Everyone’s eating shit now and it’s AI’s fault

Nunc Est Cacandum

It’s October 2025, and I’m watching my flatmate package human faeces into matchboxes. This isn’t fiction, this isn’t a fever dream, no, this is just a Saturday in London.

Six months ago, if you’d told me that Google DeepMind’s breakthroughs in protein folding would lead to a coprophagy epidemic sweeping through universities and schools, I’d have laughed at you for such a bizarre and absurd claim, for your conspiratorial boomer take. But here we are! Nobody’s fucking laughing. Not me at least.

You could imagine a hypothetical sci-fi situation in which a sentient AI realises how jaded, corrupted and parasitic humans are and decides to become just like them, homicidal and megalomaniacal, and annihilate all the skin bags. Happens now and then in literature and film, wouldn’t be a surprise either. Yuddites would be right, any typical anti-AGI take would come out as prophetic, proper futurology. But that’s not what happen; the AI we’ve deserved can hurt you in other ways: impersonation, misinformation at industrial scale, loneliness and mental health issues, copyright infringement, sloppification of the internet. Without saying it directly, they admit the AGI isn’t coming, perhaps only as a porn-generator. Not a bang but a whimpering fart, a slow rot, the society eating itself. Who could imagine our omnivorousness can take us thus far?

See, the AI we’ve deserved doesn’t have to be intelligent even — being stupid is enough for humans to use you for their own selfish stupid ideas and remarkable breakthroughs. They used the same transformer architecture that powers everything now and the same protein structure prediction that came out of DeepMind. AlphaFold cracked the protein folding problem, made structural biology obsolete overnight, won a Nobel Prize, and gave every schmuck with a GPU cluster the delusion they could play God with genomics. They built these tools to cure Alzheimer’s, cancer, and design carbon-capture enzymes. Instead? Well...

That was March 2025. DeepMind published a paper in Nature: “Novel Protein Structures for Sustainable Nutrition: An AI-Driven Approach to Gut Microbiome Engineering.” Checks all the marks: clinical language, peer-reviewed, respectable. The press release talked about “leveraging breakthroughs in protein folding prediction to address global food insecurity.” It mentioned termites and their remarkable three-way symbiotic relationship with cellulolytic protists and bacterial symbionts, referenced Kopi Luwak and civet gut fermentation as proof-of-concept — look, such things exist in nature, and it’s always our greatest inspiration. Some very rhetorically advanced chaps would even build nature-God connection and say it’s all, in fact, intended and designed by God, and we’re just slowly discovering who we are. You know, Jesus spoke of this! You know, it is all very scientific and humanitarian, jolly good, butterflies and rainbows!

Two weeks later, a new venture called Abdominion Labs (mind you, backed by OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA in a Series A) announced they’d licensed DeepMind’s research for commercial application. Isn’t that the best? Isn’t that what we’ve always wanted — to eat our own shit? They used AlphaFold to design a special microorganism that would live in your gut, colonise your faeces, and upon evacuation — sorry, “bio-material extraction” — start a novel fermentation process. Abdominion Labs didn’t just study it. They optimised it. Made it scalable. Made it marketable. Made it inevitable.

They called the microorganism LOTUS (under the microscope, its structure apparently resembled a lotus flower or whatnot). The press kit was beautiful — clean sans-serif fonts, pastel gradients, lots of white space, very mindful, very demure. Sustainable, circular, revolutionary — you name it — all the buzzwords were there. But hear me, not once, not a single time, did they use the word “shit” or it’s mindful and demure synonyms.

Millions of views in the first day. Everyone was reading, watching, and listening as to how soon they’d be stuffing their mouths with their own faeces and what made it possible. And then, of course, the memes — you can imagine.

That said, venture capitalists were in an impossible position. On one hand, you had something that could end world hunger, trillions in revenue, the big tech companies already involved, DeepMind’s reputation backing it. On the other hand, you have the most degenerate and mental idea humanity has ever seen. But OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA don’t throw money at things lightly. Series B followed within weeks, valuation was modest, only £34 billion. Government support was rubber-stamped. I bet there was some sort of a lobby, or the secret world government, the shit-luminati with an eyed turd on top of a pyramid. That would not surprise me. At all. In fact, I would rather believe in that than anything else.

For the next six months everyone, except investors, forgot about Abdominion Labs, memes got dusty, hype — droopy, until the testing phase ended and they started production. The first batch looked like chewing gum. In a wee square box, with a lotus flower painted on it, laid a thin soft gummy layer with a flowery scent. You buy it, you chew it, and you get the microbe down in your guts forever. Simple yet genius. AI created it in a way such that there was no common horrid odour. You could put it in a container and leave it for a few days exposed to the sunlight so it can dry out a bit. Then, well, you could eat it.

Now, it’s being sold in Boots. Next to the meal deals and paracetamol. Someone set up an artisanal stall in Borough Market, same shit, extremely overpriced. There are LOTUS pop-ups everywhere! In the UK, in Europe, in the US — all around the world. Only Russia, Iran, North Korea and the bunch managed to escape it due to sanctions.

Sounds almost utopic, but this is exactly when the evil AI plot twist happened. Ingenious craftsmen soon discovered that if you leave your shit fermenting for a week or more away from the sun, somewhere in a dark and cool place, it starts acquiring unusual, magical, perception-warping properties. When used, aged lotus increased the user’s happiness, self-confidence, and, allegedly, intelligence, too, making people forget about their problems and live in a faecal fantasy.

The timing was perfect, wasn’t it? Right when the whole psychedelic renaissance was promising to heal our collective trauma after a decade of austerity, along comes LOTUS to fuck it all up. Why microdose mushrooms for enlightenment and therapeutic integration when you can macrodose your own shit and become a better self almost for free?

It was cheap, accessible, and easy to use, plus, gluten-free and organic. Thanks to the internet, in less than a week, everyone started buying Lotus gums, fermenting and ageing their shit, eating it, and being happy, sexy, and wise. It wasn’t actually making people so, of course, but a feeling was enough. It felt good, good enough to get addicted, good enough to make Abdominion Labs rich.

The authorities don’t know how to classify LOTUS, for it’s technically a probiotic. They can’t ban it because you can’t criminalise someone’s digestive system. I would imagine Keir Starmer’s wet dream is to ban us from taking a shit. As soon as you take lotus for the first time, you become dependent upon it, you become a hopeless slave to its allure. Once you stop consuming it, the fancy image of yours fades away and you see who you really are: a miserable, lost, self-despising, trembling creature; the contrast is striking, and you feel yourself a hunchback with mildly exotic ugliness who sees themselves in a mirror for the first time. So, to keep the effect, you’ve got to take lotus consistently. Some of the more addictive effects of it are bouts of euphoria, protracted ennui, drastic reduction of attention span, and possibly... death. Ha-ha, just kidding. Lotus kills no one. “Viruses” that kill too fast and too much cannot spread well and die out often. Lotus was the opposite. Lotus was harmless. No one cared. Shepherd, shan’t you worry if your flock is happy? Opium for the masses, from the masses, in mass quantities. The third psychedelic revolution. We thought it was supposed to be different, spiritual, not just clinical. We wanted arts and sciences renaissance. We were this close to something, to collective healing, to ego dissolution, to reconnection with whatever the hell we’d lost in the digital wasteland. We wanted Terence McKenna to be quoted unironically. And then LOTUS came along and turned the whole thing into a shitshow.

Everyone is a shitborg now. Scroll through Twitter right now and half the posts are people sharing their “lotus journeys”. There’s a waiting list for LOTUS starter kits longer than the NHS waiting list for mental health services. Quite a few enthusiasts on Etsy and Ebay is selling “artisanal” varieties. There’s a subreddit with 2m members. Netflix did a documentary, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eating Shit”. The Guardian ran a thinkpiece titled “LOTUS and Late Capitalism: Are We Eating Ourselves?” Some were concerned, especially the European Union.

While I write this, my degenerate flatmate is building a lotus ageing farm under his bed. He is a shitrepreneur now, you see. The internet is full of ultimate guides on how to become one. My flatmate adds different colouring and fruity infusions to make it fancy and surprising. Earl Grey infusion, naturally — because of course he’s making tea-flavoured shit, we’re that far gone. Assam, English Breakfast, matcha Labubu Dubai chocolate for fuck’s sake.

For distribution, he packages it in match boxes, portable and convenient, easy to put a sticker on, and others will happily buy it. His “business” is doing better than the actual economy. Savvy afaeceonados hunt for unique tastes and flavours, for each and every shit is unique, especially if you sprinkle it with lavender or mix it with turmeric. Your own aged lotus soon becomes boring and stops “sparking joy”. You need something that opens the gateway to new experiences, and after a while, it becomes part of your daily diet. It becomes a part of you. You become a shiteater.

I look into my flatmate’s eyes. They are empty, always have been. A feverish flame flickers in them, but behind... nothing. He smiles and asks if I want to try his product and open my turd eye. For free. I frown, show him my right middle finger and leave the room.

In this fucked up world, I feel myself an alien, a savage to coprophagi civilisation standing at the edge of a cliff, on a chair with rope in hand. The realisation that you’re the only sane person makes you question your reality. What if I’m the one who’s wrong? Is there anyone else out there? We live in a society and blablabla. For them I’m just another lonely lunatic with a placard and a mic and a Bluetooth speaker strolling through an empty Trafalgar Square, whining about the end of time. But we are always at the end of time, aren’t we? If I have no power to save the world, no power to drag everyone away from the sinister island on which they all have stuck, why persist? If the world doesn’t need saving anymore, the easiest choice is to fall in line.

Thus I wonder, who are you, reader? Whom is this even addressed? Perhaps, a dummy postbox in front of Void Court on Inane Avenue. Someone scrolling through Substack on Sunday, wondering if they’ve gone mad or if everyone else has. Someone in another flat, another city, a parent watching their own child build their own shit farm and thinking: surely, surely I’m not alone in finding this completely mental.

Any decent piece of writing, whether it’s a message in a bottle or a death note, should have two things: a Kubrick reference, and a piece of poetry. The first I’ve already got, so I was willing to write a poem to give you, droog, something beautiful and transcendental enough, something full of hope, a salvific possibility of redemption. But, despite being sober from lotus, my brain convolutions are clogged with nothing but shit.

So, I scribble down this verse, and, leaning perhaps too far out the window, read it out loud so the void can hear my voice:

In spite of our rich aspirations

To conquer the likes of Uranus

We ditched the space exploration,

And have only conquered your

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀Ego.

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