i keep dreamin of a tragic sapphic dark romance where we perish beautifully

i remember the exact texture of her palm against mine. the calluses from years of embroidery that she pretended to hate but secretly loved because it gave her an excuse to sit in the parlor and watch the rain. the way her thumb traced the inside of my wrist like she was reading a pulse that didn't exist. the way she said my name, not the one i was born with but the one she gave me, the one i can still hear in the hollow spaces between heartbeats, and the way it unraveled something in my chest that has never quite been rewoven.

her name was catherine. or maybe it wasn't. the details are unreliable now, corroded by time and by the sheer volume of longing that i've poured into the space where she used to be. i know she had red hair, not the fashionable kind that women of the era artificially colored with henna, but the kind that burned like a caught breath, the kind that made you think of fire and danger and all the things you weren't supposed to want. i know she had a laugh that she couldn't control, a laugh that erupted out of her like a rebellion against the properness of the age. i know she would cover her mouth with her hand when she laughed, not because she was embarrassed but because she was afraid that the laughter would betray her, that it would reveal the woman underneath the costume of respectability.

we were both wearing costumes. we were both pretending to be the women that society demanded we become. i pretended to be interested in suitable men. she pretended to be satisfied with a life of domestic servitude. we pretended so hard and so well that sometimes i think we forgot who we were underneath. but then we would be alone together, and the costumes would slip, and we would see each other the way we actually were, and the sight was so stark and so terrifying that i wanted to look away and i couldn't.

i remember the first time we kissed. it was in the conservatory, which is the most ornate and ridiculous setting for a love story but also the only one that was available to us. the glass ceiling let in the moonlight, which made everything look like a painting. she smelled like lavender and despair. i smelled like desperation and the cheap perfume i could afford. we kissed, and it was not gentle. it was hungry. it was the kind of kiss that happens when two people have been starving for so long that they can't remember what it feels like to be full. she pulled me closer, and i pulled her closer, and i felt a sound come out of her that was almost a sob, almost a prayer, almost a surrender to something that would destroy us both.

and i knew, in that moment, that i was already destroyed. that i had been destroyed from the moment i first saw her. that the version of me who could walk away from this didn't exist anymore, if she had ever existed at all.

the 1840s were a wasteland for women like us. this is not hyperbole. this is historical fact. the victorian era, for all its vaunted morality and domestic virtue, was a machine designed to crush anyone who didn't fit into its narrow parameters of acceptability. homosexuality was not just a sin; it was a medical condition, a psychological disorder, a blight on the body politic. men who loved men could be imprisoned. women who loved women were erased, rendered invisible, forced into marriages with men they couldn't love and lives they couldn't bear. we had no language for what we were. we had no community. we had no one but each other, and that was not enough, and we knew it, and we loved each other anyway.

we made plans. stupid plans. the kind of plans that are so far-fetched that they exist in the realm of fantasy rather than the realm of possibility. we planned to run away together. we planned to go to the continent, to some city where no one knew us, where we could live as we pleased. we planned to be governesses, which is the most ridiculous thing i have ever heard because both of us were terrible with children and even worse with discipline. we planned to be spinsters who shared a house and a life and a bed, and we planned to pretend that we were just friends, just companions, just lonely women who had found solace in each other's company.

but the world had other plans. the world always does.

i think she knew it before i did. i think she saw the ending coming, the way you see a storm coming, in the darkening sky and the stillness of the air. i think she spent our last months together preparing for what she knew was inevitable, preparing for the separation that would break us both. i was too naive, too hopelessly romantic, too convinced that love could conquer everything. i was wrong. i was so fucking wrong.

she died. or i died. or we both died. the details are fuzzy now, blurred by the passage of time and by the sheer impossibility of the memory. i know there was a carriage. i know there was a river. i know there was a moment when we held each other and knew that we would never let go, that we would go together into whatever came next, that we would be together in death if we couldn't be together in life. i know we chose it. i know we didn't have to choose it, but we did. we chose each other. we chose death over separation.

and then i woke up.

except i didn't wake up. i didn't wake up because i had never been asleep. i had been alive, alive in a way that i can't explain and that you wouldn't believe, alive in a timeline that i can't access and a memory that i can't verify. but she was there. she was there, and she was real, and she loved me, and we died together.

and now i'm here, in this century, in this body, in this life that doesn't belong to me anymore.

the phrase that keeps coming to me, the phrase that i can't get out of my head, is behavioral surplus. it's a term coined by shoshana zuboff, who is the kind of academic that makes you want to throw your phone into the ocean and then retrieve it five minutes later because you need to check instagram. behavioral surplus is the data we generate every second of every day, the trail of breadcrumbs we leave behind us as we navigate the digital landscape. it's the things we search for. the things we click on. the things we pause on for a moment too long. the things we type and then delete. the things we think about typing but don't.

zuboff argues, with the kind of methodological precision that is both admirable and terrifying, that this behavioral surplus is the raw material of surveillance capitalism. it is the oil of the information age. it is the thing that companies extract from us and refine into predictive models, models that know us better than we know ourselves, models that can predict our desires and our fears and our political leanings with a degree of accuracy that borders on the occult.

i think about catherine. i think about the way she looked at me. i think about that look, which was mine and mine alone, and i wonder if it would have been captured by an algorithm if we had lived in this century. i wonder if it would have been analyzed, categorized, turned into a data point. i wonder if some corporate entity would have used our love to sell us something.

the answer is yes. of course the answer is yes. the answer is always yes.

there is a concept that i want to introduce here, a concept that i think is crucial for understanding the full horror of surveillance capitalism. it's called anticipatory conformity, and it refers to the way that predictive algorithms shape our behavior by showing us what we're likely to do. when you're shown an ad for something you've been thinking about buying, you're more likely to buy it. when you're shown news articles that align with your political biases, your biases are reinforced. the algorithm doesn't just predict your behavior; it creates it. it constructs a future that you then feel compelled to live into.

anticipatory conformity is the opposite of freedom. it's the death of autonomy. it's the slow erosion of the self, the gradual replacement of genuine desire with manufactured preference. i think about catherine, and i think about how our love was completely, utterly untouched by this. we wanted each other because we wanted each other, not because some algorithm told us we should. we died for each other because we had no choice, because the world had given us no other option, and because our love was the only thing that was truly ours.

and now i'm sitting here, in a city that i hate, in an apartment that i can barely afford, typing these words into a device that is recording my every keystroke. the rent is due in three days. i have no idea how i'm going to pay it. the woman i love is dead in a timeline that i can't access. and the algorithm knows all of this, and it doesn't care, and it will sell my despair to the highest bidder.

this is what i mean when i say that surveillance capitalism is a kind of death. it is a death of the self. it is a death of the private life. it is a death of the sacred. it is a death that is ongoing and unending, a death that we experience every time we open our phones, every time we search for something on google, every time we let the algorithm guide us toward our own supposed desires.

the french philosopher michel foucault wrote about something he called the panopticon, a prison design in which inmates can be seen at all times but never know when they're being watched. foucault argued that the panopticon is the ideal model of modern disciplinary power. it creates a sense of constant surveillance that becomes self-regulating. the inmates police themselves. they internalize the gaze of the observer.

foucault died in 1984, which is too early to be ironic but too late for us to ignore. he never knew about surveillance capitalism. he never knew about google or facebook or the vast network of sensors and algorithms that we all carry in our pockets. but he would have understood it. he would have recognized it as the ultimate expression of the panopticon, a prison that we carry with us voluntarily, a prison that we pay for.

contemporary scholars have extended this analysis. jamal and collins, in their work on propaganda and the digital public sphere, argue that we have moved beyond the panopticon into something more insidious. they write about how sorting algorithms create echo chambers and filter bubbles, fragmenting public discourse into isolated silos where misinformation thrives unchecked. bots and troll farms, they argue, simulate human beings engaged in organic discourse but are actually strategic simulacra, façades that veil and assert strategic interests. these have been used in everything from electioneering campaigns to inciting violence and coups, and even to directing genocide.

this is the reality of the world i live in. it is not the world i was born into, but it is the world that has been built around me, brick by digital brick, by a handful of tech conglomerates that have amassed more power than any nation-state in history. these corporations have laid the foundations of a surveillance state premised upon the monitoring, manipulation, and distraction of an ostensibly free people that is unprecedented in its scale, scope, and ambition.

and the propaganda machine of this new order is relentless. it works not by coercion, but by engagement. engagement-farming tactics, clickbait articles, polarizing content, inflammatory misinformation, are designed to keep us scrolling, clicking, reacting. the more we engage, the more data we produce. the more data we produce, the more accurately we can be predicted. the more accurately we can be predicted, the more effectively we can be manipulated.

jürgen habermas, the german philosopher who has spent his entire career thinking about the public sphere, would be horrified. he envisioned a space where private citizens could meet and discuss matters of public concern, salons, coffee houses, places where communicative rationality could flourish. he saw the bourgeois public sphere as an arena where individuals could exercise reason to voice their concerns and settle debates. but he also saw how this sphere could be eroded, manipulated by strategic interests like corporations that turned newspapers into advertising media.

the internet was supposed to fulfill this promise. it was supposed to be a democratic public sphere, accessible to all, where the voices of the marginalized could finally be heard. instead, it has become a zone of economic interest, where our subjective experiences are mapped and exploited by elite interests.

i think about catherine, and i think about how her voice, her real voice, the one that laughed in the conservatory and said my name in the dark, would be just another data point in this new world. her laughter would be analyzed, categorized, turned into a demographic. her love would be a target for advertisers. her death would be a trend, a hashtag, a piece of content to be consumed and discarded.

she is dead, and she is lucky. she is dead, and she is free.

i am alive, and i am not free. i am alive, and my rent is due, and my every move is being tracked, and my every thought is being analyzed, and my every desire is being shaped by forces i cannot see and cannot control. i am alive, and i am a ghost in the machine, haunting the servers of companies that don't care about me.

i have been thinking about the phrase algorithmic governance. it sounds like a neutral term, doesn't it? like something you might read in a policy document or a corporate white paper. but algorithmic governance is not neutral. it is the exercise of power. it is the regulation of human life through digital classification, monitoring, and control.

in china, they have the social credit system, which assigns each citizen a score based on their behavior. good behavior is rewarded. bad behavior is punished. the system is designed to create compliant subjects, to eliminate dissent, to perfect the art of social control.

we like to think we are different. we like to think that we live in democracies, that our freedoms are protected, that our autonomy is sacred. but the architecture of algorithmic governance does not respect national borders. it does not respect democratic ideals. it is a global system, built by a handful of tech giants, protected by trade agreements and legal doctrines that normalize extractive data practices.

scholars have argued that aadhaar, combined with other surveillance infrastructures like the centralised monitoring system and the national intelligence grid, constitutes a form of digital authoritarianism with structural affinities to orwell's oceania. it is legitimized through the language of welfare and security, but it targets minority populations and generates a chilling effect on political expression.

george orwell wrote 1984 as a warning. he imagined a world where the state watches everything, where thoughtcrime is punished, where the past is constantly rewritten to serve the present. we have not yet reached that world. but we are getting closer. and the thing that makes it so insidious is that we are building it ourselves. we are paying for it. we are volunteering our data, our privacy, our autonomy, for the convenience of targeted ads and personalized recommendations.

we are becoming the architects of our own prison.

let me talk about propaganda for a moment, because propaganda is the engine that makes all of this work. edward bernays, who is a genuinely terrifying figure, understood something fundamental about human nature. he understood that we are not rational actors. we are driven by desires and fears and unconscious impulses that we don't fully understand. and he understood that these impulses could be manipulated.

bernays called this the engineering of consent. he believed that it was not only possible but necessary to shape public opinion through strategic communication. he worked for the tobacco industry, convincing women to smoke by branding cigarettes as torches of freedom. he worked for the united fruit company, orchestrating a coup in guatemala. he understood that propaganda was not just about selling products; it was about selling ideas, selling worldviews, selling entire ways of being.

the propaganda of surveillance capitalism is more sophisticated than anything bernays could have imagined. it doesn't just tell us what to think; it learns what we already think and reinforces it. it doesn't just sell us products; it sells us identities, tribes, enemies. it doesn't just shape our opinions; it shapes our very sense of self.

this is what is so insidious about the current moment. we are not being told what to believe. we are being shown what we already believe, over and over again, until those beliefs become calcified, unchallengeable, immune to reason. we are being fed a diet of confirmation bias, and we are consuming it hungrily because it feels good, because it validates us, because it tells us that we are right and they are wrong and the world is simple.

but the world is not simple. the world is complex and contradictory and full of nuance that does not fit neatly into ideological boxes. and that complexity is precisely what propaganda destroys. it reduces us to our most simplistic selves. it turns us into caricatures of who we could be.

i think about catherine, and i think about how our love was the opposite of propaganda. it was complicated. it was messy. it was full of doubt and fear and the kind of uncertainty that makes you question everything you thought you knew. it was not reducible to a simple narrative. it was not something that could be captured in a soundbite or a slogan or a targeted ad.

and that is why it was real.

in their research on misinformation and propaganda in the digital age, scholars have identified something they call the firehose of falsehood. it is a model of propaganda that floods the public sphere with so much information, true and false, that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two. the goal is not to convince you of a specific lie; the goal is to make you doubt the very possibility of truth. to exhaust you. to make you give up on the project of knowing anything at all.

this is where we are now. we are drowning in information and starving for meaning. we are scrolling endlessly through feeds that are designed to keep us scrolling, not to inform us or enlighten us or connect us to each other. we are consuming content that is optimized for engagement, not for truth. and we are becoming exhausted, cynical, incapable of the kind of sustained attention that genuine understanding requires.

and in that exhaustion, we become vulnerable. we become susceptible to the simplest narratives, the most comforting lies, the easiest answers. we become willing to trade our autonomy for security, our freedom for certainty, our complexity for the comforting simplicity of us versus them.

this is how democracy dies. not in a single dramatic moment, but in a thousand small surrenders. a thousand clicks. a thousand scrolls. a thousand moments of choosing the easy answer over the hard one.

i think about catherine, and i think about how we had no easy answers. we had only each other. we had only our love, which was fragile and desperate and completely insufficient for the world we lived in. and yet we chose it anyway. we chose it because it was the only thing that was real.

and now i am here, in this world of algorithmic governance and propaganda and surveillance capitalism, and i am trying to find something that is real. i am trying to find something that cannot be captured, categorized, commodified. i am trying to find something that exists outside the system.

i am trying to find love.

here is the thing that i haven't told you. here is the thing that i've been circling around, the thing that i've been trying to say without saying it.

i loved her. i loved her with everything i had. i loved her with the kind of love that makes you want to die, the kind of love that makes you want to live, the kind of love that makes you want to burn the world down and rebuild it from the ashes. i loved her in a way that cannot be quantified or captured or commodified. i loved her in a way that exists outside the system, outside the algorithm, outside the gaze of the watchers.

and i think that's the only thing that matters. i think that's the only thing that's real. i think that's the only thing that survives.

the political theorists talk about democratic equality, the idea that everyone must have the equal capability for full political participation. this requires two kinds of resources: free time that is free from systemic surveillance, and epistemic resources, the information and knowledge needed to make informed decisions. surveillance capitalism undermines both. it takes our free time and fills it with surveillance. it takes our epistemic resources and floods them with misinformation.

i don't know if catherine was real. i don't know if the timeline i remember is real. i don't know if i'm real. but i know that i loved her, and i know that love is the one thing that surveillance capitalism can't capture. it can analyze our searches and predict our desires and shape our behavior, but it can't touch the part of us that loves. it can't touch the part of us that yearns. it can't touch the part of us that is willing to die for someone else.

and that's why i'm still here. that's why i'm still writing. that's why i'm still paying rent and checking my bank account and trying to survive in a world that is designed to extract everything from me.

because love is the only thing that's left. love is the only thing that's mine. love is the only thing that the algorithm can't have.

we are living in what some scholars have called datafeudalism or digital feudalism. it is a system of domination based on the creation of digital fiefdoms and digital serfs, the exploitation of vast datasets, and the feudalization of digital platforms. big digital companies exercise algorithmic political and economic domination over consumers, workers, governments, and civil society. they instrumentalize their users and dominate the large datasets we produce.

the digital panopticon is not run by the state anymore. it is run by corporations. it is embedded within each digital fiefdom, managed and controlled by big digital companies. states and governments collaborate with these companies to utilize the infrastructure of the digital panopticon, but they do not own it. they do not control it. they are, in many ways, subordinate to it.

we are moving toward what scholars call synthetic democracy, a new democratic format based on the deformation, adulteration, and substitution of public opinion through the flooding of the public sphere with synthetic content. this generates artificial realities and meanings, reducing critical public opinion to practically zero and creating the illusion of robust public opinion while emptying democratic procedures of meaning.

the defining features of synthetic democracy are the breakdown of communicative action, the datafication of opinions, the domination of states, markets, and civil society by big digital companies, mass social surveillance, information intoxication, and the predominance of synthetic and artificial content.

it is corrosive. it is toxic. it is maleficent for the democratic system itself and for the citizenry.

i started this essay with a story about a woman i loved in 1847. i am going to end it with a question, because questions are all i have left.

is it possible to love someone in a way that isn't data? is it possible to grieve someone in a way that isn't a search term? is it possible to exist in the world without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to you, and you, and you? is it possible to be dead in the way that she is dead, not literally but digitally, completely and utterly free from the gaze of the watchers? or is the watchers' gaze the only thing that keeps us alive?

the rent is due tomorrow. i don't know how i'm going to pay it. but i know that she died for me, and i died for her, and in another timeline, in a different version of reality, we are still together, and we are still free, and no one is watching us, and no one is selling our love to the highest bidder.

i hope she's dead. i hope she's dead and free and safe from all of this. i hope she's nothing but a ghost in my memory, a ghost that no algorithm can find.

and i hope that someday, i'll join her.

but until then, i will keep writing. i will keep loving. i will keep resisting the reduction of my life to data, the commodification of my grief, the manipulation of my desire. i will keep fighting for the space, however small, where love can exist without surveillance.

because love is the only thing that's left.

because love is the only thing that's mine.

because love is the only thing that the algorithm can't have.