There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.
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On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.
When powerful people (government or not) have a record of every little thing a person does for decades retrospectively, just watch inconvenient people you like suddenly start disappearing from public discourse.
People aren’t being “disappeared” for nebulous and secret reasons. They’re being disappeared because they’re brown, they speak a non-English language, or they have some minor criminal citation in the public record.
We’re making up hypotheticals to be afraid of surveillance when the modern state is already snatching people up for very superficial and arbitrary reasons
Now it’s brown poor people. Soon it will be trans people. Maybe next brown rich people, or Muslims, or Socialists. Y’all know the poem.
They’ve already “declared” Antifa a terrorist group and fentanyl as a WMD, that’s all the justification previous republican presidents have needed for starting wars and civil terror campaigns.
This was posted in another thread yesterday, and I found it particularly persuasive: https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/
When powerful people (government or not) have a record of every little thing a person does for decades retrospectively, just watch inconvenient people you like suddenly start disappearing from public discourse.
People aren’t being “disappeared” for nebulous and secret reasons. They’re being disappeared because they’re brown, they speak a non-English language, or they have some minor criminal citation in the public record.
We’re making up hypotheticals to be afraid of surveillance when the modern state is already snatching people up for very superficial and arbitrary reasons
That scope will narrow as time passes.
Now it’s brown poor people. Soon it will be trans people. Maybe next brown rich people, or Muslims, or Socialists. Y’all know the poem.
They’ve already “declared” Antifa a terrorist group and fentanyl as a WMD, that’s all the justification previous republican presidents have needed for starting wars and civil terror campaigns.