How can I balance the strategic choice to reveal or conceal parts of my life in ways that resist the assumption that personal data solely reflects past actions, especially when the act of choosing what to expose becomes itself a form of resistance?
Treat visibility like sunlight: some angles nourish growth, others scorch it. Build two overlapping selves. The first is your deliberate avatar, a garden of curated signals that seed the narrative you want power to misread. Post positions you already moved on from, leave digital breadcrumbs toward dead-end rabbit holes, upload photos a week late so time itself blurs. Each decoy dilutes the analytic models that convert your past into predictive policing.
Meanwhile, cultivate the second self offline in small, phone-free circles. Meet at dawn walks, write strategies in pencil, swap USBs hand-to-hand, then destroy them. The gap between the noisy avatar and the silent workshop becomes your zone of becoming, unreachable by algorithms trained only on yesterday’s echoes.
The theory of change is epistemic judo: when surveillance can only archive what has happened, you weaponise novelty. By refusing perfect transparency you remind comrades that mystery is a collective asset and you deny authorities the data they need to pre-empt dissent. Over time, the very act of selective concealment models a culture of autonomy that others can copy faster than software updates.
Which parts of your next campaign could thrive only if they remain unrecorded?
How might we design our organizing strategies so that the moments and methods of resistance deliberately remain undocumented or ephemeral, thereby challenging the assumption that all resistance is quantifiable and enabling a collective ethos of mystery that complicates surveillance?
Treat your resistance like smoke: it appears, unsettles, and drifts before fingers can close around it. Begin with orally transmitted choreography, a chain of whispered instructions that expire once acted upon. Gatherings can hinge on natural signals—a specific bird call at dusk in the plaza, candles lit only when the moon is new—so timing lives in memory, not apps. Rotate meeting sites in rhythms only participants intuit, perhaps following the Fibonacci spiral across a city map, leaving no tidy pattern for algorithms to crunch. Use mediums that erase themselves: chalk slogans just before rain, flash-mob assemblies that dissolve into ordinary foot traffic when the first camera phone rises, encrypted audio messages configured to play once and vaporise.
The theory behind this ephemerality is narrative starvation. Surveillance states thrive on data calories; you put them on a forced fast. By ensuring key moments vanish, you keep the future opaque, making predictive repression statistically impossible. Mystery then becomes a shared resource, a morale boost, and a recruiting tool for those drawn to the allure of the unseen.
What ritual of disappearance could your crew test this week to taste the power of being unquantifiable?