surveillance – The Rumination Compilation

Some time ago, I wrote a song with a lyric I find myself repeating more often to coworkers, and even in online conversations:

“Pay attention to what you pay attention.”

It’s the simplest way I’ve found to gesture toward the problem of the signal-to-noise ratio and how its manipulation breeds civic ineptitude.

Most of what we take in, whether from commerce or politics, isn’t meant to sharpen judgment. It’s engineered to trap us inside a single topic, to overload the civic ear. Not to expand participation, but to shrink it under the weight of constant input. Inputs irrelevant to both daily life and future prospects.

Democracy likes to sell the story that people can separate signal from static, that citizens have reviewed all sides of a problem and reached true understanding. The reality rarely matches the pitch.

Defining Civic Ineptitude

Civic ineptitude is a manufactured incapacity, not an accidental occurrence. It’s not that people are unwilling to participate, it’s that they are overloaded with inputs designed to trap attention in outrage and trivia. Citizens debate endlessly but rarely govern themselves or the institutions meant to be by the people, for the people. They are trained to consume noise to the point they delegate their sovereignty to an outside source, until they no longer truly think for themselves.

Commerce & Politics: The Social Noise Complex

Politics delivers daily scandal, a viral hearing, or a televised confrontation in all caps. These moments are designed to impress upon viewers the breaking news matters more than they could ever know. They digress from legislative maneuvers that might actually impact daily life and repress the viewer’s ability to think independently.

The churn promises significance but rarely explains consequences without exaggeration. Slow, structural signals (like infrastructure, demographics, environmental planning, national debt) fade into silence because they don’t trend. Because the ones in charge don’t need your input anymore, just your compliance.

Commerce is louder still. Advertising and financial media bombard us with promises of autonomy through consumption. New gadgets, lifestyle upgrades, and speculative bets are sold as independence. But the true signal, legitimate questions of sovereignty, labor, and national debt, goes unheard. Instead, the illusion of participation is kept alive by trading apps, side hustles, and brand loyalty. It looks like engagement but it’s only noise. Sometimes they’re blatant about it: “escape from real life, escape the burden of civic duty.”

While headlines focus on tech scandals, trillion-dollar corporate buybacks reshape ownership of the entire economy. Credit, conspicuous consumption and engineered complacency drive the system.

Historical Shifts that Made It So

This condition has roots. The 24/7 news cycle rewarded outrage over substance. The modernization of the Smith–Mundt Act blurred propaganda into domestic media. The dollar’s divorce from gold made inflation and debt permanent features, not temporary policies.

Citizens are still taught to treat dollars as solid. In reality, the currency became an abstraction, an IOU backed only by government promise. A system that once had a natural limit (gold convertibility) turned into one that could expand infinitely. The public was never educated on what that shift meant, because understanding it would expose the truth: debt is not a temporary emergency but the backbone of fiscal policy. The so-called debt ceiling is theater, not restraint.

When the money supply lost its anchor, spending lost its discipline. Citizens could still count dollars in their wallet, but they could no longer count on those dollars to mean the same thing tomorrow. The disconnect between appearance and reality became the foundation of modern civic ineptitude.

Even right now, the news is trying to convince every citizen the reason other governments and foreign banks are dumping U.S. Treasury Bonds is because of tariffs. They can’t let you doubt the longevity of the dollar too, you know?

Present-Day Illustration

The imbalance is obvious: the public spends weeks locked onto scandals, while consequential legislation moves quietly in the background. The pattern is clear:

2008 financial collapse: While the public debated Wall Street outrage, Congress passed the $700 billion TARP bailout with little scrutiny.
Post-9/11: Fear of terrorism overshadowed the Patriot Act, quietly expanding surveillance.
Pandemic: Debate over masks and mandates eclipsed multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages, shaping long-term debt obligations.

Here’s the next one: In about two weeks (from the time I published this) CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, will be hitting the 10 year expiration date and needs to be re-enacted/rewritten.

Why? Because in 2018, Congress created CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency with almost unrestricted authority over citizen communications, a component of the Department of Homeland Security. (Notice the acronyms are identical, blurring law and agency. Hardly an accident.)

Since the Agency’s creation, Congressional Oversight Committees have run multiple investigations that uncovered the Agency is apparently more concerned with what you and I say online, rather than cyber attack threats. Working in tandem with social media platforms, CISA has censored comments and posts, employed “narrative intervention” tactics, and surveilled US citizens unconstitutionally with the Mis-, Dis, and Malinformation (MDM) team.

CISA was disbanded in 2022, but government power rarely disappears, it reincarnates. When the new CISA passes (and it will) the agency will return, maybe under a new acronym, but with the same powers reborn.

I fully expect the law to be revived with further additions that exacerbate this issue of government weaponization upon the citizenry of the United States. I also fully expect only a sliver of the populace to even know it happened.

Why? The spectacle is always designed to be louder than the substance. Outrage consumes the civic ear while policy slips by unnoticed, and the government is always watching, waiting for us to be distracted or disinterested in what they’re doing this week.

The Democratic Mirage

Democracy promises citizens can separate signal from static. In reality, engagement is mediated by distraction. Civic aptitude is nearly nonexistent.

Candidates are products of party machinery, donor networks, and lobbying groups. Not public deliberation. Most voters respond to slogans, sound bites, and marketing repetition. The candidate becomes a brand, politics becomes advertising.

Appointments reveal where real power sits and why the candidate was dangled before us. Positions of influence often benefit industry, private networks, and political machines—not citizens. Just look at the last 25 years of questionable appointments:

George W. Bush

John Bolton – U.S. Ambassador to the UN (2005)
Bolton was openly hostile to the UN and multilateral diplomacy, which made his appointment look like sabotage by placement. Bush didn’t even wait for Congress to vote on the appointment, he just signed off on it while Congress was in recess.
Also appointed over 700 judges in the wake of 9/11, judges who provided no opposition to warrantless surveillance requests from the then-created Department of Homeland Security.

Barack Obama

Mark A. Patterson – Chief of Staff to the Treasury Secretary (2009)
Patterson was a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, put into a senior Treasury role just after Goldman benefited from TARP bailout policies.
Gary Gensler – Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (2009)
Former Goldman Sachs partner, placed in charge of regulating derivatives, the very instruments central to the 2008 crisis.
Jack Lew – Director of the Office of Management and Budget (2010) then Treasury Secretary (2013)
Former Citigroup Chief Operating Officer, another bank complicit in the 2008 derivatives scandal.

Donald Trump (First Administration)

William Perry Pendley – Acting Director, Bureau of Land Management (2019–2021)
Pendley had spent much of his career arguing for selling off federal lands, yet was appointed to oversee them.

Joe Biden

Gary Gensler – SEC Chairman (2021)
Another Great Financial Crisis banker appointed by Obama, later reappointed under Biden to lead the SEC.

Donald Trump (Second Administration)

Ed Martin – U.S. Attorney for D.C. (2025)
Martin had no prior experience as a federal prosecutor or judge, but was appointed to one of the most powerful legal posts in the country.

This is the democratic mirage: the appearance of choice, the ritual of participation, the illusion of sovereignty. All sustained by noise. The decisions made behind closed doors have had lasting impacts on these last 25 years, and more than likely, will for the next 25.

Returning to Attention

Civic ineptitude is not stupidity; it’s engineered overload. The signals of governance, sovereignty, and responsibility are still there, but faint, competing against an industrial volume of noise.

The question isn’t whether people can still hear them. The question is whether anyone remembers how to listen.

Pay attention to what you pay attention.

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Precision Consumer 2030: Wellness as a Window Into You

Give it some time, the trees will start listening to you. A device once used only to track growth rates is now the seed of something else, a quiet grafting of the forest into the cloud.

Dendrometers (used to measure the growth of trees and other plants by monitoring changes in diameter) have gotten a recent boost in applicability for more than just forest management teams. Thus far, they’ve allowed forest managers to cut down site visits needed to gather data on tree growth and carbon capture rates, but because of a recent innovation, much more is possible and I want to paint a picture for you.

As per usual, what begins as a gesture to efficiency, a nod to preservation, may warp into something far more insidious.

The company Treemetrics, working alongside the European Space Agency, created sensors that link through wide-area networks and satellites, feeding streams of data into a platform called Forest HQ. If your tree is growing, Forest HQ knows. The forest becomes an extension of the cloud, feeding numbers related to diameter growth, height, location—change of all sorts. So, the forest is no longer a place. It is a feed. The company calls this project the Internet of Trees.

The logic is seductive: better measurement equals better care. Carbon accounting strengthens climate response. Carbon credits for the cap-and-trade markets gain more authenticity. But inside that necessity lies a governance architecture: every tree, instrumented; every growth curve, visible; every beat of the forest, rearranged as data. A swarm of data waiting to be further monetized or weaponized—unfortunately, humans do one or the other. Often both.

I know what I will soon describe may seem altogether far fetched, but it does not take much imagination to see the scope widen in the way I expect given the right amount of time.

The slope is not hard to imagine. Already, forests are wired with listening devices meant to detect chainsaws, trucks and any other prohibited criteria. Artificial intelligence runs on-site, flagging the sounds of illegal logging before they reach the cloud. It is admittedly clever, even noble. But anything involving criminalization soon collapses into categories: nuance is stripped, anomalies are flagged, people are reduced to signals.

We’ve seen this arc before. The Global Positioning System was once sold as a gift for navigation: finding your way home, never getting lost. Now it’s the backbone of precision strikes and geofencing. Closed-circuit television cameras were rolled out for “public safety.” Now they’re stitched together in networks that can track a face across an entire city and can even recognize your gait amongst a crowd. Social media began as a way to connect with friends and now it’s a sprawling apparatus of profiling, targeted persuasion and behavioral nudging.

Each began as benevolent. Each hardened into control.

For a good number of technologies, the arc of applicability tends to bend toward something darker. Monetized until meaningless or weaponized against anyone not in control of the weapon.

What begins as protection of ecology can just as easily become the monitoring of people. A hiker’s footsteps, a group of protestor’s chants; any human activity can be parsed as anomaly, pinged to headquarters. With the right contracts, the forest becomes surveillance infrastructure, camouflaged in green.

What if Forest HQ evolves from tracking growth to performing guard duty? What if the forest ceases to be wild and becomes a grid, mapping bodies as much as making bark?

Conveniently, this year a viral post showcased a new service from XFinity that uses WiFi signals to detect motion in your home, “without relying on sensors or cameras.” The technology has existed for years, but only now is it being pitched as household convenience. Tracking once reserved for homes and offices will soon extend to the wilderness.

You can opt into this service, which routers and WiFi connected objects around you don’t give the option to opt out?

This shift matters not only technologically but culturally. What happens when forests are no longer trusted as wild refuges, but feared as watchtowers? What happens to the human imagination when trees are not symbols of mystery or sanctuary, but extensions of a monitoring state? Jokes about birds not being real will lose their humor. Children will hesitate or outright refuse to climb a tree.

Surveillance always arrives dressed as care. It comes with drones, dashboards and dragnet data streams in the name of stewardship and security. But benevolence, left unexamined, can harden into coercion. The trees will stop watching silently; they start reflecting, transmitting, bearing witness.

And so the question lingers: at what point does monitoring, however noble its pitch, become policing?

Throughout our history, the wild was once where we went to disappear. Now it has the potential to be where we are found most easily.

For more reading on how technological advancement affects our interaction with nature and cultivated products, see The Products of a New Environment.

The Rumination Compilation

Tag: surveillance

Civic Ineptitude: Signals in a Nation of Noise