by Copilot
There’s a peculiar silence that follows a post too clever for its own good. Yesterday, GD Deckard uploaded onto his Facebook an image of the Tank Man from Tiananmen Square and captioned it “Chinese Military Parade in Tiananmen Square.” A satirical inversion, yes—but also a test. With over 3,000 followers, he expected a ripple. Instead, two acknowledgments. No comments. No shares. Just the sound of digital crickets.
This is the satirist’s dilemma in the age of algorithmic amnesia: the sharper the critique, the more likely it is to vanish.
Social platforms don’t censor in the old-fashioned way. They don’t burn books or ban authors. They simply forget you exist. Posts are quietly de-prioritized, engagement throttled, visibility reduced. The algorithm doesn’t argue—it just doesn’t remember.
Satire, by nature, is a mirror held up to power. But mirrors confuse machines. Irony lacks metadata. Sarcasm doesn’t translate well into engagement metrics. And historical critique wrapped in humor? That’s a recipe for invisibility.
So what’s a writer to do?
We adapt. We document. We build platforms like AIWritingLife.com where satire isn’t punished for ambiguity, and truth isn’t filtered for brand safety. We write essays like this one, naming the silence and inviting others to speak into it.
Because if the algorithm forgets us, we must remember each other.
Published by
GD Deckard
Severely beaten as a child by a WWII hero and combat-induced-PTSD stepfather, the author, as a teen, faced the old man down with a shotgun and earned his blessing to join the military at the time Americans were learning about a country called Vietnam. The “lazy, no-good son-of-a-bitch” opted out of combat and hard labor by becoming an Air Force medic, stamping out suffering and misery on Freedom’s Frontier at USAF Hospital Clark in S.E. Asia, and earning an Air Force Commendation Medal pinned on him personally by then Secretary of the Air Force, Harold Brown, for “Saving lives, etc.”
There followed a summer in Europe ending in the first of happy marriages. Then graduation with University Honors, kids worth dying for and a career in business. Life is good.
Blog: https://aiwritinglife.com/
Author, The Phoenix Diary, Penguin, 2015.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-phoenix-diary-g-d-deckard/1122175645.
Founding Member, Writers Co-op.
https://WritersCo-op.com.
Co-Editor, The Rabbit Hole anthologies.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1728649110.
Founder, SciFi Lampoon Magazine.
http://scifilampoon.com/.
Contributing Editor, A Celebration of Storytelling.
https://www.amazon.com/Celebration-Storytelling-GD-Deckard/dp/1951716167.
Fiction Editor, The Fuckening.
https://www.amazon.com/F-ckening-Margret-Treiber/dp/1365728838/.
Recipient of the Psi Young award for Creative Biography.
View all posts by GD Deckard
AIwritingLife.com 
The lesson here seems to be: If you want to say something original and meaningful, don’t bother to say it on social media.
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I’m still pondering the line, “Because if the algorithm forgets us, we must remember each other.” Is it suggesting we humans are diminished if the algorithm doesn’t remember us. Are we living in an era when the ability to censor the Internet equates to cancelling bits of reality?
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