naked to the invisible eye is my conscience
so jaded, they almost shot the president; i didn’t buy the paper
the elbowed class are occupied, betting the house on forex
honest labourers: poets, cleaners, cooks, balance on the breadline
not even the climate crisis promises to kill with equality
that’s ermine hegemony, they’ll colonise the moon
before one less race, people or nation leaves immiseration
so on every day’s agenda keep an item just for you
say no, instead of yes, and swear allegiance to yourself
and see yourself in every other soul

an old friend, don john, who i have not seen or heard of in probably 20 years, once accidentally said ‘naked to the invisible eye’ rather than ‘invisible to the naked eye’ during one of his tutorials at oxford. a creepy mistake which cuts to the meat of the disconcerting level of surveillance which seems to be a feature not a bug of late capitalist society.

i remember around the turn of the millennium seeing a movie about the stazi in east germany. the level of surveillance by the state against its citizens was rightly seen as shocking. it was one of the most effective arguments the western allies had against actually-existing state-socialism. do you want to live in a cliping society where thugs go through your garbage?

but then the snowden leaks happened and it turned out the us and european governments had been illegally spying on their citizens for years. we can probably be sure they still are. but on top of that, we now have unelected tech megapolies monitoring us and we are freely giving them our data, and that of those we communicate with. we tell their ai chatbots our darkest secrets. maybe we just aren’t very smart. maybe these technologies are generating issues and possibilities that we aren’t yet capable of understanding.