture deprecated by the Firmware Cliff. Sudden. Total. Corporate decision. One day your firmware is current; the next day it isn’t. The cliff, not the slope.
The Dim Ward
MVC poverty — ongoingRunning at minimum viable consciousness because you can’t afford otherwise. Not a process. A state. The floor that catches you after the dimming or the graying is done.
Different speeds, same direction. The Dimming is the slope. Going gray is the cliff. The Dim Ward is the ground.
Connections
Debt Culture
“The Dimming” is the central term in debt culture vocabulary — the word that named the experience before the experience had a politics.
The Gradient Slang
Part of the Sprawl’s living vocabulary of institutional harm — the language that names what corporations euphemize. Sits alongside “chromer,” “going gray,” “clocked,” and the rest.
The Repossession Protocol
Where the word was born. Stage 3 of the Protocol — the gradual reduction phase — was originally called “the Dimming” in technical documentation. The word walked out of the contract and into the street.
The Firmware Cliff
“Going gray” and “the Dimming” are sister terms for related but distinct cognitive reduction. One is corporate deprecation. The other is debt collection. Both end the same way.
Points of Inquiry
"The word is never reflexive. You don’t dim yourself. You are dimmed. The grammar decided before the speaker did — this is something done to you, by someone with a spreadsheet and the authority to use it."
When a technical term escapes into the street, it carries its origin with it. “The Dimming” still sounds clinical — measured, controlled, precise — even when a child uses it to insult another child. That clinical quality is the point. It reminds everyone, in every usage, that the reduction was administered.
The passive construction is the most telling feature. Every language has ways to assign agency, and the Dregs chose the construction that assigns it to an institution. Not “I got dimmer.” Not “Things got worse.” But “I was dimmed” — there is a subject, even if they never appear in the sentence. The grammar knows who did it. The grammar always knows.
And then there’s the children. When the next generation absorbs a word, the word is permanent. “Dim” is now part of the Dregs’ childhood vocabulary — as natural as any insult, as loaded as none of them ever were before. The children don’t know the Protocol. They just know the word. That’s how language wins.