From the first discussion and through the whole day there was a lot of talk of virtual vs “real” identity. It was once understood that legal identity is as much a fiction as any other invented identity, but this seems long forgotten in these places. Legal identity, far from being “real” or “physical” as people in our government think of it now, was identity based on forms of legal liability constructed for political benefit to the state. It was about taxing you, drafting you, moving you, or throwing you in jail — legal identity was never concerned with reality. I found the conflation of that with either reality or physicality to be the single most chilling thing I encountered in that room, even moreso than surveillance. When the men with guns can't tell the difference between you and your social security number, the mechanisms of power have lost vital critical thinking. The IC has become out of touch with lived experience.

One of the intel people spoke of the illuminated vs the dark areas of the world, as one sees the globe at night, and a war between them. I found this a ridiculous divide. The areas they called “dark” I called biodiverse, muttering to the person sitting with me, and taking notes.

The dark of the Earth where the food comes from, the deep history, the life. The “illuminated” earth is relatively sterile and dead, reliant on the dark for even the matter that makes the light.

I wrote notes about the use of white and black in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a book that felt present in the room with me that whole day. The speaker nervously told me to stop writing, but I assured them I wasn't attributing. I considered bringing up Pynchon, but held off.

-Later, one of the government people said of the rest of the world “They want our resources,” but this is as ridiculous as saying they hate our freedom. They want what all humans want: to not have to worry about too much, to hang out with their friends, and to dream. The humans who want things other than these, myself and the rest of the room included, are the weirdos. I turned over this idea of ownership, “our resources” in my head through the day, and it grew stranger. “Our” resources were the life-giving material under their feet.

To the degree that it makes sense for the dark Earth and its wild seas to belong to anyone but itself, how could the ground under their feet be “ours”?

For me it was a remarkably pessimistic and scared crowd, always thinking in terms of catastrophe, but never of the obvious catastrophes we’re definitely slated to get, like climate change or antibiotic resistance. That surprised me — I assumed they would find the end of antibiotics terrifying, but instead everyone talked about the privacy everyone handed away not being limited by the skin anymore. I said the end of antibiotics and the rise of diseases like resistant tuberculosis would mean that tech would end at our skin, and we’d be limited in our access to public assembly. It was probably the darkest thing I said all day, and one of my table mates said (not unkindly) “I don’t like your future.”

We did an exercise on alternative views of the future, and I suggested we try to do a positive one. An IFTF facilitator and I suggested a scenario in which people didn't emphasize safety, and were just left with the need and motivation to cooperate. We can and do accept some risk, so what if we decided as a society we'd rather have more freedom and privacy than security?

I was told that this was not an ok scenario, and we talked about our children. I said I could accept the idea that I can lose my child, it's part of the world. I told one the law enforcement people (roughly):

We don't want to live in a perfectly safe world. We don't want to live where no law gets broken, we don't want to live in a world without any possibility of even terrorism. That's a gray world. Co-operation takes risks. Yes, I might lose my daughter, but I'd rather she lived in a free world, and I might lose her anyway. Thanks for the concern for my safety, but I don't need it.

One person from an enforcement agency talked about bad people hurting my daughter, that this scenario was simply unacceptable. I tried to point out that I knew the bad people, and they weren't that bad, that all this protection "from" excluded people who have all the same lives as the people here. I said that the excluded were people I love, my own family. I didn't get anywhere. I fell into silent frustration.

I turned to talking to one of the ODNI people at my table and said it was like watching bars come down in front of people's eyes, and mimicked the stony faces. We both laughed at my impression "That's the groupthink." they told me, nodding. “That’s why we need meetings like this.”

"This emphasis on safety is ridiculous," I replied. "The death rate is still holding at 100%"

I realized that one of the problems is that being at the top of the heap, which the security services definitely are, makes the future an abomination and terror. There is no possible great change where the top doesn't lose, even if it's just control, rather than position. The future can only be worse than the present, and a future without fear is a future to fear.

When you're an incredibly well-funded defense and intelligence community, the lack of existential threats is an existential threat. There is nothing to do but be scared of things.

Several times before and after this we heard about the bad people, that there were bad people and good. I realized when I heard this that I went to the ODNI because I don't believe in bad or good people.

Their director called my friends accomplices. These agencies had jailed my friends, destroyed my father, and driven my lover to suicide. These should be my bad people, even if it was impossible for them to see that they might be the bad people to the people they exclude from their ideas of protection and safety. But if I don't believe in bad people, then even these agencies and the horrors they have visited on my family and friends and sources, they aren't filled with bad people either.

They were mostly pleasant and thoughtful people, and they listened as best they could. One told me I made her feel like Cheney, "And I'm not used to feeling like Cheney."

I was out of my element too. I am not used to rooms so lacking in hope.

At the last exercise we had to invent a product of the future. Ours was the most optimistic, and I'm proud of it. I’m proud of the older gentleman looking for ways to get past political representation and into direct political engagement. I’m proud of the woman who kept prodding us into wider suggestions, and looking at people our system might disenfranchise. I proud that my table took on the challenge of making something that wasn't a product, that didn't have a budget, or a market, or the blessing of an authority. Our vision of identity at the last was as people who could act on the world, of identity as powerful and meaningful force in the world.

We spoke nearly last, after a room full of projects that saw identity as a passive thing the powerful would act upon.