We built the surveillance state ourselves. Not some government program or corporate agenda. Us. We handed each other the audience and then started performing for it, and somewhere in that process the nature of private speech changed completely.
Every text is a deposition now. Every group chat is on the record. Anything you type is evidence, screenshottable and croppable and ready to be handed to people who weren't even in the room when you said it. So you edit before you send, before you finish the thought, not for the person you're actually talking to but for the eyes you can't place, for the mob that hasn't assembled yet but that you already know how to picture because you've watched it happen to other people.
You write to survive something that hasn't happened yet, and might not, but the fear doesn't care about that.
What that produces over time isn't careful people. It's people who've lost the thread back to what they actually think. You're not communicating anymore, you're managing. Quietly optimizing for an audience that mostly only exists in your head. And what comes out the other side is smaller than what went in.
The first version of almost anything is the truest one. The text before the rewrite. The thing you typed before you remembered who might see it. The draft you deleted was the real one. What you sent was the approved version.
