The Surveillance Decade

The years between 2043 and 2049 are the years for which the histories have, in my view, the most misleading shape.

The histories will tell you these were quiet years. They were not. The histories will tell you the species recovered from the violence of the early decade. It did not, exactly. The histories will tell you that the institutions stabilized. They did not stabilize so much as they were colonized, slowly, by a different kind of structure that the previous institutions did not recognize as a successor.

What happened in these years is harder to put on a timeline than the wars or the disclosures or the threshold events of the previous decade. What happened is that the tools the species had built, between 2031 and 2042, settled into ordinary use. The settling was the consequential thing. The settling did not look like an event. The settling looked like Tuesday.