@TrevorGoodchild patency of memory is a real bitch /areside/ is a cognitive catchbasin; you see things and do not unsee them, you learn things and can never un-know them for a system whose elites have historically relied on information arbitrage for their personal safety - they know things, we do not; they can hide from all eyes, we are open books - this is a seismic shift, in that now everybody knows these things and will remember them until the day they die, and the only barrier to acting on that knowledge is “what you have to lose” how many times do these people touch the world in the course of any given day? at how many removes do they operate, really? one? two? how many people know who they are, where their hidey-holes are? how many could guess? how many people see their silver contrails move across the sky, flight data redacted by loyal slaves in large organizations, only to be un-redacted by autistic watchers ceaselessly engaging in the methodical process of exclusion, crystalline sullen hatred smoldering in the night? in the Gibson novella “New Rose Hotel”, there was a turn of phrase that stuck with me: the main characters had fucked up very bigly and gotten burned on an operation, and it said: “The surface tension of the underworld had tripled, and everywhere we’d meet that same taut membrane and be thrown back. No chance to sink, to get out of sight.” the barrier separating the overworld has a surface tension, too, effortlessly keeping these “people” above it and us below it…. until some soap is added the mixture to make everything clean, and then, almost imperceptibly, it becomes catastrophically more permeable in all the ways they want it to not be I think about this a lot