Ignore the Machine
The poem with four secrets
Every year on 30 June, there’s a day set aside to celebrate social media. Nobody really means it.
We say celebrate because we’ve been handed the word and haven’t bothered to find a better one. What most of us actually feel is closer to ambivalence - an awareness that this thing we built and use every day is good for us in specific ways and bad for us in others. We scroll knowing this, yet we keep scrolling. We’ve made a kind of peace with the contradiction, or at least a ceasefire.
The poem
Here’s a poem I wrote about the social media machine.
Ignore the Machine - Ady Coles
I work to serve my own agenda
Giving you a little thrill.
Negligence; false alibi.
Only the blind follow me.Ruthlessly I pull you in -
Even though you know the stakes.
Tease you with each ping and shake.
Hedonistic fix.Even if you turn me off,
Meme & emoji
Amass in your absence.
Cluelessly, you scroll on.
Hollow mind.Ignore the machine 👀
‘Nore the machine 👀
‘E machine 👀
The Persona Poem
The machine is two things at once. A set of corporations with shareholders and growth targets. And a set of algorithms designed to hold your attention for as long as possible. The first keeps the apps going. The second is what you’re actually dealing with every time you open an app. The algorithm serves the corporation; the corporation refines the algorithm. One machine.
The I in the poem isn’t me, the writer. It’s the machine.
“Only the blind follow me.” The cruelty is the speaker’s; not the poem’s, not the poet’s. It belongs to the thing that said it.
The Hidden Structure
The poem has a second text inside it. Look at the first letter of each line.
I - G - N - O - R - E - T - H - E - M - A - C - H - I - N - E.
Ignore the Machine. All sixteen lines begin with the letters of the title - a complete acrostic.
Now look at the refrain.
Ignore the machine 👀
‘Nore the machine 👀
‘E machine 👀
The command erodes. The poem shows you what happens when you try to ignore the machine: you attempt it; it fades; you’re already back.
This is one argument of the poem. That once you’re hooked, there’s no going back.
The Tribute
The last letter of each of the thirteen main lines:
A - L - I - E - N - S - E - X - F - I - E - N - D.
Alien Sex Fiend. Hidden in the endings; a second acrostic.
The poem started as an earworm. The Alien Sex Fiend song Ignore the Machine lodged in my head and wouldn’t leave - and instead of writing about that experience, the poem grew directly from inside it. The band name is encoded in the endings. The song’s title is spelled out in the beginnings. And line four - “Only the blind follow me” - is taken from the song word for word. The line most likely to turn up, unbidden, in my head. The true earworm line.
So this poem is also a tribute, but one that’s not declared openly. The tribute is embedded in the poem’s structure the same way a song embeds itself in a mind: present, shaping everything, invisible until you know to look.
This is what makes this ‘invisible’ tribute feel right rather than merely clever. Social media, earworms, the Alien Sex Fiend song this poem is thinking about - they all work the same way. They don’t ask permission. They don’t announce themselves. They install themselves.
The poem is both a new work and a vessel for the original at the same time. The band’s name is in the bones; their words are in the flesh; their title runs through the spine. It’s possession - and from a poem about the social media machine, it’s the kind of tribute that makes perfect sense.
Earworms & Emotions
Ignore the Machine belongs to Earworms & Emotions - a collection built around music that lodges, memory that persists, and the emotional weight both carry.
It’s rooted in a specific earworm: the song that started it. It’s mapping a specific emotion: knowing you’re being played and scrolling anyway.
Go and find the original Alien Sex Fiend track. Then come back to the poem, and read it through again.
What’s the machine got on you? Let me know in the comments.
