The loneliness arrives not all at once but in waves, like radio signals degrading across vast distances. Marcus has been streaming for fourteen months to an audience that fluctuates between zero and three viewers, though he suspects the three are bots with their usernames too perfectly random, their silence too absolute.
His setup occupies a corner of his Phoenix apartment where he’s constructed an elaborate backdrop of LED panels and acoustic foam, a broadcasting station transmitting into the algorithmic void. Every evening at 7 PM Mountain Time, he goes live.
What makes Marcus fascinating isn’t his content, where he plays middling chess while discussing philosophy, but rather the evolution of his presentation style in near-complete isolation.
Without feedback loops, without chat interaction to shape his performance, he’s developed a speaking pattern that resembles someone having an animated conversation with their reflection.
He pauses for imagined questions, laughs at jokes that land nowhere, creates callbacks to previous streams that no one watched. His language has become increasingly baroque, developing inside jokes with himself, creating a mythology of recurring characters who exist only in his monologues about his day.
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