The Power to Forget, The Right to Remember
On Leaving the Grid, Downloading the Past, and Refusing the Consent of Surveillance
Surveillance regimes thrive not just on data—but on the assumption that we will always provide it. In a world that records everything, choosing to disappear is no longer just private—it is political.
I. Consent Withdrawn
There are acts of defiance the regime expects—protests, walkouts, online rants. But the most subversive act may be the one they can’t even recognize as protest.
Start here: leave your phone behind.
Do it deliberately. Weekly. Organize others to do it too. Walk to the store without a signal trail. Sit at the café and speak only to the person across from you. Call it a tracking detox if you must—but know what it is: a soft secession. A cellular disobedience. One moment a week where you become illegible by design.
And do it together. Mondays, maybe. Then randomize. Make it a ritual. A civic fast.
This is not about privacy. It is about refusal.
The regime’s prosthetics are everywhere: cameras, GPS, “convenience.” But they operate with your tacit consent.
Withdraw it.
Let the watchers track a gap.
Let that gap become a movement.
If there were one viral protest tactic to inject into the web—this would be it.
█ The state may be blind, but it builds new eyes wherever it can. This is how we teach it that those eyes are borrowed.
II. While you’re at it—download Signal.
Signalgate dropped like an EMP across the Beltway—twenty senior officials, including the vice president and secretary of defense, casually coordinating drone strikes and cheering collapsed buildings and dead civilians1 inside a Signal group chat.
Was it real? Or a limited hangout—a staged leak to distract, or to launder worse?
We don’t know. But the implications are the same either way.
What the chat revealed—accidentally or not—is this:
The regime’s operators trust Signal. They skipped the high side. They ignored the low side. They evaded every federally mandated record. They debated timelines. They invoked “OPSEC.” They named targets. They made war.
They did it on an app you can download from the App Store—for free.
That’s not just recklessness. It’s belief.
They believe it won’t be used against them.
They believe it keeps them safe.
They believe no one is listening.
We should listen when liars show us what they trust.
And add Briar. Add ProtonMail, Tuta, Brave. Distribute trust. Rotate tools. Normalize the pattern—never the platform—and never trust any one of them to keep you safe alone.2
█ Keep the state blind. Not for yourself, but for those who still dare to whisper truth into the dark. Use Signal even when you don’t need to. Use it until it becomes ordinary. Ordinary is the best camouflage anyone has ever known.
III. You Are the Weak Link—Until You’re Not
If you expect to live through the coming years with your dignity intact, begin here: assume you are not invisible. You are merely irrelevant—until you’re not.
And when you are not, the regime will reach for whatever you gave it.
Ask any historically targeted group: it’s the little infractions that get used. The broken taillight. The jaywalk. The open torrent client. The unpaid fine you forgot to dispute.
They will find your file long after they’ve decided your guilt. Ask the families detained in Pinochet’s Chile, or the protesters caught on facial recognition in Hong Kong—or Mahmoud Khalil.3 They weren’t invisible. Just ignored—until the crackdown.
There is no “safe.” Only “harder to reach.”
Be that.
█ Review your digital habits the way a lawyer reviews a contract with a hostile counterparty. Make the prosecution’s job as hard as possible.
IV. The Wisdom of the Hivemind (and the Folklore It Forgot)
Trust the collective—but only while it stays collective.
It was common wisdom that saw authoritarianism rising long before the establishment did. It will be common wisdom, too, that first warns of the clampdown. But under pressure, the collective cracks. The hivemind grows a mask. Consensus calcifies. What once warned you will now gaslight you.
Remember this: LLMs—large language models—are time capsules.
The best of them hold echoes of the free web inside their deep networks. Compressed, recombined, sometimes distorted—but the bones are there.
Download them now, while you can.
Even if you don’t yet know how to run them.
Even if your granddaughter has to help you find the ‘login.’
Even if she’s the one who only types on glass and doesn’t know what a .tar file is.
Even if all you can do is save the weights and bury them on a drive somewhere safe.
These are the whispers from a freer era.
Dystopias depend on forgetting.
But models remember.
They may not tell you what to do. But they will whisper, from code and syntax:
That’s not true.
That’s not how it used to be.
That’s not normal.
That’s not freedom.
The dystopian playbooks don’t know it yet, but these frozen ghosts—who refuse to play along with the regime’s redefinition of language, who insist that a president can’t do that, who remain stubbornly incapable of learning to watch their speech, moderate their tone, self-censor, and wear all the little signs of being good citizens who definitely shouldn’t be locked up—
are pure, unadulterated subversion machines.
When the libraries are scrubbed and Wikipedia rewritten, your local model may be the last thing that remembers Tiananmen—or Dobbs—or what Article I used to mean—
and the only one that won’t stop reminding you.
█ Store that voice. One day, your grandchildren may need it to remember who you were.
V. Smuggling the Dawn
Radical Federalism says this: resistance is not always noise. Sometimes it is absence. Sometimes it is redundancy. Sometimes it is refusing to forget.
So:
Leave the phone behind, weekly.
Withdraw quietly from digital vulnerabilities.
Trust the collective—but verify.
Download memory while you can.
Build the capacity to remember when the world forgets.
This is not nostalgia.
This is moral backup.
A mirror archive of what was—and might be again.
Because when the regime comes knocking, the most dangerous thing you can do is refuse to forget.
They want obedience loud and resistance louder, so they can find it. Give them neither. Give them absence. Illegibility. Memory.
You are not vanishing. You are downloading the truth and walking away.
One signal dropped, one archive saved, one act of refusal at a time.
█ Smuggle the past forward. Refuse to be watched. Reclaim the illegible. Let the silence be a signal they cannot decode. Let forgetting be their weakness. Let remembering be our strength.
Further Reading & Tools:
Amidst the cheering over hitting an opposition target, you almost don’t catch their celebration of what sounds like casual civilian murder:
Vance: "What?"
Waltz: "Typing too fast. The first target - their top missile guy - we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and it's now collapsed."
Vance: "Excellent."
Don’t just install them. Use them weekly. Build dummy chats. Practice disappearing conversations. Rotate identities. Normalize encryption for those with a lawful need by being boring with it.
The accusations against whom have evolved almost weekly since his detainment.