Cleartext

What if privacy was never a right — but an asymmetry? What if the powerful always had access, and everyone else had the comfortable fiction of walls?

When a coordinated hack equalizes a global surveillance state, every recorded act and thought becomes universally accessible. The result is not liberation. It is the fastest adaptation in human history — and then the slow, inevitable reconstruction of the exact hierarchy that was destroyed.

Cleartext is a speculative oral history assembled from the far future: eleven testimonies, collected by a researcher who cannot comprehend why the transition was experienced as trauma. A systems engineer. A politician. A therapist. A teenager. A comedian. A soldier. A nun. An entrepreneur who made a fortune selling opacity back to a transparent world. Their voices accumulate — contradictory, specific, devastating — until the question at the center of the archive shifts. It is no longer what happened when the walls came down?

It is why did we build them again?

And beneath that: who is watching you read this?