We, Who Grew Up Running in the Streets and Now Fight the Algorithm

We — the ones who ran barefoot on hot pavement, dodging bottle caps as if they were landmines designed specifically for children.

We — who came home with scraped knees, light spirits, and an entire day tucked into our pockets.

We — who knew the exact smell of the street at sunset: dust, wind, smoke, and that invisible signal whispering, time to go back.

Yes, us.

The generation that learned to love over a public phone that screeched in our ears.

We cupped our hands around the orelhão speaker to hear better — because traffic noise competed directly with the courage required to say:

“Hi… is that you?”

The generation that rehearsed entire speeches before dialing, as if every call were a radio announcement:

and if his mother answers first, breathe.

We, who could memorize phone numbers like poems.

Who wrote names and numbers in tiny agenda notebooks — analog firewalls long before cybersecurity existed.We who lived offline not because it was aspirational, but because that was simply life.

And now?!

Now we fight the algorithm.The metrics.The spreadsheets that declare whether we matter.The robot that decides if our songs deserve more than ten seconds of exposure.The algozrhythm — a modern deity demanding consistency, frequency, output, obedience.

We, who were once feral.

Today we fill out SEO forms.

The world that promised digital freedom handed us endless checklists instead:thumbnails, tags, slugs, categories, alt-text, previews, optimization fields — a technical labyrinth where one wrong step buries what we create.

And yet we remain here, survivors of an unannounced transition.

We are the generation that learned to play with little and now suffers for needing everything to create.The generation that once ran without a destination and now must schedule the exact hour of posting.We, who knew exactly where our friends were — on the street, at the corner, by the neighbor’s gate — now must wonder if the algorithm will deliver us.

Our childhood trained us to fall and get back up.But nothing trained us to compete with bots, negotiate with AI, or watch our ideas get crushed by a red downward arrow.

And still, stubborn as we were in hide-and-seek, we continue.

Maybe because we still remember what it felt like to sense the world without intermediaries.

To exist without validation.

To run until our lungs burned and stop only when the sky turned peach.

Maybe our strength comes from that —from the memory of simplicity.

From bodies that still remember how to climb walls, scrape knees, chase a ball into the wrong street.From hearts that still know how to love through analog telephones and scribbled paper notes.

That’s why we fight the algorithm — not to defeat it —but to remind ourselves that before all of this,we were human.

And we still are.

Even if the world keeps trying to compress our souls into metrics.

We, who grew up running in the streets, haven’t forgotten:the wind was the original algorithm.

And somehow, we always found our way home.