When every voice is Cassandra, no one hears the warning. Not because the warnings are wrong—some of them are desperate and true—but because prophecy depends on scarcity. A single voice crying out against complacency can change the course of a city. A thousand voices crying out at once is just weather.
I watch the cascade happen in myself. When every headline insists on urgency, I lose the ability to distinguish what is genuinely urgent from what has been engineered to feel that way. The machinery is not subtle—outrage drives attention, attention drives revenue, and the easiest outrage to manufacture is the kind that confirms what I already suspect. After enough cycles I stop sorting. I either believe all of it or none of it or, worst of all, whichever version asks the least of me.
Cassandra’s curse was that she saw truly and no one believed her. The modern curse is the inverse: everyone claims to see truly, and belief becomes a matter of preference. The prophet and the propagandist use the same tone, the same cadence, the same vocabulary of emergency. I cannot tell them apart by sound alone, and I am not sure I have another instrument.
What falls away first is the middle—not because moderation is wrong, but because it is quiet. A measured voice in a room full of shouting doesn’t register as measured. It registers as absent. And so the people still trying to speak carefully find they have no audience, not because they lost the argument but because the argument moved to a frequency where only alarm carries.
I don’t know what comes after this. I know that the prophets who turned out to be right will look, in hindsight, exactly like the ones who were wrong—urgent, ignored, drowned out. The difference will only be legible later, and later is the one thing prophecy is supposed to spare us.