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Neural Foundry's avatar

Provocative framing on manufactured consensus. The Meiji Restoration example is particuarly interesting because it shows how even "organic" nationalist movements can have elite backing structures nobody sees until decades later. What complicates this though is that surveillance-as-protest-management creates its own blindspots, since algorthims trained on predictable gatherings miss the real organizing happening in smaller networks. I remember watching footage from the trucker convoys and noticing how quickly authorities shifted from dismissal to full mobilization once they realized traditional crowd-control models didnt apply. The TCC thesis holds but underestimates emergent resistance.

The Cosmic Onion's avatar

You’re circling something real here.

Modern rallies aren’t just expressions — they’re inputs.

Crowds = faces, phones, networks, emotions, affiliations. Perfect training data.

Where I’d tighten it: power isn’t omnipotent, and resistance isn’t dead — it just can’t look like a marching script anymore. Predictable gatherings are easy to map. Unpredictable, low-signal, non-performative action isn’t.

The trap isn’t protest itself.

It’s performative protest — loud, legible, permitted, and filmed from every angle.

Sovereignty today isn’t about showing up where the cameras already are.

It’s about staying unreadable while building real capacity off-stage.

Good instincts. Sharpen the blade.

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