You are not the customer. You are the battery.

Every scroll, every double-tap, every story view gets monetized. Your attention sold. Your data farmed. Your psychology mapped and exploited to keep you coming back. But here's the dark part: At least in The Matrix, humans were unconscious. You're wide awake. Actively participating.

That's the cage with no lock.

"In this country, you got to get the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women." Scarface laid it down. But somewhere along the way, the script flipped. You don't get the money. You don't get the power. You don't get the women. You just get billed. Quietly, relentlessly.

It starts with a little taste. A few bucks here, a few bucks there. Join Netflix. Add Spotify. Sign up for an Adobe license that never really ends. The leech doesn't take it all at once. It slides under the skin quietly, feeding on you month by month. Before long, you look at your bank statement and realize your entire life is being rented back to you in neat little digital invoices.

That is the beauty of the subscription grift. It does not bleed you out in one go. It works like heroin. You never notice the drain until you are hooked.

At fifteen I thought 1984 was melodrama. At forty I watch my feed and the hair on my arms stands up.

We cheer privacy and watch state CCTV networks expand. We demand free speech and celebrate deplatforming people we dislike. We accept predictive policing because it feels modern while ignoring that every biased data set hardwires prejudice into police work. Doublethink lets us feel moral while we make our actions immoral.

The cage looks fancy now. Leather seats, chrome trim, subscription plan. But it is still a cage. The difference between being alive and being useful to the machine is noticing you have a choice.

First came the compliments. Then the lunch invitation. Then the card tricks. Then thousands on the table. Then the request: "Bring your passport. Bring your money."

That's when I ran.

I typed "Vietnam scam Filipino cards" into my laptop and the screen filled with ghosts of my own story. A seventy-year-old man from Western Australia lost nearly three hundred thousand dollars. TripAdvisor was a graveyard of confessions. Embassy bulletins warned of the same gang running the scam across Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Manila.

My close call wasn't a fluke. It was a cog in a larger machine that feeds on curiosity, greed, and shame. It survives because victims either laugh it off or bury it.

So here it is, laid bare. My brush with the Filipino Blackjack Gang.

As a photographer visiting Tokyo for the first time, everything felt new, intoxicatingly so. I arrived from Australia with no real itinerary, just two weeks, a camera, and a willingness to lose myself in the rhythm of a city I'd only seen in photos.

One evening, I teamed up with another photographer I met through a local online group. We dove into the electric pulse of Shinjuku, where neon signs towered above us like glowing totems and the sound of life never stopped bouncing off the concrete walls. We weaved through alleys, snapping shots of hidden izakayas, passing local salarymen on their way to late night meals, soaking up the surreal stillness that somehow lives alongside the chaos.

What followed was a night that taught me as much about being human as it did about photography.