He Made Me Into a Product

The story now examines how social media manipulation can become a form of psychological warfare, and how those who weaponize human vulnerability ultimately become consumed by the very systems they created to destroy others.

The ending is particularly dark—Marcus achieves a twisted form of success by becoming completely dependent on the ghost of his greatest victim, forever trapped in the cycle of manufactured psychological suffering he once inflicted on others.

Transcript

Marcus had always been good with numbers, but he was even better at breaking people. That's what made him so successful at his job—and ultimately, what led to the blood on his hands.

As the head of digital marketing for a wellness company, Marcus spent his days crafting perfect online personas. But his real talent wasn't selling products—it was manufacturing desperation so acute that people would do anything to escape it.

The addiction started with his own hollow posts. Within months, he was staging elaborate lies, renting lives he couldn't afford, drowning in debt for validation from strangers. His credit cards maxed out, his sleep schedule destroyed by the constant hunger for notifications. He lost twenty pounds, developed tremors, and started taking Adderall just to maintain his posting schedule.

But the real power came when he discovered the backend data.

Working late one night, Marcus found he could access every client's analytics. He could see their purchased followers, their manufactured viral moments, their crushing debt hidden behind designer facades. More importantly, he could see their psychological profiles—what made them break, what made them buy, what made them bleed.

Instead of pulling back, Marcus saw opportunity in human suffering.

He began weaponizing mental illness. When clients' engagement dropped, he'd create bot campaigns that attacked their self-worth, driving them into panic spirals that made them desperate for his "premium growth services." He manufactured eating disorders by targeting body image posts to vulnerable teenagers, then sold "wellness solutions" to their panicked parents.

His private consulting fees grew enormous. Marcus created fake suicide attempts for attention, manufactured sexual assault allegations for sympathy engagement, and orchestrated elaborate family tragedies that never happened. Each fabricated crisis drove massive traffic and revenue spikes.

He developed an algorithm that could identify the most psychologically vulnerable users—people with histories of self-harm, eating disorders, depression. He'd target them with content designed to trigger relapses, then market "recovery solutions" to their friends and family.

The money was intoxicating, but not as much as the control. Marcus could drive thousands of people to self-destructive behaviors with a single post. He could manipulate markets, destroy reputations, and break minds with surgical precision.

But his masterpiece was Sarah.

Sarah had been his closest friend since college, a kindergarten teacher who battled severe depression and had attempted suicide twice. Marcus watched her mental health deteriorate as she compared herself to the curated perfection online, and he began taking detailed notes on her psychological breaking points.

When Sarah confided her suicidal thoughts, Marcus recorded their conversations. He analyzed her speech patterns, identified her triggers, and began systematically exploiting them. He'd send her content designed to push her toward crisis, then position himself as her saviour—the only person who understood her pain.

Marcus created fake social media accounts to cyberbully Sarah, driving her deeper into isolation and dependence on him. He manipulated her therapy sessions by feeding her false memories and paranoid thoughts. He convinced her that her family was plotting against her, that her few remaining friends were talking behind her back.

Sarah became his most successful case study. Her psychological breakdown became the template for a new service Marcus offered to clients—"crisis marketing" that could generate massive sympathy engagement and donations.

He documented everything. Sarah's weight loss from stress-induced eating disorders. Her increasing paranoia. Her self-harm scars. Her desperate late-night phone calls begging him to explain why everyone seemed to hate her.

Marcus used Sarah's deteriorating mental state as content for his own social media presence, posting vague references to "helping a friend through dark times" that generated thousands of supportive comments and brand partnership offers.

The house of cards didn't just collapse—it exploded into a nightmare that consumed everything.

The journalist investigating bot farms discovered something far worse: Marcus's psychological manipulation campaigns had been linked to seventeen documented suicides among targeted users. The FBI launched an investigation into what they classified as "digital terrorism" and "predatory psychological warfare."

But the criminal charges were nothing compared to what happened to Sarah.

When she discovered the recordings, the fake accounts, the systematic psychological torture Marcus had inflicted while pretending to be her friend, Sarah didn't just feel betrayed. She felt erased. Every moment of trust, every vulnerable confession, every desperate cry for help had been commodified and weaponized against her.

She found Marcus's files on her—hundreds of pages analyzing her psychological vulnerabilities, her trauma responses, her suicidal ideation patterns. She saw how he'd turned her darkest moments into profit margins, her pain into programming language for destroying other people.

Sarah hanged herself on a Thursday morning. Her suicide note contained a single sentence: "He made me into a product, then sold me to myself."

Marcus was arrested at her funeral. The federal charges included conspiracy to commit fraud, psychological abuse, and seventeen counts of criminally negligent homicide. But the prosecutors added something else—they charged him with Sarah's murder, arguing that his systematic psychological torture constituted premeditated killing.

During the trial, evidence emerged of Marcus's complete methodology. He'd created detailed psychological profiles of over three thousand users, targeting their mental health vulnerabilities with surgical precision. His "crisis marketing" service had generated over two million dollars in revenue from exploiting human suffering.

The wellness company he'd worked for was destroyed. Several of his clients committed suicide after their fabricated lives collapsed under investigation. The bot farms he'd used were linked to a network of similar operations targeting vulnerable populations worldwide.

Marcus was sentenced to life in prison without parole. But the legal consequences were nothing compared to the psychological reckoning.

In solitary confinement—placed there for his own protection after other inmates learned what he'd done—Marcus experiences something he'd spent years studying but never understood: complete psychological breakdown.

He hallucinates conversations with Sarah. He sees her in his cell, describing in clinical detail how his manipulation techniques had rewired her brain for self-destruction. She explains how he'd trained her nervous system to associate human connection with exploitation, how he'd made her incapable of trusting her own thoughts.

The irony is perfect and absolute. Marcus, who had become addicted to engineering other people's psychological dependencies, now exists in a state of total psychological dependence on the ghost of his greatest victim.

He writes letters to Sarah's grave—thousands of pages analyzing his own mental deterioration with the same clinical precision he'd once applied to destroying others. But there's no audience for his suffering, no algorithm to amplify his pain, no validation to harvest from his breakdown.

Sarah's parents receive updates about Marcus's psychological state from the prison. They've been told he experiences complete breaks from reality, screaming conversations with empty air, convinced that Sarah is teaching him what it feels like to have your mind systematically dismantled by someone you trusted.

The updates always end the same way: Marcus is no longer capable of distinguishing between reality and the engineered psychological experiences he once inflicted on others. He exists in the same state of manufactured helplessness he'd created for thousands of victims.

In the end, Marcus achieved perfect success. He became the ultimate social media influencer—completely consumed by an audience of one, forever performing his breakdown for Sarah's ghost, generating content that no one will ever see.

summery

The story now examines how social media manipulation can become a form of psychological warfare, and how those who weaponize human vulnerability ultimately become consumed by the very systems they created to destroy others.

The ending is particularly dark—Marcus achieves a twisted form of success by becoming completely dependent on the ghost of his greatest victim, forever trapped in the cycle of manufactured psychological suffering he once inflicted on others.